This is the first time I’m reading him, and really loving his writing. Keen to read more from him. Erudite and literary, in a good way. Makes you slow down while reading the prose, and I am tempted to re-read certain sections, if not the whole book. The book is about Climate and the way perhaps future generations will call this age the greatly deranged age – these 300 years of industrialisation, exploitation of earth’s resources, and our persistent blind eye to what is happening to the world.
Personally, I don’t know how one breaks the tide of the way humanity has chosen progress and materialism and capitalism and the race to resources – without really building in the right price of things. Only the cost of extraction is referred to, and the cost of replacement is completely ignored. Earth regenerates, and both air and water can be regenerated if we would only help the process and actually allow the cost to be built in to the cost of things. The right price will perhaps slowly nudge us into the right habits.
Air and water being the most basic, and the only renewable resources we have - as to the rest of the extraction of earth, unless we change our value matrix, our way of living, or use our brains to develop the world on a more sustainable, long-term basis, ....what Gass says, about the human appetite, a universe is on fire...but because it is not felt acutely immediate, the brain relegates the fire as invisible...
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I have just about begun reading the book. Keen to read this one and more from him. And perhaps find a better way to talk about this book to more people. Some of these things are as much about real awareness, mindshare, thoughtshare of more and more people - both young and old. The world turns itself over fairly quickly in the timescale of history, but the impact of these few scores of generations of human beings will be felt for a while
One can only move forward from where one is, and the best way is to work with the value matrix I feel.
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Note to self - to read it well, and to write about the book.
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There are two things regarding the problem of cities close to water, the problem of climate change created by humanity, and all the related problems. Changes take generations. The first thing is about awareness, understanding and appreciation. The second thing is about using this as a checklist of problems with current world arrangements, and to fix what can be fixed or bolstered. For instance, he talks about Nuclear Power plants close to sea which are now prone to cyclones because of climate change. If efforts in science can be directed towards creating innovation and tech to deal with Nucelar Plants in case of power loss. ....What I mean is that this book is not just for awareness, but also as a reckoner of things to be fixed, the worst problems to be dealt with, the efforts to be directed...to maximise the saving of humanity, both from impact as well as cause... and saving of the environment.
One can hence also read this book as a sort of checklist. To consider all the issues he details, story by story, something as a task list.
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There are cycles in the world, of which the clock is a miniature way to look at, seconds, minutes, hours, each circling at a different pace. But in nature, umpteen cycles keep moving. Nothing is still, everything is slowly or rapidly churning. Some of these are discernible to us like seconds and minutes and some of these are in rhythm with our being like hours, days, months and years. But many of these, because they are beyond our easy discernment, sometimes are not really grasped, understood, or their magnitude and impact appreciated. One gets a feeling reading this book that so much of the world is beyond our time-sense-grasp, that where one should listen to or bow to the wisdom of ages, just because one cannot discern or see so far. So either the wisdom of the ages, or the general reverence of the ancient man to what he didn’t understand rather than the general unabashed-ness of the modern man in front of what he doesn’t understand, or a general obliviousness, ignorance, a complete disconnect or ignoring of what is not understood. The thing about unknown unknowns but there are known unknowns too. However, the pace of life, the practicality of living and at a level, it is some sort of FOMO that drives the human race so competitively, capitalistically forward.
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There's his approach to the issue, a question he wonders about why is climate change not much spoken about in fiction, and to answer that he delves into the form of narrative and novel which has evolved over time, and the seeming improbability of certain events make them difficult to approach in fiction which deals with 'life as usual', the modern day life. (Some excerpts below)
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Some excerpts:
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.
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Recognition is famously a passage from ignorance to knowledge. To recognize, then, is not the same as an initial introduction. Nor does recognition require an exchange of words: more often than not we recognize mutely. And to recognize is by no means to understand that which meets the eye; comprehension need play no part in a moment of recognition. The most important element of the word recognition thus lies in its first syllable, which harks back to something prior, an already existing awareness that makes possible the passage from ignorance to knowledge: a moment of recognition occurs when a prior awareness flashes before us, effecting an instant change in our understanding of that which is beheld. Yet this flash cannot appear spontaneously; it cannot disclose itself except in the presence of its lost other. The knowledge that results from recognition, then, is not of the same kind as the discovery of something new: it arises rather from a renewed reckoning with a potentiality that lies within oneself.
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But, of course, air too can come to life with sudden and deadly violence.
But more often it does so with a quiet insistence—as the inhabitants of New Delhi and Beijing know all too well—when inflamed lungs and sinuses prove once again that there is no difference between the without and the within; between using and being used. These too are moments of recognition, in which it dawns on us that the energy that surrounds us, flowing under our feet and through wires in our walls, animating our vehicles and illuminating our rooms, is an all-encompassing presence that may have its own purposes about which we know nothing.
It was in this way that I too became aware of the urgent proximity of non-human presences, through instances of recognition that were forced upon me by my surroundings.
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But when it came to translating these perceptions into the medium of my imaginative life—into fiction, that is—I found myself confronting challenges of a wholly different order from those that I had dealt with in my earlier work. Back then, those challenges seemed to be particular to the book I was writing, The Hungry Tide; but now, many years later, at a moment when the accelerating impacts of global warming have begun to threaten the very existence of low-lying areas like the Sundarbans, it seems to me that those problems have far wider implications. I have come to recognize that the challenges that climate change poses for the contemporary writer, although specific in some respects, are also products of something broader and older;
that they derive ultimately from the grid of literary forms and conventions that came to shape the narrative imagination in precisely that period when the accumulation of carbon in the atmosphere was rewriting the destiny of the earth.
That climate change casts a much smaller shadow within the landscape of literary fiction than it does even in the public arena is not hard to establish.
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.
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But the truth, as is now widely acknowledged, is that we have entered a time when the wild has become the norm: if certain literary forms are unable to negotiate these torrents, then they will have failed—and their failures will have to be counted as an aspect of the broader imaginative and cultural failure that lies at the heart of the climate crisis.
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Clearly the problem does not arise out of a lack of information: there are surely very few writers today who are oblivious to the current disturbances in climate systems the world over. Yet, it is a striking fact that when novelists do choose to write about climate change it is almost always outside of fiction.
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In his seminal essay ‘The Climate of History’, Dipesh Chakrabarty observes that historians will have to revise many of their fundamental assumptions and procedures in this era of human-induced climate change, in which ‘humans have become geological agents, changing the most basic physical processes of the earth’. I would go further and add that the Anthropocene presents a challenge not only to the arts and humanities, but also to our common-sense understandings and beyond that to contemporary culture in general.
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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 an advertisement that links a picture of a tropical island to the word paradise, the longings that are kindled in us have a chain of transmission that stretches back to Daniel Defoe and Jean-Jacques Rousseau: the flight that will transport us to the island is merely an ember in that fire. 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. The artefacts and commodities that are conjured up by these desires are, in a sense, at once expressions and concealments of the cultural matrix that brought them into being.
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This culture is, of course, intimately linked with the wider histories of imperialism and capitalism that have shaped the world. But to know this is still to know very little about the specific ways in which the matrix interacts with different modes of cultural activity: poetry, art, architecture, theatre, prose fiction, and so on. 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?
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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.
All Excerpts From Ghosh, Amitav. “The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable.”
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Later - This book is a long essay. Even as I read it, I go through earlier sections. Like a report or a text book, it needs more time than a fast read. And any time spent on it is enriching in terms of understanding, appreciation and a worldview or a way of seeing fiction and the world in light of our deranged age.
