Below the Radar Transcript
Episode 25: The Great Derangement — with Amitav Ghosh & Olive Dempsey
Speakers: Melissa Roach, Maria Cecilia Saba, Jamie-Leigh Gonzales, Rachel Wong, Am Johal, Olive Dempsey, Amitav Ghosh
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Melissa Roach 0:00
You’re listening to Below the Radar, a knowledge mobilization project recorded out of 312 Main. This podcast is produced by SFU’s Vancity Office of Community Engagement.
Maria Cecilia Saba 0:17
Below the Radar brings forward ideas to encourage meaningful exchanges across communities.
Jamie-Leigh Gonzales 0:21
Each episode we interview guests on topics ranging from environmental and social justice, arts, culture, community building, and urban issues. This podcast is recorded on the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples.
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Rachel Wong 0:43
Hello, I’m Rachel Wong and thank you for joining us on Below the Radar. This week, we are joined by Amitav Ghosh. Amitav, who is from India, is the author of a number of books, including The Great Derangement. This book was the focus of a talk that he gave as part of the 2019 Indian Summer Festival. In this episode, our host Am Johal along with special guest host Olive Dempsey dive into climate change and examine the different sides of it along with Amitav. Together, they talk about how the climate crisis goes beyond science, the relationship between movement, displacementments, and climate change, and how denying that climate change exists is actually something that is particularly potent in the Anglosphere.
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Am Johal 1:34
Delighted that you could join us on Below the Radar. We have our guest Amitav Ghosh with us this morning, and he’ll be speaking later tonight as part of the Indian Summer Festival on his book The Great Derangement. And we also have with us the host of Big Bright Dark podcast, Olive Dempsey. Welcome Olive.
Olive Dempsey 1:51
Hello, thanks for having me.
Am Johal 1:53
Amitav, just delighted that you could take the time to meet with us this morning, and I really enjoyed reading your book The Great Derangement. Really made me think about a lot of things in terms of my own research and writing as well, but I feel like you captured the big questions in a really interesting way. You start off the book saying that your family were ecological refugees long before the word was invented. Can you share some of your family’s story of displacement in the 19th century?
Amitav Ghosh 2:23
Well first of all, thank you very much Am, thank you Olive, for inviting me to be here, it’s a great pleasure to be here speaking with you today. My family is originally from Bangladesh, and as you know, Bangladesh, it’s ecologically very unsettled in the sense that, you know, it’s a deltaic region - it’s one of the biggest deltas in the world - it’s a delta formed by the confluence of the Ganges and the Brahmaputra, and you know, it’s this vast, deltaic region with thousands of rivers, which constantly in times of inundation they change course. And the story that my father told me about our family was that in the 1850s, a river changed course and basically drowned the village that we were originally from. So from that time onwards, my family started travelling, you know, they started moving eastwards and so on. And they ultimately ended up, I think, about maybe three, four hundred to the west of where they’d been. But you know it sort of inaugurated a pattern of movement which really went on and on for ages. I think you’ll find that, you know, when families are displaced in that way, the movements tend to echo down the generations, you know. So for example, in my generation, my cousins are sort of everywhere, including Vancouver.
Olive Dempsey 3:45
I’m curious about this link around displacement in the Anglosphere. You talk about denialism and the Anglosphere being particularly acute in your book, and there’s something that I think a lot about in terms of the Anglosphere in what we call North America in particular, which is populated with the exception of an Indigenous communities, by folks who are living the echoes of displacement through varying generations, and I’m just curious what are the links between this kind of inability to grapple with the climate crisis and the displacement that we’re all living with the echoes of somehow.
Amitav Ghosh 4:20
Well, the point that I make in my book is that it’s actually an empirical thing, I mean, it’s actually been shown that this whole idea of denial or climate denial is very much linked to the English language. It tends to be particularly strong in English speaking countries, and it tends to be particularly strong in, how should we say, the settler colonial countries. You know, most of all in the US, in Canada, in Australia - not so much in New Zealand, I think, but these three countries, it’s a very powerful thing. This whole extractivist economy was really pioneered by America. I think, you know, when you look at the whole history of what has brought us to this particular moment in time, the real sort of inflection point was the discovery of the Americas, because most of all it was the discovery of the Americas, it was the availability of the Americas, if you’d like, that gave rise to this ideology of what’s called ‘cornucopianism’, you know, somehow the idea that there would always be more and more and more and more, and that ideology is now so deeply rooted in people, and it’s not just here, it’s everywhere now, because America really made it their national mission to carry this ideology to the rest of the world and they succeeded: in India, in China, people are now thinking in much the same way. And so, this ideology is just so powerful and also so attractive, I mean, we’d all like to believe that there’s more and more and more and more, you know, that it’s hard to get rid of, really. It’s hard to know what we could put in its place.
Am Johal 5:54
You write that the accumulation of carbon is re-writing the destiny of the Earth, of its past and its present, and in terms of the title of the book as well, you observe that the climate crisis is also a crisis of culture and some sense, arts and culture literature in particular has been challenged by this question and in fact, in many ways, has left out discussing or thinking about the climate. Wondering if you could talk a little more about this.
Amitav Ghosh 6:23
One of the sort of really weird things that’s happened in relation to our climate crisis today is that it’s always framed as an issue of science and technology. Scientists have done very, very important work in alerting us to what’s happening. But they are just the messengers, you know? I mean it’s, in some sense, what lies behind this climate crisis is really culture. It’s a pattern of desire, it’s a pattern of wanting. And all of that comes from culture, really. I mean, just to give you one example, the internal combustion engine isn’t just a machine, you know - I mean, it is a machine, but it’s much more than that. Attached to it is this enormous nebula, if you’d like, of desires, of imagery, all of that. So, for example, if you ask someone, especially in North America, “what does freedom mean to you?”, the image that they’ll usually provide is one of being on a car on a vast empty road, or on a motorcycle on this empty road going off into nowhere. Think about what a curious idea of freedom this is, because on the one hand your idea of freedom is tethered to fossil fuels, on the other hand you’re driving it down a road that someone made for you already, you know, with presumably somebody’s taxes, et cetera. So in what way does that suggest any kind of freedom? If anything, it suggests exactly the opposite. It’s those kinds of confusions, really, that to me suggested this title The Great Derangement.
Olive Dempsey 7:51
It strikes me too, in the example that you just gave around the image of a car being driven, that it’s also a freedom that is alone, that it’s a freedom of the individual and that was something that came through so clearly to me in your book, was talking about, I think you used the phrase ‘individualizing imaginary in which we are trapped’. And that shows up even in how we can conceive of our own response to the climate crisis, that somehow we still can only conceive of it or for many, many folks, living in the Anglosphere in particular, the only pathway we have is to imagine that we, you know, are going to quote “be the change we wish to see.” I’m wondering if you can speak a little bit about what you might envision or what you see as another way that does not hold us bound by the individualizing imaginary in our responses to the climate crisis.
Amitav Ghosh 8:39
It’s the great triumph of neoliberalism that it succeeded in persuading us that all issues ultimately are issues of consumerism, so that’s really what it’s become in the minds of so many people, especially in the Anglosphere but actually throughout the west, and now even in India. The whole climate thing becomes almost automatically an idea in relation to what you consume, what you buy, et cetera - this entire way of thinking of this crisis, to me, really represents a catastrophic failure, because - not that individual decisions aren’t important, of course they’re important, if nothing else, and at least foregrounding the problem in our minds - but there’s no way that you can actually tackle this issue in that individualistic way, because you know, even to present it in that way is a concealment. For example, if you look at the individual carbon footprint, you’ll see thousands of them on the net. They always break the carbon footprint down into, let’s say, transportation, into meat, what you eat…
Olive Dempsey 9:44
Having children!
Amitav Ghosh 9:46
Having children, entertainment, et cetera. But what this completely obscures is that 25% of greenhouse gas emissions in most advanced countries is produced by the defence sector. Where in that individual carbon footprint is that accounted for? So actually, you know, you’re just concealing that entire reality, which you and I, though individual choice can do nothing to affect. What does it mean to solarize a house if you don’t actually have a grid in which you can feed it? You know, in so many ways, these are collective decisions, there’s nothing you can do about that. Or the fact that, you know, when you go into a supermarket everything you buy is wrapped in plastic and then you have to get yet more plastic to put it into, I mean you go to the farmers’ market and you’re weighing your things in plastic, I mean what’s the point of it? Bangladesh banned this kind of single-use plastic years ago, you know? And here in North America it’s still considered normal to live like that. Again, you know, what is the imagery that lies behind plastic? I mean you think about it: I mean, when you go to a farmers’ market and buy some vegetables. Of course when you get back home you’re going to wash it! So what is it, I mean what does this plastic signify? Some idea of purity or neatness or whatever? And actually, you think about what it is, it’s anything but pure or neat or anything! And you know, the really terrible thing is how powerful this imagery and this culture is. In India, even 4, 5 years ago if you went to the market, you didn’t have to be imbricated with plastic in so many ways. But now it’s inescapable, it’s everywhere!
Am Johal 11:27
You make a distinction in the book between capitalism and the empire in your critique of the climate crisis, and you write of the rise of Asian economies and standards of living, and you write, “What we have learned from this experiment is that patterns of life that modernity and genders can only be practiced by a small minority. These patterns of living can’t be adopted by everyone: Every family can’t have two cars, a washing machine and a refrigerator because humanity would asphyxiate. The period of the great acceleration coincides with the period of decolonization.” I mean, that sentence hits you like a sucker punch, in a way, in terms of how you capture what’s happened in certainly the second part of the 20th century into the present, and so how do we think about this problem of empire and how do we distinguish it from capitalism?
Amitav Ghosh 12:18
I think most theorists would say there’s no difference, empire and capitalism are the same thing. I actually don’t buy that. I don’t think empire and capitalism are the same thing. We know of forms of capitalism which were not as carbon intensive as extractive settler colonial capitalism, you know? For example, it’s been shown repeatedly that, say, East Asian capitalism - that is Korean and Japanese capitalism - was actually not resource intensive, it was labour intensive capitalism. So I don’t think capitalism is just one thing, it is a number of different things. But the fact that the dominant model of capitalism today is the Anglo-American model. How can you remove that from the considerations of empire and the considerations of power? It was because Britain was so dominant that it managed to force this ideology upon the rest of the world! But more than that, you know, climate change - one of the IPCC authors said recently, “Climate change is fundamentally a problem of inequality. It’s a problem of injustice.” It’s a problem of injustice in this way that a very small change in the per capita footprint of basically Asians and Africans, that you know, they expanded their per capita footprint very, very slightly, which means that they grew slightly richer, if you’d like - if indeed we consider consumerism the equivalent of wealth, that they grew slightly more consumerist, if you’d like. And that happened in these last 30 years, and that’s exactly when half the greenhouse gases which are in the atmosphere were put there in the last 30 years, and it’s exactly this change that brought it about. At this point, inequality, injustice are absolutely fundamental to climate change! I think those people we call climate denialists, I don’t think they are denialists at all! They know perfectly well what the problem is, they know that perfectly well. Basically what their attitude is that those people are there, climate change is going to hit them, they’re going to suffer, they’re going to perish, and that will solve the problem on its own. We mustn’t imagine that those people don’t have a plan: they do have a plan, and this is the plan. They actually want to accelerate climate change because they think it will take care of the problem by killing lots of people. That’s fundamentally it.
Olive Dempsey 14:43
It’s a sobering framing of what’s happening and of the trajectory that we’re on, and I’m imagining sitting with that possibility, and I think even that to me, that speaks to the fundamental question that you’re working through in the book which is one of our imagination, our individual and our collective imagination, and the role that that plays in our ability to conceive of what’s happening and it strikes me that what you’ve just share around the trajectory we’re on is an intentional one for some folks, that that in and unto itself is a hard thing to imagine in that it pushes us to… what am I saying here? I think what I’m feeling into in this, is that one of the narratives, the dominant narratives, along with endless progress and limitless growth and all that is that so-called democratic capitalism has the world’s best interests at heart, right? I mean certainly as someone who was raised in ‘white lady going to school in Canada’, that’s certainly the story that we were fed, that what we’re living is best for the world, right? And I know that’s not the case, and I guess what I’m hearing is another call to completely re-imagine how we understand ourselves in the world and how we understand the shape of the world, kind of in the same way that you call, I think in the book, on us to re-imagine our relationship to Earth and Earth’s forces and catastrophe and scale of change and our own vulnerability. So this isn’t really a question, but it’s more what I’m hearing when I hear your reflections on the systemic forces that are pushing us towards increasing chaos.
Amitav Ghosh 16:11
You know, I know that what I am saying is a very dark and terrible thing, and it’s hard for us to reckon with it. But yet in our hearts I think we all know that this is the case, which is not to say that there aren’t many, many people who are profoundly well intentioned who wish nothing but well in relation to the world. And certainly those are the young activists who go out in the streets who are striving as hard as they can. What you just said, that democratic capitalism essentially, that we assume that it has the world’s best interests at heart, I think it’s exactly that assumption that prevents us, sometimes, from actually recognizing what stares us in the face, this kind of assumption. And if you actually ask yourself, if democratic capitalism or its forebearers actually had the world’s best interests at heart, why would you have had what happened to Indigenous populations in the New World? Why would have had slavery, why would you have had imperialism? Why would you have had, I mean, despite democratic capitalism, inequality is greater in the world than ever in human history! How do we reconcile these things? So sometimes, I do feel that our kind of assumptions about liberal good will really are very misleading, if you like. And the curious thing is that if you look at religious traditions, if you look at, say, Catholicism or you look at Hinduism or Islam or Buddhism or whatever, they never make these kinds of, as it were, ‘cheerful assumptions’ about human nature or about human beings. In all religious traditions, there is a profound reckoning of the evil that is inherent in human beings, and religion is fundamentally in so many ways an attempt to as it were both recognize and master this capacity for wrongdoing, isn’t it? And I think when we make those assumptions that people only wish each other well or whatever, I think we really need to re-think that. Because we know that really the only sustainable lifestyles actually are those of Ethiopian and Bangladeshi villages, who lead very, very simple lives. You tell me, if you went out in the street here and even spoke to the most well-meaning person you could find and say “Are you willing to lead that life?”, what do you think they’re going to say? And they may not be willing to accept it, but in fact they’ll fight to keep it.
Am Johal 18:47
Near the end of the book, you do a close reading of two texts: the Paris Agreement and Pope Francis’ encyclical on the climate crisis. And you’ve referred to the giddy virtuosity of the Paris Agreement, you know, the back-slapping diplomats coming to agreement, that really connected with me clearly. And you talk about the possibilities of mobilizing the best sides of organized religion in the fight for climate justice. Organized religion has also been involved, historically, in the project of empire too. So how do you reconcile the possibilities of organized religion in terms of scaling up to fight for climate justice in the moral ways that you speak about, but also with the legacy of its colonial past, particularly in its relationships to Indigenous communities?
Amitav Ghosh 19:35
You know when I was writing this book in 2016 was when the IPCC report came out, and it was also when Pope Francis’ Laudato Si came out. And naturally I read both. And you know, I’m not a technological expert, I don’t have those kinds of skills. But I can read, you know, I’m a writer. So I can read. And it’s actually so interesting to apply, as it were, the tools of rhetoric - really classical rhetoric, if you’d like - to these two texts, because I think they’re deeply revelatory. You know, just the rhetoric is, and we’re humans, we live in language. What we say really often is what we are. And if you read those two texts together, it’s very, very striking. I mean, the climate agreement, the Paris Climate Agreement, is completely a closed text. You can see that they’re addressing basically technocrats. The whole intention of it, almost the whole intention of it is to obscure what it is! To reserve it, if you’d like - to reserve this problem for a group of technocrats and bureaucrats. I mean, it has such bizarre sorts of verbiage, for example, it has these clauses where it says “climate champions will be appointed”. What’s a climate champion? Who’s going to appoint them, you know? You know it’s going to be some big bureaucrat somewhere, you know. So, I mean, it’s a completely sealed text. I’m not saying that it has no value - of course, it has the value of bringing together a very large number of people. But we know that in the discussions, many billionaires et cetera were involved whereas activists were kept off the streets by very well planned operations whereby they locked up, what was it, they put under house arrest 40 environmental activists? How did they even know to do that, you know? It just makes you wonder.
Amitav Ghosh 21:28
Whereas with the Pope’s text, the rhetoric of it is so completely different. It’s written in the simplest language, it puts the issues very, very simply, even though we know that the Pope was assisted a very stellar panel of scientists and activists and so on, including your very own Naomi Klein. So you know, that’s the extraordinary thing: very complex ideas, who puts into the simplest of words. As opposed to the Paris Agreement, Laudato Si is a text that’s striving to open itself, you know? And I do think that it comes from the Pope’s Jesuit background, you know. He’s been out there meeting poor people, and he knows that something he says, as Pope, will go into the poorest houses. So simply through that, that text, he’s able to reach 1.2 billion Catholics, but apart from that, simply by power of example, he reaches so many more! So I do think that Laudato Si is, I would say, the most important thing written on this subject. You know, both as a text that is explaining and a text that is performative in the sense that it puts into action certain acts, if you’d like. So I do think it’s a very, very powerful text. Can religions actually, are they capable of solving or addressing this issue, who’s to say? But we know that the secular world has completely failed also. I mean, its failure is everyday more evident. So what can you say? At this point, we’ve exhausted all human resources.
Olive Dempsey 23:02
Except the sacred, I mean that’s one of the pieces that really, like when I was reading the book, I had the parts that I bracketed, the parts that I underlined, the parts that I starred, in this sort of order of ‘this really jumps out at me!’ And you have a line towards the end around, and it circles back to - and this is one of the things that I starred - it circles back to what you were speaking to earlier around limits, right, and how painful it can be in our current context, I guess, of affluence, of Western affluence, to quote unquote “give up” what we have and what we have that gives us so much meaning, and links so much to our identity and sense of worth and all of that. And so you talk about one of the pieces of work that needs to happen is to come into contact with our own limits and that part of what might support us to do that is a relationship with the sacred. And so I’d love to hear more about that, and in particular what you mean by the sacred and also in the context of those folks who do live very secular lives or for whom an organized religious response might not be a place where they feel at home but that they also do something about the sacred experience does feel like a longing for them. I would just love to hear your thoughts on that.
Amitav Ghosh 24:07
I wish I could lay it all out in a…
Olive Dempsey 24:11
I’d like a ten step plan, please!
Amitav Ghosh 24:12
...coherent way. But look, in the first place we do know that the idea of limits, it has to be axiomatic. You can’t necessarily establish it discursively, and in that axiomatic way, it has to be...what other word can we use but a sense of the sacred? And it is actually the case, that all sacred traditions speak of holding yourself in. As opposed to that, you have the idea of, greed is good, of the self-maximizing individual, which is the ideology of contemporary economics! We now know that if we were all to maximize to the best of our abilities, what would happen to this planet? But in fact, this is the ideology that has come to prevail. When I speak of this sacred or whatever, personally speaking you know, I’m not thinking at all about organized religion and so on, because one of the really sad things that’s actually happened is that all religions today - especially the very successful, politicized religions - they’ve internalized a certain kind of capitalist ethic, you know, which perhaps started with Protestantism but which has now entered really the mainstream. For example, you look at the ideologies of a person like Erdoğan, the leader of Turkey. On the one hand he calls himself a very devout Muslim, on the other hand, he’s all about promoting growth, promoting capitalism. You see the same thing happening with certain kinds of Buddhism, with certain kinds of Hinduism. I mean in fact, these have all become, as it were, these ideologies have all become effects of modernity, effects of a certain kind of capitalist modernity! Where do we today look for the alternatives? And I think this is another way in which the new world is so important, I think, to our thinking on this. Because I think, really, we have to look at the ideas and ideologies of the first peoples of the Americas and Australia, you know? And personally for myself, I find that this is the only rewarding way to think: to look at how the Indigenous peoples of the New World are really conceived of, what it means to live in this world. If you think of the end of the world - that we are, sort of, increasingly forced to think about - it is also true that the Indigenous peoples actually lived through the end of their world and they found ways of surviving. I think they have so much to teach us.
Am Johal 26:39
Yeah, there’s 370 million Indigenous people in the world, and when you look at the UN reports and the collective organizing that’s going on in terms standing in the way of extractive development, it’s not just a theoretical idea in many ways, it’s a pragmatic one in terms of figuring out a different way that this could be possible. I was going to also ask you, you have a new book out right now as well that’s a work of fiction, and I’m wondering if you can tell us a little bit about that because it’s not yet available in Canada, as far as I know.
Amitav Ghosh 27:08
No, it’s not yet out in Canada. But something you said earlier, I just want to refer to that. There are hundreds of millions of Indigenous peoples around the world, and they are doing a great deal to sort of confront these issues, especially of extractivism, if you’d like. But you know, I do think that the Indigenous peoples of the Americas and Australia have a special position in relation to how we think about these issues, you know? Because the Indigenous peoples of the Old World, even those that were not literate, lived in the presence of literacy. And I think literacy in some way creates a different relationship with the world, and I find it very interesting. I don’t know if you’ve read this book called The Falling Sky. It’s the memoirs of a Yanomami Shaman, and it’s a sort of collaborative effort - I mean, the book resulting from his collaboration with a French anthropologist. It’s a very, very interesting book. But he points out repeatedly that it’s the marks on leather he calls it, as far as I remember, the marks on leather that prevent you from seeing in the ways in which the Yanomami see. There’s a great treasure there in the sense of how do we see differently? How do we look at things differently? And that’s where I feel, you know, it’s a particular thing that the Indigenous traditions of the New World can teach us, you know? I mean it’s not just a question of the politics, it’s also a question of the metaphysics, if you’d like.
Am Johal 28:37
Yeah, there was a book written in the early ‘70s by a really important Indigenous leader in Canada named George Manuel, and he was doing a lot of international solidarity work, and it was published as The Fourth World, which was to make a distinction between the First, Second, and Third, but also a different way of looking at the relationship to land. And it’s just been re-printed, finally, because the publisher had gone out of print, and University of Minnesota Press just put it out again and it has a foreword by Glen Coulthard, who’s a really important decolonization scholar here. But what you just said made me think of that book which is a beautifully written book from the early ‘70s and is finally beginning to recirculate now.
Amitav Ghosh 29:14
Yeah actually, there’s a lot of interesting work coming out now, including one on the Yukon - I mention that because it’s not far from here - It’s called… something like Do Glaciers [Listen]. Because the Indigenous people, the Tlingit and the Kwanlin Dün actually believe that glaciers do speak, and that they are entities, that is, they are agents. And I think this is really the thing that we are waking up to, you know? All these aspects of agency that surround us, to which we have become blind. But only now that they are actually striking us in the face that we realize that we were ones that were blind and deaf.
Olive Dempsey 29:54
I feel like I could say more, I could ask more, I’m mindful of our time and of your time. So I actually might leave it there, I think it’s a beautiful, beautiful closing. And maybe I’ll just say that I appreciate that we have a writer speaking about the ways that literacy and reading the written word might itself be a challenge to our ability to respond to this time, and I am hearing, in what you are saying a guess, a kind of call to get out from behind books and to be and experience and to use all our senses to show up, to build new capacities in ourselves.
Amitav Ghosh 30:27
Yes, I think we really reached a moment where our critique can’t just be about the systems that are in the world, but also about the systems that are within ourselves.
Am Johal 30:40
Thank you so much for joining us.
Amitav Ghosh 30:43
Thank you Olive, thank you Am, it was a real pleasure.
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Rachel Wong 30:52
Thank you again to Amitav Ghosh for joining us on this episode of Below the Radar. To learn more about Amitav and his book The Great Derangement, you can go to his website, amitavghosh.com. We’ve put a link to that in the episode discussion. If you missed Amitav’s talk back in July, not to worry! There is a link to a video where you can watch and re-watch it in our Knowledge Mobilization A/V Gallery. Thank you also to Olive Dempsey for co-hosting this episode of Below the Radar. As mentioned, she joins us from the podcast Big Bright Dark, which you can find on Soundcloud and Apple Podcasts. As always, many thanks to this team that puts this podcast together. Our production team which includes myself and Maria Cecilia Saba. Davis Steele is the composer for our theme music, and of course, thanks to you for listening. We’ll catch you next time on Below the Radar.
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