The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable

by Amitav Ghosh

Thus was the novel midwifed into existence around the world, through the banishing of the improbable and the insertion of the everyday. The process can be observed with exceptional clarity in the work of Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, a nineteenth-century Bengali writer and critic who self-consciously adopted the project of carving out a space in which realist European-style fiction could be written in the vernacular languages of India. Bankim’s enterprise, undertaken in a context that was far removed from the metropolitan mainstream, is one of those instances in which a circumstance of exception reveals the true life of a regime of thought and practice. Bankim was, in effect, seeking to supersede many old and very powerful forms of fiction, ranging from ancient Indian epics to Buddhist Jataka stories and the immensely fecund Islamicate tradition of Urdu dastaans. Over time, these narrative forms had accumulated great weight and authority, extending far beyond the Indian subcontinent: his attempt to claim territory for a new kind of fiction was thus, in its own way, a heroic endeavour. That is why Bankim’s explorations are of particular interest: his charting of this new territory puts the contrasts between the Western novel and other, older forms of narrative in ever sharper relief.

‘Nature does not make leaps.’ The trouble, however, is that Nature does certainly jump, if not leap. The geological record bears witness to many fractures in time, some of which led to mass extinctions and the like: it was one such, in the form of the Chicxulub asteroid, that probably killed the dinosaurs. It is indisputable, in any event, that catastrophes waylay both the earth and its individual inhabitants at unpredictable intervals and in the most improbable ways. Which, then, has primacy in the real world—predictable processes or unlikely events? Gould’s response is ‘the only possible answer can be “both and neither”’. Or, as the National Research Council of the United States puts it: ‘It is not known whether the relocation of materials on the surface of the Earth is dominated by the slower but continuous fluxes operating all the time or by the spectacular large fluxes that operate during short-lived cataclysmic events.’

It could not, of course, be otherwise: if novels were not built upon a scaffolding of exceptional moments, writers would be faced with the Borgesian task of reproducing the world in its entirety. But the modern novel, unlike geology, has never been forced to confront the centrality of the improbable: the concealment of its scaffolding of events continues to be essential to its functioning. It is this that makes a certain kind of narrative a recognizably modern novel. Here, then, is the irony of the ‘realist’ novel: the very gestures with which it conjures up reality are actually a concealment of the real. What this means in practice is that the calculus of probability that is deployed within the imaginary world of a novel is not the same as that which obtains outside it; this is why it is commonly said, ‘If this were in a novel, no one would believe it.’ Within the pages of a novel an event that is only slightly improbable in real life—say, an unexpected encounter with a long-lost childhood friend—may seem wildly unlikely: the writer will have to work hard to make it appear persuasive. If that is true of a small fluke of chance, consider how much harder a writer would have to work to set up a scene that is wildly improbable even in real life? For example, a scene in which a character is walking down a road at the precise moment when it is hit by an unheard-of weather phenomenon? To introduce such happenings into a novel is in fact to court eviction from the mansion in whic...

Indeed, Sandy was an event of such a high degree of improbability that it confounded statistical weather-prediction models. Yet, dynamic models, based on the laws of physics, were able to accurately predict its trajectory as well as its impacts. But calculations of risk, on which officials base their decisions in emergencies, are based largely on probabilities. In the case of Sandy, as Sobel shows, the essential improbability of the phenomenon led them to underestimate the threat and thus delay emergency measures. Sobel goes on to make the argument, as have many others, that human beings are intrinsically unable to prepare for rare events. But has this really been the case throughout human history? Or is it rather an aspect of the unconscious patterns of thought—or ‘common sense’—that gained ascendancy with a growing faith in ‘the regularity of bourgeois life’? I suspect that human beings were generally catastrophists at heart until their instinctive awareness of the earth’s unpredictability was gradually supplanted by a belief in uniformitarianism—a regime of ideas that was supported by scientific theories like Lyell’s, and also by a range of governmental practices that were informed by statistics and probability. It is a fact, in any case, that when early tremors jolted the Italian town of L’Aquila, shortly before the great earthquake of 2009, many townsfolk obeyed the instinct that prompts people who live in earthquake-prone areas to move to open spaces. It was only bec...

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 treat them as magical or surreal would be to rob them of precisely the quality that makes them so urgently compelling—which is that they are actually happening on this earth, at this time.

Yet now our gaze seems to be turning again; the uncanny and improbable events that are beating at our doors seem to have stirred a sense of recognition, an awareness that humans were never alone, that we have always been surrounded by beings of all sorts who share elements of that which we had thought to be most distinctively our own: the capacities of will, thought, and consciousness. How else do we account for the interest in the non-human that has been burgeoning in the humanities over the last decade and over a range of disciplines, from philosophy to anthropology and literary criticism. Can the timing of this renewed recognition be mere coincidence, or is the synchronicity an indication that there are entities in the world, like forests, that are fully capable of inserting themselves into our processes of thought? And if that were so, could it not also be said that the earth has itself intervened to revise those habits of thought that are based on the Cartesian dualism that arrogates all intelligence and agency to the human while denying them to every other kind of being? This possibility is not, by any means, the most important of the many ways in which climate change challenges and refutes Enlightenment ideas. It is, however, certainly the most uncanny. For what it suggests—indeed proves—is that non-human forces have the ability to intervene directly in human thought. And to be alerted to such interventions is also to become uncannily aware that conversations among ...

At the air force base where my plane had landed there was another, even more dramatic, illustration of this. The functional parts of the base—where the planes and machinery were kept—were located to the rear, well away from the water. The living areas, comprised of pretty little two-storey houses, were built much closer to the sea, at the edge of a beautiful, palm-fringed beach. As always in military matters, the protocols of rank were strictly observed: the higher the rank of the officers, the closer their houses were to the water and the better the view that they and their families enjoyed. Such was the design of the base that when the tsunami struck these houses the likelihood of survival was small, and inasmuch as it existed at all, it was in inverse relation to rank: the commander’s house was thus the first to be hit. The sight of the devastated houses was disturbing for reasons beyond the immediate tragedy of the tsunami and the many lives that had been lost there: the design of the base suggested a complacency that was itself a kind of madness. Nor could the siting of these buildings be attributed to the usual improvisatory muddle of Indian patterns of settlement. The base had to have been designed and built by a government agency; the site had clearly been chosen and approved by hard-headed military men and state-appointed engineers. It was as if, in being adopted by the state, the bourgeois belief in the regularity of the world had been carried to the point of der...

Only then did it strike me that the location of that base in the Nicobars was by no means anomalous; the builders had not in any sense departed from accepted global norms. To the contrary, they had merely followed the example of the European colonists who had founded cities like Bombay (Mumbai), Madras (Chennai), New York, Singapore and Hong Kong, all of which are sited directly on the ocean. I understood also that what I had seen in the Nicobars was but a microcosmic expression of a pattern of settlement that is now dominant around the world: proximity to the water is a sign of affluence and education; a seafront location is a status symbol; an ocean view greatly increases the value of real estate. A colonial vision of the world, in which proximity to the water represents power and security, mastery and conquest, has now been incorporated into the very foundations of middle-class patterns of living across the globe. But haven’t people always liked to live by the water? Not really; through much of human history, people regarded the ocean with great wariness. Even when they made their living from the sea, through fishing or trade, they generally did not build large settlements on the water’s edge: the great old port cities of Europe, like London, Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Stockholm, Lisbon and Hamburg, are all protected from the open ocean by bays, estuaries, or deltaic river systems. The same is true of old Asian ports: Cochin, Surat, Tamluk, Dhaka, Mrauk-U, Guangzhou, Hangzho...

As I watched these events unfold it occurred to me to wonder what would happen if a similar storm were to hit Mumbai. I reassured myself with the thought that this was very unlikely: both Mumbai and Goa face the Arabian Sea, which, unlike the Bay of Bengal, has not historically generated a great deal of cyclonic activity. Nor, unlike India’s east coast, has the west coast had to deal with tsunamis: it was unaffected by the tsunami of 2004, for instance, which devastated large stretches of the eastern seaboard. Still, the question intrigued me and I began to hunt for more information on the region’s seismic and cyclonic profiles. Soon enough I learned that the west coast’s good fortune might be merely a function of the providential protraction of geological time—for the Arabian Sea is by no means seismically inactive. A previously unknown, and probably very active, fault system was discovered in the Arabian Sea a few years ago, off the coast of Oman; the system is 800 kilometres long and faces the west coast of India. This discovery was announced in an article that concludes with these words, chilling in their understatement: ‘These results will motivate a reappraisal of the seismic and tsunami hazard assessment in the NW Indian Ocean.’ Soon, I also had to rethink my assumptions about cyclones and the Arabian Sea. Reading about Hurricane Sandy, I came upon more and more evidence that climate change may indeed alter patterns of cyclonic activity around the world: Adam Sobel’...

One such occurred on 26 July 2005, when a downpour without precedent in Mumbai’s recorded history descended on the city: the northern suburbs received 94.4 cm of rain in fourteen hours, one of the highest rainfall totals ever recorded anywhere in a single day. On that day, with catastrophic suddenness, the people of the city were confronted with the costs of three centuries of interference with the ecology of an estuarine location. 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. The old waterways have been so extensively filled in, diverted and built over that their carrying capacity has been severely diminished; and the water bodies, swamplands and mangroves that might have served as natural sinks have also been encroached upon to a point where they have lost much of their absorptive ability. A downpour as extreme as that of 26 July would pose a challenge even to a very effective drainage system: Mumbai’s choked creeks and rivers were wholly inadequate to the onslaught. They quickly overflowed causing floods in which water was mixed with huge quantities of sewage as well as dangerous industrial effluents. Roads and rail tracks disappeared under waist-high and even chest-high floodwater; in the northern part of the city, where the rainfall was largely concentrated, entire neighbourhoods were inundated: 2.5 million people ‘were under water for hours together’. On...

But there is another possibility, yet more frightening. Of the world’s megacities, Mumbai is one of the few that has a nuclear facility within its urban limits: the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre at Trombay. To the north, at Tarapur, 94 kilometres from the city’s periphery, lies another nuclear facility. Both these plants sit right upon the shoreline, as do many other nuclear installations around the world: these locations were chosen in order to give them easy access to water. With climate change many nuclear plants around the world are now threatened by rising seas. An article in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists notes: ‘During massive storms . . . there is a greatly increased chance of the loss of power at a nuclear power plant, which significantly contributes to safety risks.’ Essential cooling systems could fail; safety systems could be damaged; contaminants could seep into the plant and radioactive water could leak out, as happened at the Fukushima Daiichi plant. What threats might a major storm pose for nuclear plants like those in Mumbai’s vicinity? I addressed this question to a nuclear safety expert, M.V. Ramana, of the Program on Science and Global Security at Princeton University. His answer was as follows: ‘My biggest concerns have to do with the tanks in which liquid radioactive waste is stored. These tanks contain, in high concentrations, radioactive fission products and produce a lot of heat due to radioactive decay; explosive chemicals can also be produ...

Unlike Chennai and Mumbai, Kolkata is not situated beside the sea. However, much of its surface area is below sea level, and the city is subject to regular flooding: like everyone who has lived in Kolkata, I have vivid memories of epic floods. But long familiarity with flooding tends to have a lulling effect, which is why it came as a shock to me when I learned, from a World Bank report, that Kolkata is one of the global megacities that is most at risk from climate change; equally shocking was the discovery that my family’s house, where my mother and sister live, is right next to one of the city’s most threatened neighbourhoods. 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? My mother is elderly and increasingly frail; there is no telling how she would fare if the house were to be cut off by a flood and medical attention were to become unavailable for any length of time. After much thought I decided to talk to my mother about moving. I tried to introduce the subject tactfully, but it made little difference: she looked at me as though I had lost my mind. Nor could I blame her: it did seem like lunacy to talk about leaving a beloved family home, with all its memories and associations, simply because of a threat outlined in a World Bank report. It was a fine day, cool and sunlit; I dropped the subject....

It is surely no accident that colonial cities like Mumbai, New York, Boston and Kolkata were all brought into being through early globalization. They were linked to each other not only through the circumstances of their founding but also through patterns of trade that expanded and accelerated Western economies. These cities were thus the drivers of the very processes that now threaten them with destruction. In that sense, their predicament is but an especially heightened instance of a plight that is now universal. It isn’t only in retrospect that the siting of some of these cities now appear as acts of utter recklessness: Bombay’s first Parsi residents were reluctant to leave older, more sheltered ports like Surat and Navsari, and had to be offered financial incentives to move to the newly founded city. Similarly, 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? But in time, sure enough, there was a collective setting aside of the knowledge that accrues over generations through dwelling in a landscape. People began to move closer and closer to the water. How did this come about? The same question arises also in relation to the coast around Fukushima, where stone tablets had been placed along the shoreline in the Middle Ages to serve as tsunami warnings; future generations were explicitly told ‘Do not ...

How did this come about? How did a state of consciousness come into being such that millions of people would move to such dangerously exposed locations? 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 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.

The urban history of Bengal provides an interesting illustration of what I am trying to get at. Colonial Calcutta, which was for a long time the capital of the British Raj, was founded on the banks of the Hooghly River in the late seventeenth century. It had not been in existence for long before it came to be realized that the river was silting up. By the early nineteenth century, the East India Company had decided in principle that a new port would be built at a location closer to the Bay of Bengal. A site was chosen in the 1840s; it lay some 55 kilometres to the south-east of Calcutta, on the banks of a river called Matla (which means ‘crazed’ or ‘intoxicated’ in Bengali). At that time, there lived in Calcutta an Englishman by the name of Henry Piddington. A shipping inspector by profession, he dabbled promiscuously in literature, philology and the sciences until his true calling was revealed to him by a treatise, An Attempt to Develop the Law of Storms, written by an American meteorologist, Col. Henry Reid. Published in 1838, the book was an ambitious study of the circular motion of tropical storms. Colonel Reid’s book inspired a great passion in Piddington, and he devoted himself to the field for the rest of his life. It was he who coined the word cyclone, and it is for this that he is best remembered today. But Piddington’s particular interest was the phenomenon of the storm surge (or ‘storm wave’ as it was then called): he would eventually compile a detailed account ...

Long after the publication of The Circle of Reason, I wrote a piece in which I attempted to account for this mysterious absence: ‘To the principal protagonists in the Oil Encounter (which means, in effect, America and Americans, on the one hand, and the peoples of the Arabian peninsula and the Persian Gulf, on the other), the history of oil is a matter of embarrassment verging on the unspeakable, the pornographic. It is perhaps the one cultural issue on which the two sides are in complete agreement. . . . Try and imagine a major American writer taking on the Oil Encounter. The idea is literally inconceivable.’ The above passage appears in a review of one of the few works of fiction to address the Oil Encounter, a five-part series of novels by the Jordanian-born writer Abdel Rahman Munif. My review, entitled ‘Petrofiction’, dealt only with the first two books in the cycle, which were published in English translation as Cities of Salt (Mudun al Malh) and The Trench (Al-ukhdud). ‘The truth is,’ I wrote in my review, ‘that we do not yet possess the form that can give the Oil Encounter a literary expression. For this reason alone Cities of Salt . . . ought to be regarded as a work of immense significance. It so happens that the first novel in the cycle is also in many ways a wonderful work of fiction, perhaps even in parts a great one.’ This was written in 1992. I was not aware then that Cities of Salt had been reviewed four years earlier by one of the most influential figures ...

But how, we might ask, can any question of thought arise in the absence of language? Kohn’s answer is that to imagine these possibilities we need to move beyond language. But to what? Merely to ask that question is to become aware of the multiple ways in which we are constantly engaged in patterns of communication that are not linguistic: as, for example, when we try to interpret the nuances of a dog’s bark; or when we listen to patterns of birdcalls; or when we try to figure out what exactly is portended by a sudden change in the sound of the wind as it blows through trees. None of this is any less demanding, or any less informative, than, say, listening to the news on the radio. We do these things all the time—we could not stop doing them if we tried—yet we don’t think of them as communicative acts. Why? Is it perhaps because the shadow of language interposes itself, preventing us from doing so? It isn’t only the testimony of our ears that is blocked in this way, but also that of our eyes, for we often communicate with animals by means of gestures that require interpretation—as, for example, when I wave my hands to shoo away a crow. Nor does interpretation necessarily demand a sense of hearing or sight. In my garden, there is a vigorously growing vine that regularly attempts to attach itself to a tree, several metres away, by ‘reaching’ out to it with a tendril. This is not done randomly, for the tendrils are always well-aimed and they appear at exactly those points wher...

The effect of mainland Asia’s numbers is such as to vastly amplify the human impacts of global warming. Take, for instance, the Bengal Delta (a region that consists of most of Bangladesh and much of West Bengal). Formed by the confluence of two of the world’s mightiest rivers, the Ganges and the Brahmaputra, this is one of the most densely populated parts of the world, with more than 250 million people living in an area about a quarter the size of Nigeria. The floodplains of Bengal are not likely to be submerged as soon or as completely as, say, the Pacific island nation of Tuvalu. But the population of Tuvalu is less than 10,000 while the partial inundation of just one island in Bangladesh—Bhola island—has led to the displacement of more than 5,00,000 people. Because of the density of its population, some of the world’s worst disasters have occurred in the Bengal Delta. The 1971 Bhola cyclone is thought to have killed 3,00,000 people. As recently as 1991, a cyclone in Bangladesh resulted in 1,38,000 dead, of whom 90 per cent were women. Sea-level rise and the increasing intensity of storms will make large-scale inundations more likely, all along the coastline. Moreover, in Bengal, as in other Asian deltas, for example those of the Irrawaddy, the Indus and the Mekong, another factor has magnified the effects of sea-level rise: this is that delta regions across Asia (and elsewhere in the world) are subsiding much faster than the oceans are rising. This is due partly to geol...

The vulnerability of Asia’s populations is only one aspect of their centrality to global warming. The reality is that the continent has also played a pivotal role in setting in motion the chain of consequences that is driving the present cycle of climatic change. In this story, too, numbers are critical, for it was the rapid and expanding industrialization of Asia’s most populous nations, beginning in the 1980s, that brought the climate crisis to a head. Numbers are critical again to the difference in Asia’s role in global warming and that of countries that industrialized earlier. The West’s largest contribution to the accumulation of greenhouse gases came about through the continuous expansion of the carbon footprint of what was about 30 per cent of the world’s population at the beginning of the twentieth century. Asia’s contribution, on the other hand, came about through a sudden but very small expansion in the footprint of a much larger number of people, perhaps as much as half of a greatly expanded global population, late in the twentieth century. To be sure, the planet would have faced a climate crisis sooner or later, even if the history of mainland Asia had not taken this turn. After all, signs of a changing climate date back to the 1930s, and the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere had already passed 300 parts per million when Charles Keeling began to take measurements at the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii. This was in the late 1950s, long before the...

It is a fact, in any event, that exchanges of technology and knowledge accelerated in the early modern period. In the sixteenth century, for instance, innovations in weaponry and fortifications travelled very quickly between Europe, the Middle East and India. The same was true of ideas: early botanical works, like the seventeenth-century Hortus Malabaricus, were often produced in collaboration by Europeans and savants from elsewhere. A continuous cross-pollination of ideas occurred in mathematics too. It is now known that the Kerala School of Mathematics anticipated the work of ‘Gregory, Newton and Leibniz by at least 250 years’; it is by no means unlikely that these developments were transmitted to Europe by Jesuits. Although non-Western influences usually went unacknowledged in Europe, in at least one instance, that of the nineteenth-century logician and mathematician George Boole, they were explicitly recognized. Boole’s wife, Mary Everest Boole, even made the claim that nineteenth-century European science ‘could never have reached its present height had it not been fertilized by successive wafts from the . . . knowledge stored up in the East’. Philosophy provides a particularly interesting example, both of parallel development and of the circulation of ideas. As the philosopher Jonardon Ganeri has shown, the innovations of the Nava-Nyaya school of philosophy in Bengal contain striking similarities to the thought of early modern philosophers in Europe. So rapid was the ...

For the ruling Konbaung dynasty, the oil industry was a major source of revenue even in the eighteenth century, which was one reason why British envoys took a special interest in it. But oil became especially important after the Second Anglo-Burmese War of 1852–53, when the British seized a large part of the kingdom, depriving the then ruler, King Mindon, of his southern revenues. This greatly increased the king’s dependence on oil, and in 1854 he did what the rulers of many modern petro-states would do in the century to come: he asserted direct control over the oil fields of Yenangyaung, effectively nationalizing the industry. After this, producers could sell only to the state, and the king was able to dictate prices. At the same time, King Mindon also took steps to create links with the world market by entering into contracts with an English firm that manufactured paraffin candles. Soon, Price’s Patent Candle Company Ltd was importing approximately 2000 barrels of Burmese oil per month. This amounted to more than half of the yearly production of the Yenangyaung oil fields, which was in the range of 46,000 barrels. The king further consolidated his relationship with the oil industry by marrying the daughter of a leading well-owner, thereby acquiring control of over 120 oil wells. King Mindon is also said to have created a refinery in Mandalay, where oil was stored and processed. These and other interventions brought about a twofold increase in oil production in Burma betw...

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. Already in the early 1820s, businessmen in India, foreign and local, had become keenly interested in the possibility of a regular steamer service between England and India. Since no coal-fuelled vessel had yet made that journey, a conglomerate of wealthy men—a group that included the Nawab of Awadh—announced a prize of 10,000 pounds sterling for the first steamship to complete the voyage in less than seventy days. The challenge was taken up by a group of investors in England and a side-wheeled steamship called Enterprise (a name that recurs often among early steamships) was built at Deptford at a cost of 43,000 pounds sterling. The Enterprise left Falmouth on 16 August 1825, and arrived in Calcutta on 7 December, after a voyage of 114 days. Even though the steamer had not met the specified time limit, the committee decided to award the owners a substantial sum of money in recognition of the historic...

Imperialism was not, however, the only obstacle in Asia’s path to industrialization: this model of economy also met with powerful indigenous resistances of many different kinds. While it is true that industrial capitalism met with resistance on every continent, not least Europe, what is distinctive in the case of Asia is that the resistance was often articulated and championed by figures of extraordinary moral and political authority, such as Mahatma Gandhi. 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.’ This quote is striking because of the directness with which it goes to the heart of the matter: numbers. It is proof that Gandhi, like many others, understood intuitively what Asia’s history would eventually demonstrate: that the universalist premise of industrial civilization was a hoax; that a consumerist mode of existence, if adopted by a sufficient number of people, would quickly become unsustainable and would lead, literally, to the devouring of the planet. Of course, Gandhi was not alone in being granted this insight; many others around the world arrived at the same conclusion, often by completely different routes. But Gandhi occupied a position of unique social and cultural importance, and, what was...

It is a striking fact also that many leading figures from Asia voiced concerns even at a time when environmentalism was largely a countercultural issue in the West. One of them was the Burmese statesman U Thant, who served as the secretary-general of the United Nations from 1962 to 1971 and was instrumental in establishing the United Nations Environment Programme. In 1971, he issued a warning that seems strangely prescient today: ‘As we watch the sun go down, evening after evening, through the smog across the poisoned waters of our native earth, we must ask ourselves seriously whether we really wish some future universal historian on another planet to say about us: “With all their genius and with all their skill, they ran out of foresight and air and food and water and ideas,” or, “They went on playing politics until their world collapsed around them.”’

Consider, for example, the stories that congeal around questions like, ‘Where were you when the Berlin Wall fell?’ or ‘Where were you on 9/11?’ Will it ever be possible to ask, in the same vein, ‘Where were you at 400 ppm [parts per million]?’ or ‘Where were you when the Larsen B ice shelf broke up?’

And as the public sphere grows ever more performative, at every level from presidential campaigns to online petitions, its ability to influence the actual exercise of power becomes increasingly attenuated. This was starkly evident in the build-up to the Iraq War in 2003: I was in New York on 15 February that year, and I joined the massive anti-war demonstration that wound through the avenues of mid-Manhattan. Similar protests were staged in 600 other cities, in sixty countries around the world; tens of millions of people took part in them, making them possibly the largest single manifestation of public dissent in history. Yet even at that time there was a feeling of hopelessness; relatively few, I suspect, believed that the marches would effect a change in policy—and indeed they did not. Then, as never before, it became clear that the public sphere’s ability to influence the security and policy establishment had eroded drastically. Since then the process has only accelerated: in many other matters, like austerity, surveillance, drone warfare, and so on, it is now perfectly clear that in the West political processes exert very limited influence over the domain of statecraft—so much so that it has even been suggested that ‘citizens no longer seriously expect . . . that politicians will really represent their interests and implement their demands’. This altered political reality may in part be an effect of the dominance of petroleum in the world economy. As Timothy Mitchell h...

The net result is a deadlocked public sphere, with the actual exercise of power being relegated to the interlocking complex of corporations and institutions of governance that has come to be known as the ‘deep state’. From the point of view of corporations and other establishment entities, a deadlocked public is, of course, the best possible outcome, which, no doubt, is why they frequently strive to produce it: the funding of climate change ‘denial’ in the United States and elsewhere, by corporations like Exxon—which have long known about the consequences of carbon emissions—is a perfect example of this.

3 The public politics of climate change is itself an illustration of the ways in which the moral-political can produce paralysis. Of late, many activists and concerned people have begun to frame climate change as a ‘moral issue’. This has become almost a plea of last resort, appeals of many other kinds having failed to produce concerted action on climate change. So, in an ironic twist, the individual conscience is now increasingly seen as the battleground of choice for a conflict that is self-evidently a problem of the global commons, requiring collective action: it is as if every other resource of democratic governance had been exhausted, leaving only this residue—the moral. This framing of the issue certainly has one great virtue, in that it breaks decisively with the economistic, cost-benefit language that the international climate change bureaucracy has imposed on it. But, at the same time, this approach also invokes a ‘politics of sincerity’ that may ultimately work to the advantage of those on the opposite side. 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 c...

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 equally culpable—for the imagining of possibilities is not, after all, the job of politicians and bureaucrats.

The fact that laissez-faire ideas are still dominant within the Anglosphere is therefore itself central to the climate crisis. In that global warming poses a powerful challenge to the idea that the free pursuit of individual interests always leads to the general good, it also challenges a set of beliefs that underlies a deeply rooted cultural identity, one that has enjoyed unparalleled success over the last two centuries. Much of the resistance to climate science comes exactly from this, which is probably why the rates of climate change denial tend to be unusually high throughout the Anglosphere. Yet it is also true that the Anglosphere, the United States in particular, has produced the overwhelming bulk of climate science, as well as some of the earliest warnings of global warming. Moreover, many, if not most, of those who have taken the lead on the issue politically, whether it be as thinkers, theorists, or activists, are from these five countries, which together possess some of the most vigorous environmental movements in the world. Bill McKibben’s 350.org is but one example of a group that has spearheaded a global movement. The tension between these two polarities—widespread denialism, on the one hand, and vigorous activist movements, on the other—now defines the public politics of climate change throughout the Anglosphere, but particularly in the United States. And since identity and performativity are now pivotal to public discourse, climate change too has become enm...

But strangely, the picture takes on a completely different appearance when we look to other domains of the American body politic, for example, the security establishment. There is no sign there of either denial or confusion: on the contrary, the Pentagon devotes more resources to the study of climate change than any other branch of the US government. The writer and climate activist George Marshall notes, ‘the most rational and considered response to the uncertainties of climate change can be found among military strategists. . . . As General Chuck Wald, former deputy commander of U.S. European Command puts it: “There’s a problem there and the military is going to be a part of the solution.”’ Other top-ranking officers have been equally blunt. In 2013, when Admiral Samuel J. Locklear III (then head of the US Pacific Command) was asked about the ‘biggest long-term security threat to the United States in the Pacific Region’, he pointed immediately to climate change, identifying it as the factor that was most likely to ‘cripple the security environment’. Indeed, the US military establishment’s focus on global warming is such that Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, once summed it up with these words: “The only department in . . . Washington that is clearly and completely seized with the idea that climate change is real is the Dept. of Defense.’ The seriousness of this commitment is evident in the fact that the US military—which is...

Seen in this light, climate change is not a danger in itself; it is envisaged rather as a ‘threat multiplier’ that will deepen already existing divisions and lead to the intensification of a range of conflicts. How will the security establishments of the West respond to these threat perceptions? In all likelihood they will resort to the strategy that Christian Parenti calls the ‘politics of the armed lifeboat’, a posture that combines ‘preparations for open-ended counter-insurgency, militarized borders, [and] aggressive anti-immigrant policing’. The tasks of the nation state under these circumstances will be those of keeping ‘blood-dimmed tides’ of climate refugees at bay and protecting their own resources: ‘In this world view, humanity has not only declared a war against itself, but is also locked into mortal combat with the earth.’ The outlines of an ‘armed lifeboat’ scenario can already be discerned in the response of the United States, United Kingdom and Australia to the Syrian refugee crisis: they have accepted very few migrants even though the problem is partly of their own making. The adoption of this strategy might even represent the logical culmination of the biopolitical mission of the modern nation state, since it is a strategy that conceives of the preservation of the ‘body of the nation’ in the most literal sense: by a reinforcement of boundaries that are seen to be under threat from the infiltration of the pathological ‘bare life’ that is spilling over from o...

It is for these reasons that I differ with those who identify capitalism as the principal fault line on the landscape of climate change. It seems to me that this landscape is riven by two interconnected but equally important rifts, each of which follows a trajectory of its own: capitalism and empire (the latter being understood as an aspiration to dominance on the part of some of the most important structures of the world’s most powerful states). In short, even if capitalism were to be magically transformed tomorrow, the imperatives of political and military dominance would remain a significant obstacle to progress on mitigatory action.

‘different road to development’ and so on. Take the use of coal. Much concern has been expressed in the West about coal plants in India. Yet, analysts have calculated that ‘in 2014 the average Indian accounted for around 20 per cent of the average American’s coal consumption and around 34 per cent of those from the OECD’.

Although the Paris Agreement does not lay out the premises on which its targets are based, it is thought that they are founded on the belief that technological advances will soon make it possible to whisk greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere and bury them deep underground. But these technologies are still in their nascency, and the most promising of them, known as ‘biomass energy carbon capture and storage’, would require the planting of bioenergy crops over an area larger than India to succeed at scale. To invest so much trust in what is yet only a remote possibility is little less than an act of faith, not unlike religious belief.

But the most promising development, in my view, is the growing involvement of religious groups and leaders in the politics of climate change. Pope Francis is, of course, the most prominent example, but some Hindu, Muslim, Buddhist and other groups and organizations have also recently voiced their concern. I take this to be a sign of hope because it is increasingly clear to me that the formal political structures of our time are incapable of confronting this crisis on their own. The reason for this is simple: the basic building block of these structures is the nation state, inherent to the nature of which is the pursuit of the interests of a particular group of people. So powerful is this imperative that even transnational groupings of nation states, like the UN, seem unable to overcome it. This is partly due of course to questions of power and geo-political rivalries. But it may also be that climate change represents, in its very nature, an unresolvable problem for modern nations in terms of their biopolitical mission and the practices of governance that are associated with it. I would like to believe that a great upsurge of secular protest movements around the world could break through the deadlock and bring about fundamental changes. The problem, however, is time. One of the reasons why climate change is a ‘wicked’ as opposed to a ‘normal’ problem is that the time horizon in which effective action can be taken is very narrow: every year that passes without a drastic redu...