Amitav Ghosh

"Look at us!" Arjun would say, after a whisky or two, "we're the first modern Indians; the first Indians to be truly free. We eat what we like, we drink what we like, we're the first Indians who're not weighed down by the past."

But where would his loyalties go now that they were unmoored? He was a military man and he knew that nothing - nothing important - was possible without loyalty, without faith. But who would claim his loyalty now? The old loyalties of India, the ancient ones - they'd been destroyed long ago; the British had built their Empire by effacing them. But the Empire was dead now - he knew this because he had felt it die within himself, where it had held its strongest dominion - and with whom was he now to keep faith? Loyalty, commonalty, faith - these things were as essential and as fragile as the muscles of the human heart; easy to destroy, impossible to rebuild. How would one begin the work of re-creating the tissues that bound people to each other? This was beyond the abilities of someone such as himself; someone trained to destroy. It was a labour that would last not one year, not ten, not fifty - it was the work of centuries.

The science-fictional concept of terraforming is thus an extrapolation from colonial history, except that it extends the project of creating neo-Europes into one of creating neo-Earths. Consequently, narratives of terraforming draw heavily on the rhetoric and imagery of empire, envisioning space as a 'frontier' to be 'conquered' and 'colonised'. The concept's deep roots in the settler-colonial experience may explain why it has such a wide appeal in the English-speaking world, not just among fans of science fiction, but also among tech billionaires, entrepreneurs, engineers, and so on. It suggests an almost poignant yearning to repeat an ancestral experience of colonising and subjugating not just other humans, but also planetary environments.

Ecological interventions were not just an incidental effect of European settlement in the Americas; they were central to the project, the explicit aim of which was to turn territories that were perceived to be wastelands into terrain that fitted a European conception of productive land. Indeed, the settlers' very claims to the territories were based on an idea that was essentially ecological: the notion that the land was 'savage', 'wild', and vacant, because it was neither tilled nor divided into property.

Capitalism was never endogenous to the West: Europe's colonial conquests and the mass enslavement of Amerindians and Africans were essential to its formation. Nor was it based mostly on free labour - not even in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when many of the raw materials required by Western factories were produced by non-White workers in conditions of coercion, if not outright slavery. In the final analysis, it was the military and geopolitical dominance of the Western empires that made it possible for small minorities to exercise power over vast multitudes of people: over their bodies, their labour, their beliefs, and (not least) their environments. In that sense it was capitalism that was a secondary effect of empire, as is so clearly visible in the VOC's remaking of the Banda Islands.

The predicament of the US Department of Defense is a refraction of the quandary that now confronts the world's status quo powers: how do you reduce your dependence on the very 'resources' on which your geopolitical power is founded? How do you reduce the fossil-fuel consumption of a gargantuan military machine that exists largely to serve as a 'delivery service' for hydrocarbons?

The direction taken by the Covid-19 pandemic also suggests that future events may take some unexpected turns. Before 2020, respected experts placed the US and UK at the very top of a list of 'Countries best prepared to deal with the pandemic'. China was relegated to fifty-first place and a cluster of African countries were lumped together at the bottom. In the event, the assessment could not have been more misleading - the actual outcomes were startlingly at odds with the predictions.
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Underlying all of this is another disquieting long-term trend, toward a form of governance that the anthropologist Joseph Masco has described as 'suicidal' because it 'privileges images of catastrophic future events' while being unable to respond to immediate challenges. [...] Military and security assessments of climate change fit this pattern perfectly in the sense that they project images of catastrophe into the future in a fashion that negates the possibility of confronting climate change in the present day.

Indeed, common lands existed everywhere in the world, with no tragic consequences, until Europeans, armed with guns and the ideas of John Locke and his ilk, began to forcefully impose draconian regimes of private property. An accurate title for the history of common lands would therefore be 'The Tragedy of Enclosure'.

All this conforms to what appears to be a consistent pattern in the relationship between vitalist ideas and politics: almost always, beliefs in the Earth's sacredness and the vitality of trees, rivers, and mountains are signs of an authentic commitment to the defence of nonhumans when they are associated with what Ramachandra Guha calls 'livelihood environmentalism' - that is to say, movements that are initiated and led by people who are intimately connected with the specificities of particular landscapes. By the same token, such ideas must always be distrusted and discounted when they are espoused by elite conservationists, avaricious gurus and godmen, right-wing cults, and most of all political parties: in each of these manifestations they are likely to be signs of exactly the kind of 'mysticism' that lends itself to co-optation by exclusivist right-wingers and fascists.

[Meteorologist] Sobel goes on to make the argument, as have many others, that human beings are intrinsically unable to prepare for rare events. But has this really been the case throughout human history? Or is it rather an aspect of the unconscious patterns of thought – or ‘common sense’ – that gained ascendancy with a growing faith in ‘the regularity of bourgeois life’? I suspect that human beings were generally catastrophists at heart until their instinctive awareness of the earth’s unpredictability was gradually supplanted by a belief in uniformitarianism – a regime of ideas that was supported by scientific theories like Lyell’s, and also by a range of governmental practices that were informed by statistics and probability.

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But in the era of global warming, nothing is really far away; there is no place where the orderly expectations of bourgeois life hold unchallenged sway. It is as though our earth had become a literary critic and were laughing at Flaubert, Bankim, and their like, mocking their mockery of the ‘prodigious happenings’ that occur so often in romance and epic poems.

This, then, is the first of the many ways in which the age of global warming defies both literary fiction and contemporary common sense: the weather events of this time have a very degree of improbability. They are not easily accommodated in the deliberately prosaic world of serious prose fiction

The [World Bank climate change risk] report forced me to face a question that eventually confronts everybody who takes the trouble to inform themselves about climate change: what can I do to protect my family and loved ones how that I know what lies ahead?

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The experience did make me recognise something that I would otherwise have been loathe to admit: 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; those who will uproot themselves and make the right preparations are precisely those obsessed monomaniacs who appear to be on the borderline of lunacy.

It is surely no accident that colonial cities like Mumbai, New York, Boston, and Kolkata were all brought into being through early globalisation. 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. Those cities were thus the drivers of the very processes that now threaten them with destruction. In that sense, their predicament is but an especially heightened instance of a plight that is now universal.

Is isn’t only in retrospect that the siting of some of these cities now appear as acts of utter recklessness: Bombay’s first Parsi residents were reluctant to leave older, more sheltered ports like Surat and Navsari, and had to be offered financial incentives to move to the newly founded city. Similarly, Qing dynasty officials were astonished to learn that the British intended to build a city on the island of Hong Kong: why would anyone want to create a settlement in a place that was so exposed to the vagaries of the earth?

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This too is an aspect of the uncanny in the history of our relations with our environments. It is not as if we had not been warned; it is not as if we were ignorant of the risks. An awareness of the precariousness of human existence is to be found in every culture.