Dear Reader,
Happy Earth Day! How did you celebrate?
We picked lettuce and spinach from the cold frame for a delicious dinner salad.
It has been chilly here, and the dandelions looked rather frazzled by the frost, but they seem to be bouncing back just fine.
Review
The Great Derangement:
Climate Change and the Unthinkable
Amitav Ghosh
The University of Chicago Press, 2016
196 pages
$15.00
I’m asking people to think about a world without a left, right, up, and down. If you don’t, you will be stuck asking your most difficult questions in the same box canyon. You’ll never get out because you don’t know how to appreciate someone else’s system of orientation.” ~ Barry Lopez
What you see often depends upon where you stand, and whether you are willing to make a shift in your perspective. Here in Massachusetts we have just had our annual Patriots’ Day holiday, always the third Monday in April. In normal years, we engage in cornball reenactments of the “Shot Heard ’Round the World.” We run the Boston Marathon. And we remember our rupture from our English tyrants. As if in a kind of geopolitical romcom, we later became frenemies, and now we are “in a relationship.”
But if, say, you are a farmer in the Sundarban mangrove forest of the great Bengal Delta, the relationship drama between the Americans and the British might provoke a bit of an eye roll. Your history has been influenced to an enormous degree by the Anglosphere, and the same holds for your family’s future. What began with colonial subjugation and Brittania ruling the waves now continues, with a neoliberal economic order and American military hegemony—the UK having switched to a supporting role. The US and the UK look like a power couple who really know how to throw their weight around.
My Patriots’ Day musings were prompted by Amitav Ghosh’s The Great Derangement, which I now consider an essential book for readers who want to understand the Anthropocene from a non-Western perspective, and to consider deeply the role that art can play in helping humanity to find its way. Ghosh is a wonderful novelist, and one of the foremost Indian writers working today. He grew up in Kolkata, and he has long been fascinated with the Sundarbans, a unique coastal and riverine ecosystem of mangrove forests that is the last such habitat on Earth for tigers. When Ghosh was writing his novel The Hungry Tide (2005), which is set in the Sundarbans, he came to understand that the coastline there was already receding due to sea level rise. Over the next decade, Ghosh became increasingly preoccupied with climate change. In 2015 he prepared a series of lectures that he delivered at the University of Chicago, and he subsequently adapted and expanded them to create The Great Derangement.
This book, which has the virtues of being tightly argued and richly sourced, is structured into three sections: Stories, History, and Politics. In Stories, Ghosh sets the stage for his own openness to the unthinkable by telling the tale of how he was nearly killed in a freak tornado in Mumbai. He then describes his realization that the literary novel as a genre is failing its readers and society during an era of climate disruption. The post-WWII novel often creates a “rhetoric of the everyday,” with a “relocation of the unheard-of toward the background.” It often operates by imposing boundaries around the story, setting it in a specific place and period of time. This process of “partitioning” reality may not be helpful, however, when the same “stirrings of the earth” are causing sunny-day floods in Bangladesh, Miami, and Venice. Ghosh wonders whether a similar process of parsing and analytical thinking has led humans to build huge cities at the water’s edge, despite centuries of indigenous knowledge about the potential risks of storms and flooding. Ghosh addresses this particular issue in his most recent novel, Gun Island, which links the migration crisis to the climate crisis and creates a plot that operates simultaneously around the globe.
A central question for Ghosh is: “what is the place of the nonhuman in the modern novel?” Stories in which natural forces and gods direct the flow of events are often categorized within the realms of epic or myth. Fiction that explores the uncanny, the improbable, and the dystopian—what Margaret Atwood has called “wonder tales”—has generally been classified in other genres such as fantasy or science fiction. Atwood herself has taken on ecological disaster and climate change, as have others including Octavia Butler, J. G. Ballard, and Kim Stanley Robinson. But the events occurring on earth today aren’t transpiring in some imagined epoch, or other dimension of reality.
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 museum-goers 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 models 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.
Ghosh makes the notable point that very little so-called “serious” fiction has been written about the oil industry. “For the arts, oil is inscrutable.” His own The Circle of Reason and Abdelrahman Munif’s Cities of Salt are exceptions that prove the rule. Ghosh cites John Updike’s cringe-inducing review of Cities of Salt, in which he criticized the author as “insufficiently westernized” and the book as lacking in “individual moral adventure.” And that’s exactly the point. Kicking our addiction to fossil fuels is not something that you or I can accomplish by nobly giving up meat— although that would be virtuous given the extravagant per capita emissions of the people of the United States versus the rest of the world. We are facing a systems-level challenge in the realms of global governance, political action, and economic reinvention. A politics of individual moral sincerity is not going to do the trick.
There is little doubt (see the 5,200 citations on Google Scholar), that this book has had a significant effect on writers and publishers. But so too have the overlapping waves of disaster we have lived through in the five years since its publication. From The Overstory by Richard Powers to Weather by Jenny Offill to The Yellow House by Sarah Broom, “literary” authors are now writing about climate change with urgency, delicacy, and insight. For many writers, there has been a turn from the human to the more-than-human, and from the individual to the collective. As the critic Elisa Gabbert wrote recently about contemporary poetry in the New York Review of Books:
. . . in the past several years, as we approach or cross a theoretical point of no return, has the end of the world as we know it, the lateness of the world, come to seem like the only available subject. It’s not that you can’t still write a poem about sex or the rain at your mother’s funeral. It’s that sex poems and funeral poems are about climate change too. The poem is always aware of the lateness. There is weather, rain or drought, in the background, whether or not you acknowledge it.
For American readers in 2021, Ghosh’s chapters on History and Politics may be even more instructive. In History, Ghosh argues that capitalism has been blamed for climate change at the expense of factoring in the complex role of empire. In his account, European colonialism actually delayed the onset of the Great Acceleration by denying colonies permission to industrialize fully. For example, British law in the nineteenth century forbade the development of an Indian shipbuilding industry. Global trade arrangements in Asia were created by force of arms borne by coal-fired battleships. Natural resources and agricultural commodities of colonial countries that might have been left in the ground or used at home were instead commandeered for export. And global military hegemony, first imposed by the British and more recently by the United States, has been the subsurface layer upon which all these economic and political arrangements have rested.
The Great Derangement usefully re-centers the discussion of climate change on Asia. With 250 million people living in the Bengal Delta alone, in an area one-quarter the size of Nigeria, and with 47% of the world’s population dependent on the fragile water cycle of the Great Himalayan Watershed, “the great majority of potential victims are in Asia.” But Asia will also be a decisive actor in terms of future carbon emissions.
In a fascinating section, Ghosh shows us that the history of decolonization in Asia includes important voices who strongly resisted consumer capitalism. Gandhi was assassinated by Hindu nationalists in part because he opposed a western model of development for India, saying it would “strip the world bare like locusts.” Ghosh cites the less wasteful development paths of South Korea and Japan, and he sees China’s One Child Policy as a very real example of the kind of profound sacrifice that Asian societies have proved they can make in the interest of sustainability. The Chinese official Zhang Shizao (1881-1973) wrote:
While finitude characterizes all things under heaven, appetites alone know no bounds . . . Conversely, the depletion of finite things would soon come when used to satisfy insatiable desires.
For Ghosh, Asia is both victim and perpetrator, but is also in a sense the fool in this particular drama:
. . . the simpleton who, in his blundering progress across the stage, unwittingly stumbles upon the secret that is the key to the plot . . . 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 state of the Great Derangement . . . It dare not even name what it has beheld—for having entered this stage, it is trapped, like everyone else.
For a compelling explication of this growth trap within the African context, I enthusiastically refer the interested reader to Self-Devouring Growth (2019), by NYU Professor and MacArthur Fellow Julie Livingston, who in the interest of full disclosure is a dear friend. I confess that I can’t foresee what standards of living might be sustainable for all eight billion of us, given the capacity of humans to develop new technologies. But I am with Ghosh and Livingston that growth in GDP per capita is the wrong yardstick for assessing human—let alone planetary—flourishing in the age of climate change.
In his final section, Politics, Ghosh seeks to understand how we might reinterpret the central democratic value of individual freedom for a time that requires concerted collective action. “Non-human forces and systems have no place in this calculus of liberty—indeed being independent of Nature was considered one of the defining characteristics of freedom itself.” (One thinks immediately of the emancipation of the reader from her dependence on sunlight or wax candles.) The laissez-faire ideology of the Anglosphere, and its geo-strategic dominance, are now making things harder for everyone.
In that global warming poses a powerful challenge to the idea that the free pursuit of individual interests always leads to the general good, it also challenges a set of beliefs that underlies a deeply rooted cultural identity, one that has enjoyed unparalleled success over the last two centuries.
Ghosh invokes an unexpected source on the question of freedom: Laudato Si, the 2015 encyclical of Pope Francis. In part quoting his predecessor Benedict, Francis writes:
We have forgotten that “man is not only a freedom which he creates for himself. Man does not create himself. He is spirit and will, but also nature.” With paternal concern, Benedict urged us to realize that creation is harmed “where we ourselves have the final word, where everything is simply our property and we use it for ourselves alone. The misuse of creation begins when we no longer recognize any higher instance than ourselves, when we see nothing else but ourselves.”
Having explored at some length the inability of nations to respond fully and appropriately to the climate threat, Ghosh asks a powerful question (and he is not alone in this): What if scientists, policy makers, secular reformers, and indigenous wisdom keepers could join forces with members of the world’s largest religious movements?
. . .religious worldviews are not subject to the limitations that have made climate change such a challenge for our existing institutions of governance: they transcend national-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 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.
From the standpoint of the arts and humanities, what interests and excites me about this vision is that it will require artists to redefine their materials, forms, and practices, in order to learn from and engage with many more of the planet’s humans. We may even want to return to premodern and hybrid forms, which Ghosh himself has done in his latest book, Jungle Nama, an illustrated verse epic about the spirit of the Bengal Tiger.
When I was planning Frugal Chariot, I spoke with a thoughtful actor in the climate fight who advised, “Just try to reach new people with whatever you do.” I don’t have that challenge completely sorted yet, but reading The Great Derangement has certainly spurred my thinking, during a week that started with Patriots’ Day and is ending with Earth Day. In particular, living as I do near a salt marsh that is beginning to struggle with sea level rise, I am thinking of my neighbors in the Sundarbans. I am thinking of the humans there, and also the tigers, the crabs, the mangroves, the Buffy Fish Owls, the mud. And I am thinking about the rising oceans that stretch between our shores.
Other Voices, Other Forms
Jungle Nama is illustrated by the Pakistani painter Salman Toor. His triumphant exhibition at the Whitney Museum recently closed, but you can read about it here. I love Toor’s vision of an al fresco hang. Let’s have lots of these very soon.
I also can’t resist sharing this short BBC “Big Cats” segment. A crew spends weeks in the Sundarbans hoping for a glimpse of the Royal Bengal Tiger.
Poem of the Week
Here is a poem by Rabindranath Tagore. It is full of the promise of language to help us in finding each other.
The Gardener 85
For your Reading Radar
On Time and Water is a new meditation on the climate crisis from the Icelandic writer Andri Snaer Magnason. The author is a major figure in Iceland, known especially for his book Dreamland: A Self-Help Manual For a Frightened Nation. That brilliant polemic critiques the Icelandic government’s decision to dam rivers in order to provide power to an aluminum smelting plant. The new book, already a huge bestseller in Iceland, includes an obituary to a glacier, and also reflections on his grandparents’ expeditions into the icy mountain landscapes that are now changing so rapidly.
For your Calendar
Speaking of climate denialism, Politics and Prose is hosting Naomi Oreskes in conversation with Frank Sesno about her new book Why Trust Science? The event is on Monday, April 26th at 6 PM Eastern.
Bookstore of the Week
Our featured bookstore is East Wind Books in beautiful Berkeley, California. For almost forty years, this shop has been a hub for the Asian community and a source for Asian-American literature, Asian Studies volumes, language learning texts, and many other categories of Asia-related books. The shop’s website makes for very happy browsing.
Wishing you joy in the week to come. xo Nicie