The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable

by Amitav Ghosh

the Arabian Sea is one of the regions of the world where cyclonic activity is indeed likely to increase: a 2012 paper by a Japanese research team predicts a 46 percent increase in tropical cyclone frequency in the Arabian Sea by the end of the next century, with a corresponding 31 percent decrease in the Bay of Bengal.

However, are you aware of the 1882 Mumbai cyclone? I have found only very brief accounts of it so far, but the death toll appears to have been between 100,000 and 200,000, and one source says there was a 6m storm surge, which is enormous, and I presume would account for much if not all of that! This

It is very spooky indeed

Evidently, there was no great storm in 1882: it is a myth that has gained a life of its own.

The remaking of the landscape has so profoundly changed the area’s topography that its natural drainage channels are now little more than filth-clogged ditches.

Altogether two hundred kilometers of road were submerged; some motorists drowned in their cars because short-circuited electrical systems would not allow them to open doors and windows.

the uptick in cyclonic activity in the Arabian Sea is so recent that there has yet been no need for large-scale evacuations on the subcontinent’s west coast.

Kolkata, I have vivid memories of epic floods. But long familiarity with flooding tends to have a lulling effect,

The report forced me to face a question that eventually confronts everybody who takes the trouble to inform themselves about climate change: what can I do to protect my family and loved ones now that I know what lies ahead?

contrary to what I might like to think, my life is not guided by reason; it is ruled, rather, by the inertia of habitual motion. This is indeed the condition of the vast majority of human beings, which is why very few of us will be able to adapt to global warming if it is left to us, as individuals, to make the necessary changes; those who will uproot themselves and make the right preparations are precisely those obsessed monomaniacs who appear to be on the borderline of lunacy.

For most governments and politicians, as for most of us as individuals, to leave the places that are linked to our memories and attachments, to abandon the homes that have given our lives roots, stability, and meaning, is nothing short of unthinkable.

Qing dynasty officials were astonished to learn that the British intended to build a city on the island of Hong Kong: why would anyone want to create a settlement in a place that was so exposed to the vagaries of the earth?

An awareness of the precariousness of human existence is to be found in every culture: it is reflected in biblical and Quranic images of the Apocalypse, in the figuring of the Fimbulwinter in Norse mythology, in tales of pralaya in Sanskrit literature, and so on.

a habit of mind that proceeded by creating discontinuities; that is to say, they were trained to break problems into smaller and smaller puzzles until a solution presented itself. This is a way of thinking that deliberately excludes things and forces (“externalities”) that lie beyond the horizon of the matter at hand: it is a perspective that renders the interconnectedness of Gaia unthinkable.

An atomization that is chaacteristicnot only of a cpitalist paradigm but also of the NS grid!

It was probably the very scale of the phenomenon invoked by Piddington that made it unthinkable to those eminently practical men, accustomed as they were to the “regularity of bourgeois life.”

the immediate discontinuities of place are nested within others: Maycomb, Alabama, the setting of To Kill a Mockingbird, becomes a stand-in for the whole of the Deep South; the Pequod, the small Nantucket whaling vessel in Moby Dick, becomes a metaphor for America. In this way, settings become the vessel for the exploration of that ultimate instance of discontinuity: the nation-state.

Ofc Anderson, fo whom novels are titly linked to the construction of natiknl spaces, Has the related concept of homogenous tim.

“period”; it is actualized within a certain time horizon. Unlike epics, which often range over eons and epochs, novels rarely extend beyond a few generations.

It is through the imposition of these boundaries, in time and space, that the world of a novel is created: like the margins of a page, these borders render places into texts, so that they can be read.

Mallabarman creates a space that will submit to the techniques of a modern novel: the rest of the landscape is pushed farther and farther into the background until at last we have a setting that can carry a narrative. The setting becomes, in a sense, a self-contained ecosystem, with the river as the sustainer both of life and of the narrative.

But it is precisely by excluding those inconceivably large forces, and by telescoping the changes into the duration of a limited-time horizon, that the novel becomes narratable.

Contrast this with the universes of boundless time and space that are conjured up by other forms of prose narrative.

We have entered, as Timothy Morton says, the age of hyperobjects, which are defined in part by their stickiness, their ever-firmer adherence to

our lives: even to speak of the weather, that safest of subjects, is now to risk a quarrel with a denialist neighbor.

these connections defy the boundedness of “place,” creating continuities of experience between Bengal and Louisiana, New ...

The Anthropocene has reversed the temporal order of modernity: those at the margins are now the first to experience the future that awaits all of us; it is they who confront most directly what Thoreau called “vast, Titanic, inhuman nature.”

for a moment, to the images I started with: of apparently inanimate things coming

suddenly alive.

But such truth as this statement has is only partial: for the fact is that a great number of human beings had never lost this awareness in the first place.

Did anyone ever really believe, pace Descartes, that animals are automatons? “Surely Descartes never saw an ape” wrote Linnaeus,

the theologian Michael Northcott points out, “At the heart of Judaism is a God who is encountered through Nature and events rather than words or texts. Christianity, by contrast, and then Islam, is a form of religion that is less implicated in the weather, climate and political power and more invested in words and texts.”

it was not till the advent of Protestantism perhaps that Man began to dream of achieving his own self-deification by radically isolating himself before an arbitrary God.

the real mystery in relation to the agency of nonhumans lies not in the renewed recognition of it, but rather in how this awareness came to be suppressed in the first place, at least within the modes of thought and expression that have become dominant over the last couple of centuries.

Bruno Latour, who argues that one of the originary impulses of modernity is the project of “partitioning,” or deepening the imaginary gulf between Nature and Culture: the former comes to be relegated exclusively to the sciences

Yet, to look back at the evolution of literary culture from this vantage point is to recognize that the project of partitioning has always been contested,

It is with these words that the poet, even as he laments the onrushing intrusion of the age, announces his surrender to the most powerful of its tropes: that which envisages time as an irresistible, irreversible forward movement. This jealous deity, the Time-god of modernity, has the power to decide who will be cast into the shadows of backwardness—the dark tunnel of time “outworn”—and who will be granted the benediction of being ahead of the rest, always en avant.

this conception of time (which has much in common with both Protestant and secular teleologies, like those of Hegel and Marx) that allows the work of partitioning to proceed within the novel, always aligning itself with the avant-garde as it hurtles forward in its impatience to erase every archaic reminder of Man’s kinship with the nonhuman.

many who once bestrode the literary world like colossi are entirely forgotten while writers like Arthur C. Clarke, Raymond Bradbury, and Philip K. Dick are near the top of the list.

But cli-fi is made up mostly of disaster stories set in the future, and that, to me, is exactly the rub. The future is but one aspect of the Anthropocene: this era also includes the recent past, and, most significantly, the present.

The very materiality of coal is such as to enable and promote resistance to established orders. The processes through which it is mined and transported to the surface create an unusual degree of autonomy for miners;

It is no coincidence, then, that coal miners were in the front lines of struggles for the expansion of political rights from the late nineteenth until the mid-twentieth century,

The materiality of oil is very different from that of coal: its extraction does not require large numbers of workers, and since it can be piped over great distances, it does not need a vast workforce for its transportation and distribution.

This is probably why its effects, politically speaking, have been the opposite of those of coal.

fear of working-class militancy was one of the reasons why a large part of the Marshall Plan’s funds went toward effecting the switch from coal to oil. “The corporatised democracy of postwar Western Europe was to be built,” as Mitchell notes, “on this reorganisation of energy flows.”

One such fortress figures in my first novel, The Circle of Reason (1986), a part of which is about the discovery of oil in a fictional emirate called al-Ghazira: “out of the sand, there suddenly arose the barbed-wire fence of the Oiltown. From the other side of the fence, faces stared silently out—Filipino faces, Indian faces, Egyptian faces, Pakistani faces, even a few Ghaziri faces, a whole world of faces.”

oil brought about an encounter with the West that has had consequences that touch upon every aspect of our existence, extending from matters of security to the buildings that surround us and the quality of the air we breathe.

Updike draws this boundary line with great clarity: the reason why Cities of Salt does not feel “much like a novel,” he tells us, is that it is concerned not with a sense of individual moral adventures but rather with “men in the aggregate.” In other words, what is banished from the territory of the novel is precisely the collective.

the era of global warming has made audible a new, nonhuman critical voice that forces us to ask whether those old realists were so “used-up” after all.

the last laugh goes to that sly critic, the Anthropocene, which has muddied, and perhaps even reversed, our understanding of what it means to be “advanced.” Were we to adopt the arrow-like time perspective of the moderns, there is a sense in which we might even say of writers like Munif and Karanth that they were actually “ahead” of their peers elsewhere.

In How Forests Think, the anthropologist Eduardo Kohn suggests that “forms”—by which he means much more than shapes or visual metaphors—are one of the means that enable our surroundings to think through us.

To think like a forest, then, is, as Kohn says, to think in images. And the astonishing profusion of images in Mrauk-U, most of which are of the Buddha in the bhumisparshamudra, with the tip of the middle finger of his right hand resting on the earth, serves precisely to direct the viewer away from language toward all that cannot be “thought” through words.

The ideabehind surrealism, which he pointed outearliker asa refuation of novelistic atomization. Zen koans etc are the connection here.