Summary
8. Ghosh writes of the Sundarbans and of how people who live near them are occasionally killed by tigers. There is a palpable sense of being watched by these nonhuman creatures, and it is a type of communication without words. The term that best describes the situation is uncanny, a theory expostulated by Freud and Heidegger. Nowadays there is an increasing sense of the uncanny “beating at our doors” and an “awareness that humans were never alone” (30).
Throughout the humanities there is indeed a marked interest in the nonhuman, such as panpsychism, animism, and object-oriented ontology. Ghosh wonders if these nonhuman entities are inserting themselves into our processes of thought, if the earth has intervened to stop the prominence of Cartesian dualism. If this is so, it also uncomfortably means our conversations among humans have not been free from listening or participation by nonhuman forces.
The novel should be a natural place for these sorts of suppositions to play out, but Ghosh says the environmental uncanny is different than the supernatural uncanny because the former has no human referents (unlike ghosts for the latter).
Climate change events are thus resistant to the ways the novel deals with “Nature” because they are “too powerful, too grotesque, too dangerous, and too accusatory to be written about in a lyrical, or elegiac, or romantic vein” (32-3). They are not totally of Nature anyway, and confound the idea of Nature writing.
9. When working on his novel The Hungry Tide (2004), Ghosh had to research a gigantic storm swell in the Sundarbans. It was extraordinarily hard to write, he explains, and says that he visited some of the islands affected by a massive underwater earthquake as part of his research. He observed that the pattern of settlement meant that those most affected by the event were the rich, as they built and lived on the edges of the sea, while the poorer, who had been pushed further into the interior, were less affected. Even the military base where Ghosh flew in had an almost absurd structure to it, where the loveliest houses of the most important people were right on the water. It was a place built by a government agency and approved by the military and state, and ultimately was “the bourgeois belief in the regulatory of the world…carried to the point of derangement” (36).
Ghosh’s smugness was complicated when he flew into JFK in Queens and saw the exact same situation; clearly, the base in the Nicobars was not anomalous. The settlement patterns around the world situate the wealthy and important near the water. And the idea that people have always loved to live by the water is not really borne out by history, as older civilizations and peoples located their cities and settlements in protected areas. It was not until the era of imperialism and colonialism that the cities most affected today by climate catastrophe were built.
10. Ghosh turns to Mumbai and New York, two cities linked in their connection to the British empire in the 1660s. Mumbai exploded in population when the British took control, and “a certain precariousness was thus etched upon them from the start by reason of their colonial origins” (39). Most of the prominent industries as well as the dwellings of many people, particularly the affluent, are in vulnerable areas because they are on “a wedge of cobbled-together land that is totally exposed to the ocean” (39).
Ghosh had watched Hurricane Sandy in New York and initially thought Mumbai would not experience anything similar because cyclones were not common in the Arabian Sea. However, once he started dong research, he realized that climate change was actually altering patterns of cyclonic activity around the world and that even pertained to the Arabian Sea. He reached out to Columbia professor of atmospheric science Adam Sobel and asked about this, quickly learning that the Arabian Sea is indeed an area where this activity will increase.
Ghosh asked Sobel to write a short piece about the risks changing patterns of climate posed for Mumbai, and Sobel agreed. Sobel started on this and came across reports of a fantastically devastating cyclone in Mumbai in 1882, but then realized that it was a hoax—such a cyclone never happened. Yet such a thing did not stay in myth only, for similar ones have formed (but thankfully not caused as much damage) in the subsequent centuries.
11. Ghosh considers what would happen if a Category 4 or 5 storm did run into Mumbai. Honestly, he avers, even a lesser storm would cause problems due to the clogged natural waterways and the now lost marshlands and swamps which would have soaked up the water. A freak rainstorm in 2005 caused tremendous strain on transportation and utilities and killed 500 people, and though many recommendations were made to prevent such damage, very few of those measures were implemented.
The 2005 rainfall event presages some of the same troubles for a cyclone, though a cyclone could be more easily tracked in advance now. Some of the city’s most prominent military and naval institutions are in the path of danger, as are landmarks and institutions. Much of the northern part of the city is low-lying and water would flood the area for days. A transportation breakdown would preclude food and supplies from reaching people, and illness and disease would spread. Mumbai also has a nuclear facility in its boundaries, which could mean, if there is a disabling of security systems, a dispersal of radioactive particles.
Ghosh states that it is ultimately rare for a cyclone to hit Mumbai, but the city is still faced with other threats that arise from climate change—increased rainfall and rising sea levels. Another city that is threatened like this is Kolkata, but Ghosh knows that “long familiarity with flooding tends to have a lulling effect” (53). After hearing a report about how Kolkata is one of the megacities threatened by potential flooding, Ghosh talked to his family, who is in the potential danger zone. His mother looked at him like he was crazy, and it did seem that way— “it did seem like lunacy to talk about leaving a beloved family home, with all its memories and associations, simply because of a threat outlined in a World Bank report” (53).
The conversation impacted Ghosh considerably, and he now realized his life was not actually guided by reason but instead “the inertia of habitual motion” (54). He knows most of us will not do anything drastic to adapt to climate change because then we look like the “obsessed monomaniacs who appear to be on the borderline of lunacy” (54).
If whole societies are to adapt, then, it will have to be through politics, the collective form that is supposed to help ensure collective survival and the preservation of the community. Yet around the world most countries are not spearheading a retreat from vulnerable areas. It turns out leaving places with our memories and attachments is not at all an easy thing to do.
Analysis
In these chapters of the “Stories” section, Ghosh deviates from the denunciation of contemporary writers for not seriously taking on climate change as a subject to a consideration of the facets of that “derangement” he introduced earlier. In his strong, clear authorial voice he lays out how absolutely absurd it is that humans settled in some of the areas they did. Of one of the Nicobar islands, he writes, “the design of the [military] base suggested a complacency that was itself a kind of madness” (35), for much of it was “at the edge of a beautiful, palm-fringed beach” (35). Ghosh is angry as he contemplates this madness, but then checks himself when, flying to New York, he realizes that, similarly, the neighborhoods closer to the water were more deleteriously affected by Hurricane Sandy, and “that base in the Nicobars was by no means anomalous; the builders had not in any sense departed from accepted global norms” (36). In New York “these neighborhoods had not sprung up haphazardly; the sanction of the state was evident in the ordered geometry of their streets” (36).
Ghosh shatters our long-held assumption that people have always wanted to live near the water, stating “through much of human history, people regarded the ocean with great wariness” and even if they made their living from the sea, they did not usually live in close proximity to it. It was not until the age of the British empire—the 1660s—that this started to change.
As Ghosh presents a brief history of the British establishment of colonial ports that violated the “separation between land and sea” (38), he begins to make his case that it is really imperialism that has most contributed to climate change—not, as many people conclude, capitalism. He will take this up in the “History” and “Politics” section of the book, but for now, it offers a compelling way into the question of just why are we so deranged? Even as Ghosh is openly incredulous about this deranged refusal to consider how to forestall or mitigate the effects of climate change, he admits how hard it can actually be for people to comprehend what is happening or what might happen. He explains how he read a terrifying report on the possible effects of increased precipitation and concomitant flooding on India and realized that his family’s house is in the danger zone. As his mother is old and frail, he immediately began worrying about what she would do. He approached her and asked her about moving, but “she looked at me as though I had lost my mind. Not that I could blame her: it did seem like lunacy to talk about leaving a beloved family home, with all its memories and associations, simply because of a threat outlined in a World Bank report” (53).
From this conversation, Ghosh realizes that his own life is not governed by reason, and that human beings have a difficult time adapting on their own. Decisions will have to be made collectively, “within political institutions, as happens in wartime or national emergencies. After all, isn’t that what politics, in its most fundamental form, is about? Collective survival and the preservation of the body politic?” (54). Unsurprisingly, though, Ghosh says that most governments and institutions are not moving away from vulnerable areas. Writer and critic Megan Fernandes sums up Ghosh’s claims here: “The great derangement is essentially a great denial of climate crisis, but not by climate deniers on the fringe of politics, but actually as Ghosh argues, by state sanctioned engineers and government agencies themselves. The idea that we are planning for the ‘exceptional’ event is maddening. The idea that disaster management is mostly focused on ‘post-disaster’ response is to neglect and disregard a risk that feels more like an inevitability.”
