by Amitav Ghosh
To think like a forest, then, is, as Kohn says, to think in images. And the astonishing profusion of images in Mrauk-U, most of which are of the Buddha in the bhumisparshamudra, with the tip of the middle finger of his right hand resting on the earth, serves precisely to direct the viewer away from language toward all that cannot be “thought” through words.
These possibilities have, of course, been explored by people in many cultures and in many eras—in fact, everywhere perhaps except within the modern academy. What, then, is to be made of the fact that such possibilities have now succeeded also in broaching the boundaries of the one sphere from which they were excluded? Could it be said, extending Kohn’s argument, that this synchronicity confirms that the Anthropocene has become our interlocutor, that it is indeed thinking “through” us? Would it follow, then, on the analogy of Kohn’s suggestion in relation to forests, that to think about the Anthropocene will be to think in images, that it will require a departure from our accustomed logocentricism? Could that be the reason why television, film, and the visual arts have found it much easier to address climate change than has literary fiction? And if that is so, then what does it imply for the future of the novel?
It is possible, of course, to construct many different genealogies for the deepening logocentricism of the last several centuries. But the one point where all those lines of descent converge is the invention of print technology, which moved the logocentricism of the Abrahamic religions in general, and the Protestant Reformation in particular, onto a new plane. So much so that Ernest Gellner was able to announce in 1964, “The humanist intellectual is, essentially, an expert on the written word.”
Merely to trace the evolution of the printed book is to observe the slow but inexorable excision of all the pictorial elements that had previously existed within texts: illuminated borders, portraits, coloring, line drawings, and so on. This pattern is epitomized by the career of the novel, which in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries often included frontispieces, plates, and so on. But all of these elements gradually faded away, over the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, until the very word illustration became a pejorative, not just within fiction but in all the arts. It was as if every doorway and window that might allow us to escape the confines of language had to be slammed shut, to make sure that humans had no company in their dwindling world but their own abstractions and concepts. This, indeed, is a horizon within which every advance is achieved at the cost of “making the world more unlivable.”
But then came a sea change: with the Internet we were suddenly back in a time when text and image could be twinned with as much facility as in an illuminated manuscript. It is surely no coincidence that images too began to seep back into the textual world of the novel; then came the rise of the graphic novel—and it soon began to be taken seriously.
So if it is the case that the last, but perhaps most intransigent way the Anthropocene resists literary fiction lies ultimately in its resistance to language itself, then it would seem to follow that new, hybrid forms will emerge and the act of reading itself will change once again, as it has many times before.
Part II
History
1.
In accounts of the Anthropocene, and of the present climate crisis, capitalism is very often the pivot on which the narrative turns. I have no quarrel with this: as I see it, Naomi Klein and others are right to identify capitalism as one of the principal drivers of climate change. However, I believe that this narrative often overlooks an aspect of the Anthropocene that is of equal importance: empire and imperialism. While capitalism and empire are certainly dual aspects of a single reality, the relationship between them is not, and has never been, a simple one: in relation to global warming, I think it is demonstrably the case that the imperatives of capital and empire have often pushed in different directions, sometimes producing counterintuitive results.
To look at the climate crisis through the prism of empire is to recognize, first, that the continent of Asia is conceptually critical to every aspect of global warming: its causes, its philosophical and historical implications, and the possibility of a global response to it. It takes only a moment’s thought for this to be obvious. Yet, strangely, the implications are rarely reckoned with—and this may be because the discourse around the Anthropocene, and climate matters generally, remains largely Eurocentric. This is why the case for Asia’s centrality to the climate crisis does need to be laid out in some detail, even if it is at the cost of stating the obvious.
2.
Asia’s centrality to global warming rests, in the first instance, upon numbers. The significance of this is perhaps most readily apparent in relation to the future; that is to say, if we consider the location of those who are most at threat from the changes that are now under way across the planet. The great majority of potential victims are in Asia.
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 the Indian state 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 ten thousand while the partial inundation of just one island in Bangladesh—Bhola island—has led to the displacement of more than half a million 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 three hundred thousand people. As recently as 1991, a cyclone in Bangladesh resulted in 138,000 dead, of whom 90 percent 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 geological processes and partly to human activities, such as dam building and the extraction of groundwater and oil. Again, the southern parts of Asia are particularly vulnerable, with the deltas of the Chao Phraya, the Krishna-Godavari, the Ganges-Brahmaputra, and the Indus being especially imperiled. The Indus, on which Pakistan is critically dependent, has been exploited to the point where it no longer reaches the sea and, as a result, salt water has pushed inland by forty miles, swallowing up over a million acres of agricultural land.
In India a significant rise in sea level could lead to the loss of some six thousand square kilometers, including some of the country’s most fertile lands; many of the subcontinent’s low-lying islands, like the Lakshadweep chain, may disappear. One study suggests that rising sea levels could result in the migration of up to 50 million people in India and 75 million in Bangladesh. Along with Bangladesh, Vietnam is at the top of the list of countries threatened by sea-level rise: in the event of a one-meter rise in sea level, more than a tenth of Vietnam’s population will be displaced.
The ongoing changes in climate pose a dire threat also to the interior of the continent where millions of lives and livelihoods are already in jeopardy because of droughts, periodic flooding, and extreme weather events. No less than 24 percent of India’s arable land is slowly turning into desert, and a two-degree Celsius rise in global average temperature would reduce the country’s food supply by a quarter. In Pakistan, a hundred thousand acres of salt-encrusted land are being abandoned each year; of the fields that remain “a fifth are badly waterlogged and a quarter produce only meagre crops.” In China, which feeds more than 20 percent of the world’s population off 7 percent of the world’s a
rable land, desertification is already causing direct annual losses of $65 billion.
Fearsome as these risks are, they are dwarfed by Asia’s accelerating water crisis. The rivers that sustain China and South and Southeast Asia rise in Tibet and the Himalayas; the waters that are stored there, in the form of accumulations of ice, sustain 47 percent of the world’s population: “here the water-related dreams and fears of half the human race come together.” But this region is warming twice as fast as the average global rate, and in 2008 it was found that the Himalayan glaciers had already lost all the ice formed since the mid-1940s; by some reckonings, one-third of them will disappear by 2050.
As the melting of the Himalayan glaciers accelerates, the variations in the rivers’ flow will increase, falling to unprecedented lows in the dry season and causing massive inundations in the summer, as in the Kosi River disaster of 2008 in Bihar, and the Indus floods of 2010. And if the glaciers continue to shrink at the present rate, the most populous parts of Asia will face catastrophic water shortages within a decade or two. A quarter of the world’s rivers already run dry before reaching the sea: many, if not most, of them are in Asia.
In terms of numbers, the consequences are beyond imagining: the lives and livelihoods of half a billion people in South and Southeast Asia are at risk. Needless to add, the burden of these impacts will be borne largely by the region’s poorest people, and among them disproportionately by women.
It is the matter of numbers again that makes Asia critical to the questions of mitigation, preparedness, and resiliency. Aquifers are drying up in northern China as well as in America’s Great Plains: but only 2 million people live in the 175,000 square miles that are watered by the United States’ Ogallala Aquifer while the 125,000 square miles of north China are populated by 214 million people.
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.
3.
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 percent 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 economies of mainland Asia began their rapid acceleration. Even back then, the carbon footprint of the West was growing rapidly enough to ensure that the accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere would continue to rise. But that rise would not have been so steep if mainland Asia had not launched upon a period of sustained economic expansion in the late 1980s. It is this acceleration that has dramatically shortened the time available to adapt to, or even recognize, the crisis for what it is.
But apart from its dual role as both protagonist and victim, Asia has played yet another critical part in the unfolding of the Great Derangement: it is that of the simpleton who, in his blundering progress across the stage, unwittingly stumbles upon the secret that is the key to the plot. This is because certain crucial aspects of modernity would not have become apparent if they had not been put to an empirical test, in the only continent where the magnitudes of population are such that they can literally move the planet. And as with any truly revelatory experiment, the results would not have been believed, by Asians or anyone else, if they had not turned out exactly as they have. For the results are counterintuitive and they contradict all the tenets on which our lives, thoughts, and actions have been based for almost a century. 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.
It is Asia, then, that has torn the mask from the phantom that lured it onto the stage of the Great Derangement, but only to recoil in horror at its own handiwork; its shock is such that it dare not even name what it has beheld—for having entered this stage, it is trapped, like everyone else. All it can say to the chorus that is waiting to receive it is “But you promised . . . and we believed you!”
In this role as horror-struck simpleton, Asia has also laid bare, through its own silence, the silences that are now ever more plainly evident at the heart of global systems of governance.
4.
If it is the case that the climate crisis was precipitated by mainland Asia’s embrace of the dominant mechanisms of the world economy, then the critical question in relation to the history of the Anthropocene is this: Why did the most populous countries of Asia industrialize late in the twentieth century and not before?
Strangely this question is almost never explicitly posed in accounts of the history of global warming. Yet these histories do often offer an implicit answer to the question of why the non-Western world was slow to enter the carbon economy: it is simply that the technologies that created this economy (e.g., the spinning jenny and the steam engine) were invented in England and were therefore inaccessible to much of the world. In this view industrialization comes about through a process of technological diffusion that radiates outward from the West.
This narrative is, of course, consistent with the history of global warming over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when the carbon-intensive economies of the West pumped greenhouse gases into the atmosphere at ever accelerating rates. It is therefore perfectly accurate to say, as 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.” Yet these truths should not lead us to overlook the fact that this economy had a very complicated prehistory.
Before the advent of the carbon-intensive economy, the populations of the “old world” were not divided by vast gaps in technology. For millennia, trade connections were close enough to ensure that innovations in thought and technique were transmitted quite rapidly over long distances. Even “deep,” long-term historical processes sometimes unfolded at roughly the same time in places far removed from each other. The vernacularization of languages is an example of one such: as Sheldon Pollock has shown, this process began almost simultaneously in Europe and the Indian subcontinent. The stimulus may also have been the same in both instances, consisting of forces set in motion by the Islamic expansion.
There is now a great deal of research to suggest that the early modern period, roughly the sixteenth to the early nineteenth centuries, was a time of rapid and often parallel change around much of the world, and particularly so across the Eurasian landmass. The fact that these d
evelopments were set in motion during a period of great climatic disruption (i.e., the seventeenth century) opens the door to the possibility that the changes of the early modern era were influenced by shifts in climate, which had varying effects on different parts of the planet.
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 traveled 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 circulation of philosophical ideas that Muslim, Jain, and Hindu philosophers were familiar with the ideas of Descartes within “ten years after his death.” A major figure in the transmission and circulation of these ideas was the French traveler François Bernier, who translated Descartes into Persian during his travels in Asia. So great was the ferment of this period, writes Ganeri, that “India in the seventeenth century . . . was in intellectual overdrive. Muslim, Jaina, and Hindu intellectuals produced work of tremendous vitality, and ideas circulated around India, through the Persianate and Arabic worlds, and out to Europe and back.”