Teetering on the Edge - Part I

what I learned from reading Amitav Ghosh's, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable.

🟢What should have been a simple read, think, learn fell off the rails and morphed into a more complex essay in excess of 3000 words. Thus, I decided to break up this post into two parts. The second segment will tunnel into the depths of the book itself on Tuesday. First though, take a bit of time to consider the quote at the near bottom of this essay and add your thoughts in the comments. (UPDATE: this essay has stretched into three parts.)

Andrew Shutes-David

wrote in a note earlier this week, “Hi! I think it's cool how your writing seems to flow both from the land and from the literature you consume.” I paused to consider his words before realizing he was noticing something I had been unable to define. My writing is shifting and learning from great environmental writers is feeding my interest. Thank you, Andrew.

---

Book Citation: Ghosh, Amitav. The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable. University of Chicago Press, 2016.

Genre: Environmental

Pages: 196 (31 pages are Notes)

---

teetering on the edge

I have a terrible practice of not reading about a book before reading a book. My consideration being that I do not want to be swayed with an expectation based upon another’s interpretation. Often, I do not even read the book jacket, which can quite often be vague or misrepresent. This is problematic—it is too hot for dense summer reading. I am sure there exists an unspoken rule that demands summer be light reading—romance novels (you know, the most popular genre), or fantasy, even satire.

My Goodreads account counts 45 books on my Want to Read list. The numerated list in the notes section of my phone has 60 books. There is another list mostly forgotten, tucked into a red folder that I rarely open which I know is multiple typed pages. Books I believed at one time important enough to read. Reading is learning and thinking about what the author is telling. Reading broadens my scope of the world and provides a sense of enlightenment.

Books fall into divisions of my reading responsibility. A continuum with the far-left being casual reading and the far-right, research.

• no notes, just read

• occasional jotted quotes in my calendar (I have a big paper calendar /to do book) that are meaningful that I might continue to ponder or simply forget

• read with notebook and pen in hand to scribble research type details (quotes/relationships/theme/lines with arrows, boxes and squares) that I will likely refer to and then later forget

Very often, I read with pen in hand because it requires me to slow down and focus, process what I am learning.

Too frequently, I jump from one recommendation to another. Simply a referenced work in a chapter paragraph can shove me down a rabbit hole of reads. This is how I came to read Amitav Ghosh’s, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable.

---

This month has been a teetering on the edge of an environmental emotional tumble. I am seeking air but maybe the secret bridge only observable at the right angle and with a toss of magical pixie dust Indiana Jones style. Between Elif Shafak’s, There Are Rivers in the Sky; Robert Macfarlane’s, Is A River Alive; and Craig Child’s, The Wild Dark: Finding the Night Sky in the Age of Light, I’m in a quandary, “What to do?” in how to use words that inspire knowledge and attention. I dipped my toe into this mire with my most recent post - 031 - barrenness, as a state of mind. What I am feeling is a little push in the small of my back, but my feet are tangled, and my mind is not yet understanding where to go, what to explore, how to communicate with a different aspect. Moreso, I stumble because I can’t quite move past the larger environmental query: does/will, my effort to make a difference matter? Which is the point, and one that is the crux of The Great Derangement—an (almost) individual powerlessness to do different.

---

defining Anthropocene

For the purpose of this read, think, learn discussion of Amitav’s, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable here is a good baseline understanding of the term Anthropocene:

“Anthropocene” is not simply altering particular environments, ecosystems, or landscapes, but an irreversible rupture of the Earth system itself, the overshoot of the planetary boundaries that had provided a “safe operating space for humanity.”¹

---

the distant looking to present - the environment/global warming/climate change/climate disaster/climate crisis/climate breakdown/climate shift

Might part of the derangement (as a term) to collectively consider (as a species) that a shifting climate is a problem, rest with the myriad of changing names intended to provide the public with a simple description of what is happening in the earthly environment? Hold that thought, it is a query for another time.

As it pertains to this book, derangement is the distant looking backwards and the wonderment if in our current time we are in fact deranged (i.e. foolish, demented, cracked, brainsick) with lack of action. This is the derangement Ghosh speaks of with a forward to back interrogation. What generations in the future might think having the knowledge we so blindly ignore and do little to change actions related to a shifting climate. Derangement is the human inability, or is it unwillingness, to grasp the magnitude of our current warming, our rising seas, our modification of earth (a planet that is 4.5 billion years old). Is our derangement irrational because of self-blinders in all but the sense of wearing a mask over our eyes in the dark so that we sleep better, or the hands we wrap around our face to shield what is offensive in our periphery?

The term derangement², as a verb is: to disturb the operation or functions of, disarrange, or to make mentally unsound. I do not like this word choice and for the reasons that likely make this word the proper word as chosen by Ghosh. In the notes section of the book, Ghosh refers to Fredrik Albritton Jonsson³, a historian –

if we consider the transgression of the “planetary boundaries that are necessary to maintain the Earth system ‘in a Holocene-like state’ … our current age of fossil fuel abundance resembles nothing so much as a giddy binge rather than a permanent achievement of human ingenuity.” (166)

---

I’m too scattered to offer significant structure in this essay, which is not a review of the book (though there is that), but a larger framing of how a shifting climate is perceived by the general public. What I hope is this two-part essay is a north point, a single bearing to assess your own environmental rootedness. I teeter because there exist unpleasant connections which I would like to explore and am taking you with me.

Before reflecting my own thoughts, ponder this quote. It is attributed to U Thant, who was the secretary-general of the United Nations from 1962 to 1971.

As we watch the sun go down, evening after evening, through the smog across the poisoned waters of our native earth, we must ask ourselves seriously whether we really wish some future universal historian on another planet to say about us: 'With all their genius and with all their skill, they ran out of foresight and air and food and water and ideas,' or, 'They went on playing politics until their world collapsed around them.' (113)

I might very well be speaking to the choir, but I want to know your thoughts on this quote. It might be a single word or a dissertation. Add to the comment section ⬇️. With enough voices, we can have a conversation about our individual views. That might have an impact on a different perspective after reading the second part of this read, think, learn—because I suspect it might get a bit uncomfortable. It already is for me.

🟢 Read Part II here.

---

notes and references

¹ Citing footnote - JAS Round Table on Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable | The Journal of Asian Studies | Cambridge Core. Hamilton, Clive, “The Anthropocene as Rupture,” Anthropocene Review 3, no. 2 (2016): 93–106, doi:10.1177/2053019616634741 Google Scholar; Rockström, Johan et al. , “Planetary Boundaries: Exploring the Safe Operating Space for Humanity,” Ecology and Society 14, no. 2 (2009)Google Scholar. Rockström et al. have developed the idea of nine critical planetary boundaries or thresholds that should not be crossed related to (1) climate change, (2) ocean acidification, (3) stratospheric ozone depletion, (4) the biochemical flow in nitrogen and phosphorus cycles, (5) freshwater overusage, (6) changes in land use, (7) biodiversity loss, (8) atmospheric aerosol loading, and (9) chemical pollution. The term “Anthropocene” encompasses rapid environmental changes on all these levels. See also Rockström, Johan et al. , “A Safe Operating Space for Humanity,” Nature 461 (September 24, 2009): 472–75 Google Scholar. This research was updated in Steffen, Will et al. , “Planetary Boundaries: Guiding Human Development on a Changing Planet,” Science 347, no. 6223 (February 13, 2015), doi:10.1126/science.1259855 Google Scholar.

² DERANGEMENT Definition & Meaning - Merriam-Webster

³ “The Origins of Cornucopianism: A Preliminary Genealogy,” Critical Historical Studies, Spring 201, 151)