Green is the new red

When the inhabitants of a region attain a natural equilibrium with their environment, we say that an ecological balance has been achieved. At its heart, it is just that — a balance. Which is why the title of Amitav Ghosh’s new book, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable, can also be read as a pun, ‘derangement’ now being used as an antonym for ‘arrangement’.

If Ghosh had stuck to the myopia of governments, corporations and other stakeholders in the policy-making process, this would still be a pretty good book. But the author goes beyond that, to chart the near-absence of climate change in literary fiction, to try and understand “the peculiar forms of resistance that climate change presents to what is now regarded as serious fiction.”

What does the history of printed texts (which itself is inextricably linked with the history of effacing images from books) have to do with a popular, ‘temperate’ image of nature? Why did the CIA encourage abstract expressionism in American art during the Cold War and what did this imply for the science behind climate change?

This fascinating blend of literary and geopolitical analyses makes The Great Derangement a great book.

BLink spoke to Ghosh when he was in the Capital last week. Excerpts:

Cheerleaders of untrammelled industrial growth in India perceive climate change as an inherently Western concept, designed to slow us down, economically: we shut down Greenpeace saying similar things. How did we manage to convince ourselves of this?

The neo-liberal model, which is now the dominant model of economy around the world, is completely oriented to this idea of endless industrial growth, to endless expansion. Any kind of talk about limits, towards reorienting its goals, meets with enormous resistance. And it’s not just in India: you see it in America, you see it in Australia. Actually, what’s interesting about India is that (as surveyors show) there is very little climate denial here. People know that the climate is changing: in many other countries, there is a straightforward denial. Attacks upon climate change activists are now a global phenomenon. These activists are on the radar of security agencies around the world. There were more environmental activists killed last year than in any year before that: there’s a very interesting book called Green is the New Red, which discusses this.

You are, however, also a little sceptical of the kind of attention-seeking tactics often employed by Greenpeace, stunts like climbing the 72-storey Shard building in London to protest against Shell, the Cancun balloon stunt of 2010 and so on. You’ve referred to Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle more than once in the book and these are Debordian spectacles, right?

I think that (The Society of the Spectacle) is such a remarkable book. It came out more than 50 years ago and, yet, it diagnoses our society today with such clinical precision. And India has become this constant tamasha: Bollywood, cricket and politics have sort of melded into each other. See, I think you have to sympathise with Greenpeace and the dilemma they’re facing. And Greenpeace does many different kinds of things: it finances studies, it does adaptability work and so on. When you’re living in the society of the spectacle, and you’re a political activist, the question does arise: what can you do? So in the political sense, yes, they have decided to use this tactic.

I don’t think I find myself at all in sympathy with the spectacular for the sake of the spectacular, but there’s a dilemma, you know. Maybe, there are political thinkers who can think of a way around that, but I’m not that person: I’m not an activist.

You also quote Ingolfur Blühdorn: “Citizens no longer seriously expect that politicians will really represent their interests and implement their demands.” Do you find evidence of this in India?

You know, I don’t think India is quite there; I don’t think we are a post-political society yet, in the way that many countries in the West are. A lot of western countries have now essentially consigned themselves to a managerial vision of politics. And people don’t want to be managed anymore, they want to revolt. In the lead-up to Brexit, the managerial class and the class of experts all said one thing, while the people just threw it out. They wanted to burn that house down. I don’t think we are there yet, but we are heading in that direction. In the present government, there’s this constant talk of management and growth; it’s as if they all came out of IIMs. And there will be a similar revolt against managerialism here.

During the course of your research, did you find ancient and medieval Indian texts that reference or directly tackle climate change and related issues?

Pre-modern texts are deeply aware of what weather means in relation to human beings: you have stories of the great deluge and so on. You see it constantly in folktales… it’s all-pervasive. I think the point I was making about these works wasn’t so much about climate as an awareness of human beings in relation to other kinds of beings: this is certainly the case with the Mahabharata. So much of it is about snakes! The entire beginning of the Adi Parva is about this and the snakes are intervening constantly in the affairs of the kings, the princes and the rishis. This is the case with older texts everywhere. If you read Moby Dick, Captain Ahab and the whale are the Other of each other, they’re both demonic entities, deep in each other’s minds.

At one point in the book, you write about a renewed “interest in the non-human (…) burgeoning in the humanities over the last decade”, citing the rise of fantasy bestsellers featuring vampires and werewolves as a reflection of the same. Do you think fantasy is ahead of the curve here, so to speak?

I think fantasy is more in touch with everything that is not anthropocentric. I think the reason why fantasy has played such an important part in our lives is that we have never really believed, in our heart of hearts, that the human is completely separate from nature, or from other beings. That project was never completely realised; I think we have always known that there are other beings around us, looking at us and judging us.

It’s just that, of late, we’ve been doing a much better job of blocking this stuff out.

That’s it, that’s it. I think what we’ve created is a sort of learned ignorance. But it’s certainly changing. There are so many philosophical movements now: there’s panpsychism, there’s interest in Alfred North Whitehead’s philosophy, which didn’t depend on this human/non-human distinction.

One of the ways in which we have kept climate change out of conversations in literary fiction is to focus on abstract expressionism: you’ve written about the CIA backing abstract art over KGB-supported social realism. Did you come across works by, say, John Barth, when you were in college, in the ’70s? If so, what did you think of them back then?

You have to understand that getting books was a bit of a problem back then! But we still prided ourselves on finding the most recent works, from pavement vendors mostly. I have to say that Barth’s work never held any appeal for me. The American writers who mattered a lot to me at that point were people like James Baldwin and John Steinbeck. It’s interesting how the American literary establishment of that period, from the ’40s to the ’60s and ’70s, loathed Steinbeck. So much so that Andre Gide reviewed a Steinbeck novel favourably and got so much flak for it that he stopped reviewing altogether. But you have to understand that a lot of the post-war aesthetic was guided by intelligence agencies. Can you imagine, somebody in the CIA, sitting there, making decisions about high literary culture? There’s a new book coming out on the subject, by an American writer, which also discusses how they (the CIA) intervened in India.

The author Peter Matthiessen was, in fact, a CIA agent, wasn’t he? And yet, a lot of his work shows a deep connection with nature.

He was. Peter was my friend, and yet, I did not realise, until recently, how deeply into that (intelligence work) he was! And his work, I think, was very much part of the avant-garde movement early on, during the time he co-founded The Paris Review. It was only later that the nature themes came into his books.

Novels like Margaret Atwood’s The Year of the Flood have events that can be described as ‘catastrophes’, a word that was almost entirely missing from the Paris Agreement, as you noted. Do you think this apocalyptic genre is slowing down?

Not really. I think there are quite a few books going around that feature devastating events, apocalypses. Now, I find them interesting and I often read them but to me, the question is, what is the status of works like these in relation to what we call ‘literary fiction’? I often talk to my friends who are serious writers and so on. The other day I told one of them that I really liked a book I read, by Liz Jensen. He said, “Oh, you know, it’s just a thriller.” It was very striking to me because these are the ways in which we assert that what is serious doesn’t take into account the catastrophe that surrounds us now. That is what is really interesting: how is it that literary fiction hasn’t really taken this on-board? Margaret, I think, is one of the exceptions.

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