The Great Derangement

by Amitav Ghosh

  It is hard to see how popular protest movements could gain enough momentum within such a narrow horizon of time: such movements usually take years, even decades, to build. And to build them in the current situation will be all the more difficult because security establishments around the world have already made extensive preparations for dealing with activism.

  If a significant breakthrough is to be achieved, if the securitization and corporatization of climate change is to be prevented, then already-existing communities and mass organizations will have to be in the forefront of the struggle. And of such organizations, those with religious affiliations possess the ability to mobilize people in far greater numbers than any others. Moreover, religious worldviews are not subject to the limitations that have made climate change such a challenge for our existing institutions of governance: they transcend nation-states, and they all acknowledge intergenerational, long-term responsibilities; they do not partake of economistic ways of thinking and are therefore capable of imagining nonlinear change—catastrophe, in other words—in ways that are perhaps closed to the forms of reason deployed by contemporary nation-states. Finally, it is impossible to see any way out of this crisis without an acceptance of limits and limitations, and this in turn, is, I think, intimately related to the idea of the sacred, however one may wish to conceive of it.

  If religious groupings around the world can join hands with popular movements, they may well be able to provide the momentum that is needed for the world to move forward on drastically reducing emissions without sacrificing considerations of equity. That many climate activists are already proceeding in this direction is, to me, yet another sign of hope.

  The ever-shrinking time horizon of the climate crisis may itself be a source of hope in at least one sense. Over the last few decades, the arc of the Great Acceleration has been completely in line with the trajectory of modernity: it has led to the destruction of communities, to ever greater individualization and anomie, and to the industrialization of agriculture and to the centralization of distribution systems. At the same time, it has also reinforced the mind-body dualism to the point of producing the illusion, so powerfully propagated in cyberspace, that human beings have freed themselves from their material circumstances to the point where they have become floating personalities “decoupled from a body.” The cumulative effect is the extinction of exactly those forms of traditional knowledge, material skills, art, and ties of community that might provide succor to vast numbers of people around the world—and especially to those who are still bound to the land—as the impacts intensify. The very speed with which the crisis is now unfolding may be the one factor that will preserve some of these resources.

  The struggle for action will no doubt be difficult and hard-fought, and no matter what it achieves, it is already too late to avoid some serious disruptions of the global climate. But I would like to believe that out of this struggle will be born a generation that will be able to look upon the world with clearer eyes than those that preceded it; that they will be able to transcend the isolation in which humanity was entrapped in the time of its derangement; that they will rediscover their kinship with other beings, and that this vision, at once new and ancient, will find expression in a transformed and renewed art and literature.

  Acknowledgments

  This book began as a set of four lectures, presented at the University of Chicago in the fall of 2015. The lectures were the second in a series named after the family of Randy L. and Melvin R. Berlin. I am deeply grateful to the Berlin family, and the administrators of the series, for providing me with an opportunity to develop my ideas on climate change.

  There could have been no more congenial milieu in which to present these ideas than the University of Chicago, which is a global pioneer in the study of the Anthropocene. The comments and questions of those who attended the lectures gave me a great deal to think about, as did my interactions with the university community. My thanks go especially to Dipesh Chakrabarty, Julia Adeney Thomas, and Kenneth Pomeranz: they have all enriched this book, through their work in the first instance, but also by their comments on the lectures.

  Prasenjit Duara and Tansen Sen gave me invaluable guidance and advice on Chinese materials; they and Liang Yongjia also translated certain passages that are quoted in the book. I owe them many thanks.

  Through much of the time that I was working on and editing this book, I was a Visiting Fellow at the Ford Foundation: I gratefully acknowledge the foundation’s support.

  My wife, Deborah Baker, read an early version of the manuscript, as did Adam Sobel, Rahul Srivastava, and Mukul Kesavan; Lucano Alvares and Raghu Kesavan pointed me to some important sources: I owe them all many thanks.

  Studies have shown that a mention of global warming at a dinner table is almost certain to lead to a quick change of subject. My children, Lila and Nayan, did not always have that option when they were growing up: I am, as ever, grateful to them for their forbearance.

  My thanks go finally to Alan Thomas and Meru Gokhale, my editors, and to the three anonymous readers who reviewed the manuscript for the University of Chicago Press: their comments were invaluable.

  Notes

  PART I

  4 ignorance to knowledge: “Recognition . . . is a change from ignorance to knowledge, disclosing either a close relationship or enmity, on the part of people marked out for good or bad fortune.” Aristotle, Poetics, tr. Malcolm Heath (London: Penguin 1996), 18.

  5 lies within oneself: In the phrasing of Giorgio Agamben, the philosopher, these are moments in which potentiality turns “back upon itself to give itself to itself” (Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, tr. Daniel Heller-Roazen [Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998], 46).

  7 genre of science fiction: Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior and Ian McEwan’s Solar, both of which were widely reviewed by literary journals, are rare exceptions.

  7 feedback loop: In Gavin Schmidt and Joshua Wolfe’s definition: “The concept of feedback is at the heart of the climate system and is responsible for much of its complexity. In the climate everything is connected to everything else, so when one factor changes, it leads to a long chain of changes in other components, which leads to more changes, and so on. Eventually, these changes end up affecting the factor that instigated the initial change. If this feedback amplifies the initial change, it’s described as positive, and if it dampens the change, it is negative.” See Climate Change: Picturing the Science, ed. Gavin Schmidt and Joshua Wolfe (New York: W. W. Norton, 2008), 11.

  8 wild has become the norm: Lester R. Brown writes, “climate instability is becoming the new norm.” See World on the Edge: How to Prevent Environmental and Economic Collapse (New York: W. W. Norton, 2011), 47.

  8 “stories our civilization tells itself”: See dark-mountain.net; and see also John H. Richardson, “When the End of Human Civilization Is Your Day Job,” Esquire, July 7, 2015.

  9 era of the Anthropocene: Dipesh Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History: Four Theses,” Critical Inquiry 35 (Winter 2009).

  9 “processes of the earth”: The quote is from Naomi Oreskes, “The Scientific Consensus on Climate Change: How Do We Know We’re Not Wrong,” in Climate Change: What It Means for Us, Our Children and Our Grandchildren, ed. Joseph F. C. DiMento and Pamela Doughman (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007). For a discussion of the genealogy of the concept of the Anthropocene, see Paul J. Crutzen, “Geology of Mankind,” Nature 415 (January 2002): 23; and Will Steffen, Jacques Grinevald, Paul Crutzen, and John McNeill, “The Anthropocene: Conceptual and Historical Perspectives,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society 369 (2011): 842–67.

  10 the wind in our hair: Stephanie LeMenager calls this “the road-pleasure complex” in Living Oil: Petroleum Culture in the American Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014,) 81.

  11 Bangkok uninhabitable: Cf. James Hansen: ‘“Parts of [our coastal cities] would still be sticking above the water, but you couldn’t live there.” http://www.th
edailybeast.com/articles/2015/07/20/climate-seer-james-hansen-issues-his-direst-forecast-yet.html.

  11 Great Derangement: As the historian Fredrik Albritton Jonsson notes, if we consider the transgression of the “planetary boundaries that are necessary to maintain the Earth system ‘in a Holocene-like state’ . . . our current age of fossil fuel abundance resembles nothing so much as a giddy binge rather than a permanent achievement of human ingenuity” (“The Origins of Cornucopianism: A Preliminary Genealogy,” Critical Historical Studies, Spring 2014, 151).

  14 meteorological history: The only part of the Indian subcontinent where tornadoes occur frequently is in the Bengal Delta, particularly Bangladesh. Cf. Someshwar Das, U. C. Mohanty, Ajit Tyagi, et al., “The SAARC Storm: A Coordinated Field Experiment on Severe Thunderstorm Observations and Regional Modeling over the South Asian Region,” American Meteorological Society, April 2014, 606.

  16 “being aware of it”: Ian Hacking, The Emergence of Probability (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), Kindle edition, loc. 194.

  17 “into the foreground”: Franco Moretti, “Serious Century: From Vermeer to Austen,” in The Novel, Volume 1, ed. Franco Moretti (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 372.

  17 regime of thought and practice: Cf. Giorgio Agamben on Carl Schmitt, “the true life of the rule is the exception,” in Homo Sacer, tr. Daniel Heller-Roazen, 137.

  18 “pictures of Bengali life”: Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, “Bengali Literature,” first published anonymously in Calcutta Review 104 (1871). Digital Library of India: http://en.wikisource.org.

  18 early 1860s: See also my essay, “The March of the Novel through History: The Testimony of My Grandfather’s Bookcase,” in the collection The Imam and the Indian (New Delhi: Ravi Dayal, 2002).

  19 “blond cornfields”: Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary, tr. Eleanor Marx-Aveling (London: Wordsworth Classics, 1993), 53.

  19 “no miracles at all”: Franco Moretti, The Bourgeois (London: Verso, 2013), 381. There is an echo here of Carl Schmitt’s observation: “The idea of the modern constitutional state triumphed together with deism, a theology and metaphysics that banished the miracle from the world. . . . The rationalism of the Enlightenment rejected the exception in every form” (Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty [University of Chicago Press, 2005], 36–37).

  20 “change in the present”: Spencer R. Weart, The Discovery of Global Warming (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 9.

  20 “does not make leaps”: Stephen Jay Gould, Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle: Myth and Metaphor in the Discovery of Geological Time (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), 173.

  20 jump, if not leap: The theory of punctuated equilibrium, as articulated by Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldredge, proposed “that the emergence of new species was not a constant process but moved in fits and starts: it was not gradual but punctuated.” See John L. Brooke, Climate Change and the Course of Global History: A Rough Journey (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 29.

  20 “‘both and neither’”: Gould, Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle, 191.

  20 “short-lived cataclysmic events”: http://geography.about.com/od/physicalgeography/a/uniformitarian.htm.

  21 “immaterial and supernatural agents”: Gould, Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle, 108–9.

  21 “victim with her cold beams”: Chatterjee, “Bengali Literature.”

  21 “nightingales in shady groves”: Flaubert, Madame Bovary, 28.

  22 “resent its interference”: Chatterjee, “Bengali Literature.”

  22 “reigned supreme”: Brooke, Climate Change and the Course of Global History.

  22 “events in the stars”: Quoted in Gould, Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle, 176.

  23 “covers of popular magazines”: Elizabeth Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History (New York: Henry Holt, 2014), 76. See also Jan Zalasiewicz and Mark Williams, The Goldilocks Planet: The Four Billion Year Story of Earth’s Climate (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), Kindle edition, loc. 3042, and Gwynne Dyer, Climate Wars: The Fight for Survival as the World Overheats (Oxford: Oneworld Books, 2010), Kindle edition, loc. 3902.

  23 “basis of intelligibility”: Gould, Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle, 10.

  23 “‘carry me with you!’”: Flaubert, Madame Bovary, 172–73.

  25 recorded meteorological history: Adam Sobel, Storm Surge: Hurricane Sandy, Our Changing Climate, and Extreme Weather of the Past and Future (New York: HarperCollins, 2014), Kindle edition, locs. 91–105.

  25 its impacts: Ibid., locs. 120, 617–21.

  26 “faraway places”: Ibid., loc. 105.

  26 “possible in Brazil”: Mark Lynas, Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet (New York: HarperCollins, 2008), 41.

  26 named the “catastophozoic”: Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction, 107.

  26 “the long emergency” and “Penumbral Period”: David Orr, Down to the Wire: Confronting Climate Collapse (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 27–32; and Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View from the Future (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), 4.

  26 “extremes of heat and cold”: Geoffrey Parker, Global Crisis: War, Climate Change, and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013), Kindle edition, loc. 17574.

  28 were killed by tigers: In his book, The Royal Tiger of Bengal: His Life and Death (London: J. and A. Churchill, 1875), Joseph Fayrer records that between 1860 and 1866 4,218 people were killed by tigers in Lower Bengal.

  29 this fearsome sight: Amitav Ghosh, The Hungry Tide (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2005).

  30 “feels it generally”: Martin Heidegger, Existence and Being, intro. Werner Brock, tr. R. F. C. Hull and Alan Crick (Washington, DC: Gateway Editions, 1949), 336.

  30 “something uncanny”: Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), Kindle edition, loc. 554.

  30 “menace and uncertainty”: George Marshall, Don’t Even Think about It: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Ignore Climate Change (New York: Bloomsbury, 2014), 95.

  31 processes of thought: Cf. Eduardo Kohn, How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology beyond the Human (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013).

  33 relationship with the nonhuman: Cf. Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus, “The Death of Environmentalism: Global Warming Politics in a Post-Environmental World” (Oakland, CA: Breakthrough Institute, 2007): “The concepts of ‘nature’ and ‘environment’ have been thoroughly deconstructed. Yet they retain their mythic and debilitating power within the environmental movement and the public at large” (12).

  33 “post-natural world”: Bill McKibben, The End of Nature (New York: Random House, 1989), 49.

  38 tides and the seasons: Anuradha Mathur and Dilip da Cunha make this point at some length in their excellent book, SOAK: Mumbai in an Estuary (New Delhi: Rupa Publications, 2009).

  38 and on Salsette: I am grateful to Rahul Srivastava, the urban theorist and cofounder of URBZ (http://urbz.net), for this insight.

  38 a chest of tea: Bennett Alan Weinberg and Bonnie K. Bealer, The World of Caffeine: The Science and Culture of the World’s Most Popular Drug (New York: Routledge, 2000), 161.

  39 “milieu of colonial power”: Anuradha Mathur and Dilip da Cunha, SOAK, 47.

  39 their colonial origins: The British geographer James Duncan describes the colonial city as a “political tract written in space and carved in stone. The landscape was part of the practice of power.” Quoted in Karen Piper, The Price of Thirst: Global Water Inequality and the Coming Chaos (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), Kindle edition, loc. 3168.

  39 “an island once”: Govind Narayan, Govind Narayan’s Mumbai: An Urban Biography from 1863, tr. Murali Ranganathan (London: Anthem Press, 2009), 256. I am grateful to Murali Ranganathan for clarifying many issues relating to the topography of Mumbai.

  39 “concentr
ation of risk”: Cf. Aromar Revi, “Lessons from the Deluge,” Economic and Political Weekly 40, no. 36 (September 3–8, 2005): 3911–16, 3912.

  40 cyclonic activity: A 2010 report published jointly by the India Meteorological Department and National Disaster Management Authority places the coastal districts of the India’s western states in the lowest category of proneness to cyclones (table 9).

  40 west coast of India: Earthquakes of 5.8 and 5.0 magnitude were recorded in the Owen fracture zone on October 2, 2013, and November 12, 2014. For details, see http://dynamic.pdc.org/snc/prod/40358/rr.html & http://www.emsc-csem.org/Earthquake/earthquake.php.

  40 “NW Indian Ocean”: M. Fournier, N. Chamot-Rooke, M. Rodriguez, et al., “Owen Fracture Zone: The Arabia-India Plate Boundary Unveiled,” Earth and Planetary Science Letters 302 nos. 1–2 (February 1, 2011): 247–52.

  41 after the monsoons: Hiroyuki Murakami et al., “Future Changes in Tropical Cyclone Activity in the North Indian Ocean Projected by High Resolution MRI-AGCMs,” Climate Dynamics 40 (2013): 1949–68, 1949.