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of course, the air too can come to life with sudden and deadly violence—as it did in the Congo in 1988, when a great cloud of carbon dioxide burst forth from Lake Nyos and rolled into the surrounding villages, killing 1,700 people and an untold number of animals.
Are the currents of global warming too wild to be navigated in the accustomed barques of narration? But the truth, as is now widely acknowledged, is that we have entered a time when the wild has become the norm: if certain literary forms are unable to negotiate these torrents, then they will have failed—and their failures will have to be counted as an aspect of the broader imaginative and cultural failure that lies at the heart of the climate crisis.
Or consider the even more striking case of Paul Kingsnorth, author of The Wake, a much-admired historical novel set in eleventh-century England. Kingsnorth dedicated several years of his life to climate change activism before founding the influential Dark Mountain Project, “a network of writers, artists and thinkers who have stopped believing the stories our civilization tells itself.”
And when they fail to find them, what should they—what can they—do other than to conclude that ours was a time when most forms of art and literature were drawn into the modes of concealment that prevented people from recognizing the realities of their plight? Quite possibly, then, this era, which so congratulates itself on its self-awareness, will come to be known as the time of the Great Derangement.
There is, however, an important difference between the weather events that we are now experiencing and those that occur in surrealist and magical realist novels: improbable though they might be, these events are neither surreal nor magical. To the contrary, these highly improbable occurrences are overwhelmingly, urgently, astoundingly real. The ethical difficulties that might arise in treating them as magical or metaphorical or allegorical are obvious perhaps. But there is another reason why, from the writer’s point of view, it would serve no purpose to approach them in that way: because to
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But the experience did make me recognize something that I would otherwise have been loathe to admit: 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.
The chronology of the founding of these cities creates an almost irresistible temptation to point to the European Enlightenment’s predatory hubris in relation to the earth and its resources. But this would tell us very little about the thinking of the men who built and planned that base in the Nicobars: if hubris and predation had anything to do with their choice of site, it was at a great remove. Between them and the cartographers and surveyors of an earlier era there was, I think, a much more immediate link: a habit of mind that proceeded by creating discontinuities; that is to say, they
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The processes through which it is mined and transported to the surface create an unusual degree of autonomy for miners; as Timothy Mitchell observes, “the militancy that formed in these workplaces was typically an effort to defend this autonomy.” 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, and even afterward. It could even be argued that miners, and therefore the economy of coal itself, were largely responsible for the unprecedented expansion of democratic
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Similarly, at exactly the time when it has become clear that global warming is in every sense a collective predicament, humanity finds itself in the thrall of a dominant culture in which the idea of the collective has been exiled from politics, economics, and literature alike.
Inasmuch as contemporary fiction is caught in this thralldom, this is one of the most powerful ways in which global warming resists it: it is as if the gas had run out on a generation accustomed to jet skis, leaving them with the task of reinventing sails and oars.
The brute fact is that no strategy can work globally unless it works in Asia and is adopted by large numbers of Asians. Yet, in this matter too, the conditions that are peculiar to mainland Asia are often absent from the discussion.
What we have learned from this experiment is that the patterns of life that modernity engenders can only be practiced by a small minority of the world’s population. Asia’s historical experience demonstrates that our planet will not allow these patterns of living to be adopted by every human being. Every family in the world cannot have two cars, a washing machine, and a refrigerator—not because of technical or economic limitations but because humanity would asphyxiate in the process.
Anil Agarwal and Sunita Narain did in their seminal 1991 essay on climate justice, that “the accumulation in the atmosphere of [greenhouse] gases is mainly the result of the gargantuan consumption of the developed countries, particularly the U.S.”
Around this time, several steam engines were also built in Calcutta. The skills for the making and maintenance of these machines were abundantly available in and around the city. A historian of Indian steamships notes, “the Ganges valley villages were teeming with men whose skills in their own traditional technology were roughly similar to those needed to keep a steam flotilla in service.” This anticipated an important but little-noticed aspect of the age of steam: it was India that provided much of the manpower for the boiler rooms of the world’s steam-powered merchant fleets.
It was the very fact that India’s ruling power was also the global pioneer of the carbon economy that ensured that it could not take hold in India, at that point in time. The appetites of the British economy needed to be fed by large quantities of raw materials, produced by solar-based methods of agriculture. Had a carbon economy developed synchronously in India and elsewhere, these materials would have been used locally instead of being exported.
In other words, the emerging fossil-fuel economies of the West required that people elsewhere be prevented from developing coal-based energy systems of their own, by compulsion if necessary. As Timothy Mitchell observes, the coal economy thus essentially “depended on not being imitated.” Imperial rule assured that it was not.
Inasmuch as the fruits of the carbon economy constitute wealth, and inasmuch as the poor of the global south have historically been deprived of this wealth, it is certainly true, by every available canon of distributive justice, that they are entitled to a greater share of the rewards of that economy. But even to enter into that argument is to recognize how deeply we are mired in the Great Derangement: our lives and our choices are enframed in a pattern of history that seems to leave us nowhere to turn but toward our self-annihilation.
Among Gandhi’s best-known pronouncements on industrial capitalism are these famous lines written in 1928: “God forbid that India should ever take to industrialism after the manner of the West. If an entire nation of 300 millions [sic] took to similar economic exploitation, it would strip the world bare like locusts.”
The climate events of this era, then, are distillations of all of human history: they express the entirety of our being over time.
of literary novelists writing in English only a handful of names come to mind: J. G. Ballard, Margaret Atwood, Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Barbara Kingsolver, Doris Lessing, Cormac McCarthy, Ian McEwan, and T. Coraghessan Boyle. No doubt many other names could be added to this list, but even if it were to be expanded a hundredfold or more, it would remain true, I think, that the literary mainstream, even as it was becoming more engagé on many fronts, remained just as unaware of the crisis on our doorstep as the population at large. In this regard, the avant-garde, far from being “ahead,” was clearly a
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If literature is conceived of as the expression of authentic experience, then fiction will inevitably come to be seen as “false.” But to reproduce the world as it exists need not be the project of fiction; what fiction—and by this I mean not only the novel but also epic and myth—makes possible is to approach the world in a subjunctive mode, to conceive of it as if it were other than it is: in short, the great, irreplaceable potentiality of fiction is that it makes possible the imagining of possibilities. And to imagine other forms of human existence is exactly the challenge that is posed by
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Under these circumstances, a march or a demonstration of popular feeling amounts to “little more than an orgy of democratic emotion, an activist-themed street fair, a real-world analogue to Twitter hashtag campaigns: something that gives you a nice feeling, says you belong in a certain group, and is completely divorced from actual legislation and governance.”
For if the crisis of climate change is to be principally seen in terms of the questions it poses to the individual conscience, then sincerity and consistency will inevitably become the touchstones by which political positions will be judged. This in turn will enable “deniers” to accuse activists of personal hypocrisy by pointing to their individual lifestyle choices. When framed in this way, authenticity and sacrifice become central to the issue, which then comes to rest on matters like the number of lightbulbs in Al Gore’s home and the forms of transport
Climate change is often described as a “wicked problem.” One of its wickedest aspects is that it may require us to abandon some of our most treasured ideas about political virtue: for example, “be the change you want to see.” What we need instead is to find a way out of the individualizing imaginary in which we are trapped.
When future generations look back upon the Great Derangement they will certainly blame the leaders and politicians of this time for their failure to address the climate crisis. But they may well hold artists and writers to be equally culpable—for the imagining of possibilities is not, after all, the job of politicians and bureaucrats.
And since identity and performativity are now central to public discourse, climate change too has become enmeshed with the politics of self-definition. When American and Australian politicians speak of climate change negotiations as posing a threat to “our way of life,” they are following the same script that led Ronald Reagan to speak of the reduction of the use of oil as an assault on what it means to be American.
It is not impossible, for instance, that in dealing with situations of extraordinary stress the very factors that are considered advantages in coping with extreme weather—education, wealth, and a high degree of social organization—may actually become vulnerabilities. Western food production, for instance, is dangerously resource intensive, requiring something in the range of a “dozen fossil fuel calories for each food calorie.” And Western food distribution systems are so complex that small breakdowns could lead to cascading consequences that culminate in complete collapse. Power failures, for
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