The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable

by Amitav Ghosh

The humans of the future will surely understand, knowing what they presumably will know about the history of their forebears on earth, that only in one, very brief era, lasting less than three centuries, did a significant number of their kind believe that planets and asteroids are inert.

Indeed, it could even be said that fiction that deals with climate change is almost by definition not of the kind that is taken seriously by serious literary journals: the mere mention of the subject is often enough to relegate a novel or a short story to the genre of science fiction. It is as though in the literary imagination climate change were somehow akin to extraterrestrials or interplanetary travel.

And if the urgency of a subject were indeed a criterion of its seriousness, then, considering what climate change actually portends for the future of the earth, it should surely follow that this would be the principal preoccupation of writers the world over—and this, I think, is very far from being the case.

the climate crisis is also a crisis of culture, and thus of the imagination. Culture generates desires—for vehicles and appliances, for certain kinds of gardens and dwellings—that are among the principal drivers of the carbon economy.

When we see a green lawn that has been watered with desalinated water in Abu Dhabi or Southern California or some other environment where people had once been content to spend their water thriftily in nurturing a single vine or shrub, we are looking at an expression of a yearning that may have been midwifed by the novels of Jane Austen.

Throughout history these branches of culture have responded to war, ecological calamity and crises of many sorts: why, then, should climate change prove so peculiarly resistant to their practices?

In a substantially altered world, when sea-level rise has swallowed the Sundarbans and made cities like Kolkata, New York and Bangkok uninhabitable, when readers and museumgoers turn to the art and literature of our time, will they not look, first, and most urgently, for traces and portents of the altered world of their inheritance? 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

Improbable is not the opposite of probable, but rather an inflexion of it, a gradient in a continuum of probability.

‘Commonplace’? ‘Moderate’? How did Nature ever come to be associated with words like these?

human beings are intrinsically unable to prepare for rare events.

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

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 derangement.

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.

a 2012 paper by a Japanese research team predicts a 46 per cent increase in tropical cyclone frequency in the Arabian Sea by the end of the next century, with a corresponding 31 per cent decrease in the Bay of Bengal.

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;

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.

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.

for poets and writers, it was not until the late nineteenth century that Nature lost the power to evoke that form of terror and awe that was associated with the ‘sublime

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.

we enter into their settings until they begin to seem real to us; we ourselves become emplaced within them. This exactly is why ‘a sense of place’ is famously one of the great conjurations of the novel as a form.

another of the uncanny effects of global warming: it was in exactly the period in which human activity was changing the earth’s atmosphere that the literary imagination became radically centred on the human.

fear of working-class militancy was one of the reasons why a large part of US aid to Europe, after the Second World War, went towards effecting the switch from coal to oil

Clearly, it is in the word moral that the conundrum lies: What exactly does it mean? Is it intended perhaps to incorporate the senses also of the ‘political’, the ‘spiritual’ and the ‘philosophical’? And if so, would not a question arise as to whether a single word can bear so great a burden?

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.

the patterns of life that modernity engenders can only be practised by a small minority of the world’s population.

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

It was not for any lack of industriousness, then, or ingenuity or entrepreneurial interest, that this avatar of the carbon economy withered in India: the matter might have taken a completely different turn if local industrialists had enjoyed the kind of state patronage that was routinely extended to their competitors elsewhere

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.

the Internet and the digital media have made the sphere of the political broader and more intrusive than ever before. Today everybody with a computer and a web connection is an activist.

politicization has not translated into a wider engagement with the crisis of climate change.

Instead, political energy has increasingly come to be focused on issues that relate, in one way or another, to questions of identity: religion, caste, ethnicity, language, gender rights and so on.

‘citizens no longer seriously expect . . . that politicians will really represent their interests and implement their demands

As an instrument of disempowerment oil has been spectacularly effective in removing the levers of power from the reach of the populace. ‘No matter how many people take to the streets in massive marches,’ writes Roy Scranton, ‘they cannot put their hands on the real flows of power because they do not help to produce it. They only consume.’ 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 that demonstrators use to get to a march.

the scale of climate change is such that individual choices will make little difference unless certain collective decisions are taken and acted upon.

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.

In 2013, James Clapper, the highest-ranking intelligence official in the United States, testified to the Senate that ‘extreme weather events (floods, droughts, heat waves) will increasingly disrupt food and energy markets, exacerbating state weakness, forcing human migrations, and triggering riots, civil disobedience, and vandalism’.

in the United States, climate activists are now among the prime targets of a rapidly growing surveillance-industrial complex.

Moreover, the climate crisis holds the potential of drastically reordering the global distribution of power as well as wealth. This is because the nature of the carbon economy is such that power, no less than wealth, is largely dependent on the consumption of fossil fuels. The world’s most powerful countries are also oil states, Timothy Mitchell notes, and ‘without the energy they derive from oil their current forms of political and economic life would not exist’. Nor would they continue to occupy their present positions in the global ranking of power.

in dealing with drought and famine, British and American colonial officials consistently placed far greater store on the sanctity of the free market than on human life.

Malthusian ideas were also often invoked in the context of famine and starvation in Asia and Africa, as, for example, by Winston Churchill when he said, ‘Famine or no famine, Indians will breed like rabbits.’ Although we are unlikely to hear words of this kind in our era, there can be little doubt that there are many who believe that a Malthusian ‘correction’ is the only hope for the continuance of ‘our way of life’. From this perspective, global inaction on climate change is by no means the result of confusion or denialism or a lack of planning: on the contrary, the maintenance of the status quo is the plan. Climate change may itself facilitate the realization of this plan by providing an alibi for ever-greater military intrusion into every kind of geographic and military space

The assumption underlying this is that the populations of poor nations, because they are accustomed to hardship, possess the capacity to absorb, even if at great cost, certain shocks and stresses that might cripple rich nations.

Power failures, for instance, are so rare in advanced countries that they often cause great disruption—including spikes in rates of crime—when they do occur. In many parts of the global south, breakdowns are a way of life, and everybody is used to improvisations and work-arounds.

In short: the rich have much to lose; the poor do not.

However, it is not the middle classes and the political elites of the global south that will bear the brunt of the suffering but rather the poor and the disempowered.

It is therefore not totally unrealistic to assume that poor countries may be able to force rich countries to make greater concessions merely by absorbing the impacts of climate change, at no matter what cost.

‘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

The Encyclical is remarkable for the lucidity of its language and the simplicity of its construction; it is the Agreement, rather, that is highly stylized in its wording and complex in structure.

while words like catastrophe and disaster appear several times in the Encyclical, the Agreement speaks only of the adverse impacts or effects of climate change. The word catastrophe is never used and even disaster occurs only once, and that too only because it figures in the title of a previous conference.