Amitav Ghosh: what the West does not understand about the climate crisis

When he was a boy, Amitav Ghosh always knew where pineapples came from. "They came from the garden, I watched them being cut down," he says casually.
His garden was in Calcutta, India, whereas my garden was in the suburbs of Manchester, England, and all that was there was grass, a tree and an old soccer ball. But I still had pineapples—although they were usually sliced in cans. I almost never thought about where they came from.

It would take me a while to explain how we got onto these fruity memories when I met the Indian author in his kitchen in Brooklyn this September. But this disconnect is one of the things behind the Great Disorder, Ghosh's book-length essay from 2016, subtitled "climate change and the unthinkable".
The book begins by asking why it is so difficult to turn climate change into a modern English-language novel that is not science fiction. He concludes that Western literature over the past 200 years or so has been trapped in a world where human comedy and tragedy are separated from nature. Along the way, Ghosh examines the power dynamics that make the climate debate so different in the Eastern Hemisphere than in the Western.

Western novels, in his opinion, are mainly bound by two limitations: verisimilitude and the human factor. Can this happen? And can our hero make his way through his moral adventure? In a sense, his new novel is "cannon Island", full of bizarre typhoons and incredible coincidences, is a conscious attempt to break out of these conventions and therefore finds a place to use climate change as a backdrop.

Crisis and implementation
"The Great Madness" is different from other books about environmental destruction that have been published in the last few years. For example, David Wallace-Wells' book "The Uninhabited Earth" (2019) and "Confessions of a Recovering environmentalist" by Paul Kingsnorth (2017) are vital books, but they are written by American and British men who have made a terrible realization and are now trying to find a way to cope.
But Ghosh, no less aware of the existential threat, seems to be free of their worries. This is mainly because he believes that the current predicament speaks more about the continuity of colonial history than about some kind of ruined future. For some people in the world, the catastrophe has already happened.

"I have a philosopher friend who says: all projections of the future are basically projections of power&"That's why almost always white guys make these predictions, because they really project the disappearance of power in the future. I don't know anything about the future."
"I came from a part of the world where we didn't have very rosy expectations of the world or the future," Ghosh says. "We knew there would be a lot of upheavals, and we witnessed these upheavals firsthand, so in that sense I think Westerners had faith in stability and the promise of the future, which I did not share."
The West has also come to rely on what Ghosh calls "expert discourse" from scientists. The result, in his opinion, is that science gives fearful Westerners hope for a business-friendly "sustainable development&"biofuels or carbon capture technology, which they believe will save the system before it collapses.
Increased forest fires, floods and droughts hit poor countries hardest
The alternative -mass economic adaptation to a new allocation of resources-is too scary to consider: the end of capitalism would be as bad as the end of the world.
"The people who first saw the climate crisis are at a completely different end: farmers, fishermen, Inuit, indigenous peoples, forest peoples in India, and they have already had to adapt, mainly by moving, finding new livelihoods," Ghosh says. - And indigenous peoples have already survived the end of the world and found ways to survive."
Empire
Ghosh believes it is no coincidence that the limitations of the bourgeois Novel began to take shape at the same time that the West began using fossil fuels to spread its power around the world.

"Climate change is absolutely an aspect of empire&"The British Empire was basically built on fossil fuels: it was the British ownership of coal that gave it a huge military advantage over the rest of the world."
This is also one of the reasons why renewable energy is a threat to a system that the West has spent centuries creating and protecting. "You can be sure of one thing," Ghosh says. "If renewable energy sources were really adopted at scale, it would completely shake up the global political order."He argues that oil and gas should flow through sea transshipment points controlled by the United States, Australia, Great Britain and Canada, which gives them a complete geopolitical advantage.

Power and justice
Looking at it this way, it's not surprising that Western anxiety about climate change is focused on social collapse and extinction. "I think Westerners feel that the whole order is changing in a way that is extremely dangerous for them," Ghosh says.
That is why, in the Eastern Hemisphere, the problem of historical injustice is central to the issue of climate change. "If you go to any Indonesian, or Indian, or Chinese, even to people who are well aware of the climate threat, and tell them: "Why don't you immediately reduce all your emissions?- And what will you hear? The answer is always deeply political, it is: "The West has created this problem, let them give up everything first. This is the terrible dilemma we are in."
Despite all the devastation that climate change is causing in the developing world, it is assumed that when an ecological collapse occurs, the wealth accumulated over the centuries will provide a cushion.
"We are always told that rich countries will adapt better: I don't think that's really the case. I think countries with very complex systems, like the United States and Europe, are much more vulnerable in many ways. Just think about food distribution." body to body massage