The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable

by Amitav Ghosh

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...