The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable

by Amitav Ghosh

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...