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THE GREAT DERANGEMENT
Climate Change and the Unthinkable
Amitav Ghosh
Penguin Random House
275 pages; Rs 399
Prime Minister Narendra Modi's government celebrated the fact that India secured the principle of climate justice in the Paris climate change agreement. Few people chose to fact-check that chest-beating statement. It must be said, though, that most of those who are paid to either decipher or build the conversation on climate change can be declared innocent of the act of reading the text of the global agreement. Most of those who did read it appear to have eschewed the need to scrutinise such bold statements or comment on it.
Amitav Ghosh has read the agreement. In one section of his three-part essay, The Great Derangement, he notes, "There is only one mention of the word 'justice' in the text and that too in a clause that is striking for the care with which it is worded: the preamble to the Annex merely takes note of the "importance for some of the concept of 'climate justice' when taking action to address climate change." The scare quotes that bracket the phrase 'climate justice' and the description of the concept as being important only for some amount to nothing less than an explicit disavowal of the concept."
He says what every insider to the climate negotiations has known since the day the hammer was gavelled on the Agreement in a Parisian airport hangar.
Debunking more fallacies that the myth makers of climate change have sold to the world, he writes, "But an implicit disavowal occurs much earlier, in one of the few passages in the text that is pellucid with clarity: 'the Agreement does not involve or provide a basis for any liability or compensation'. With these words the Agreement forever strips the victims of climate change of all possible claims to legal recompense for their losses; they will have to depend instead on the charity of a fund that developed nations have agreed to set up."
These two razor-sharp observations and candid assessments are not the reason to go out and buy his book. Mr Ghosh's essay has far more enriching lessons that will outlast many governments and perhaps even the Paris Agreement.
Mr Ghosh creates a fabric out of threads drawn from all the themes that must be part of a complete conversation on climate change - science to history, politics to ethics, personal to the communitarian, literature to geopolitics. He begins with a query: If climate change is the biggest challenge humanity faces, why has art and literature failed to capture the discourse on the subject? That question raises more pertinent issues: Why have global politics and humanity at large failed to respond to the urgency that climate change demands and why are the solutions limited to treating the symptoms, not the ailment?
Mr Ghosh is not the first to try to answer these questions. But he excels by deploying personal narratives to sharpen the reader's focus on remote ideas. He prods history, science, economics and contemporary politics to divulge answers, revealing new nuggets of information and, importantly, providing contextual illumination for the facts.
One need not agree with all his conclusions but they make the reader consider questions that were previously side-stepped or not thought of. He dwells deeply on the consequences of the economic and political forces that have segregated human beings from nature and made the latter a subject of governance by the other. He posits the questions of inter-generational inequity against existing inequity among nation states and how the two argue with each other to produce the stalemate in which we live.
He highlights the phrases that are never uttered aloud at formal climate negotiations or fancy conferences and yet everyone whispers -- the capture of global resources and neo-colonialism. The last one who raised the spectre was the Sudanese negotiator Lumumba Di-Aping at Copenhagen in 2009, never to be seen again at the negotiations.
In his intellectual storm surge, some of Mr Ghosh's ideas could each spin off into new philosophical inquiries into environmentalism. He talks of this false and evasive tactic by many to pitch personal moral and civic responsibility of the individual as the alternative to governments undertaking structural reforms to address climate change. Have you not heard this perpetual pitch to school children: plant a tree to save the planet? Have you not smirked at the government turning the Swachh Bharat Mission into a campaign about individual cleanliness taking focus away from the government's own investments in sewage and municipal waste systems? Mr Ghosh trashes this palliative approach with a lucidity that is the hallmark of this essay.
He falters at only a few steps. Most are not significant enough to mention. One is. After reading the Paris agreement like few have, like most of us who write on the subject, he too fails to see that the Paris agreement was a sleight of hand - that 198 countries came together and supplanted the original UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, claiming the agreement was to ensure the implementation of this very mother convention. The deceit was necessary to reflect the changed world economic order without acknowledging it. Mr Ghosh's essay is all about acknowledging the profound changes human society and economy have undergone to reach the age of "The Great Derangement". So one misses the lack of this particular reference in a book that has more than 50 pages of end notes.
Mr Ghosh does not present a power point primer on climate change such as Al Gore's The Inconvenient Truth. He presents a philosopher's guide to the subject. The moment you feel the primers are cheating you, and one usually does rather quickly, buy the book.
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