Teetering on the Edge - Part II

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

🟢Welcome back. This is Part II of what was initially conceived as a read, think, learn book read. There will be a Part III, to be posted on Friday.

Read Part I here. Thank you for being a part of the conversation. I look forward to more comments ⬇️ and any new thoughts or considerations you might gain with this continuing essay.

Pre-Read Thoughts:

(1) The phrase “shifting climate” is my preferred choice of climate related terms.

(2) Ghosh’s work is the catalyst for this (now very long) essay. As such, his book is an entry point for me to fuse my own tangled thoughts which are still being unraveled. Unless Ghosh is specifically mentioned, assume my opinion and latent interpretation.

(3) Reading The Great Derangement coincided with also reading Philosopher of the Oil Sands, The Seven Masques of Oil, which I will speak about – briefly – in Part III.

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Rusty bee balm

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)

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Choices We Make, Example

I have been working on our front flower bed, a self-made stupidly difficult process. Our neighbor offered bee balm to fill an open space. I grabbed the old man's wagon (this is what I call the four-wheel wagon my husband began using years ago) and a shovel and walked the half mile to my neighbor's house, parked my wagon, dug two healthy size bundles before towing my wagon home. Farm trucks, the ones with big tires, no doubt snarling “f’ing, tree-hugging, Let’s Go Brandon” tirades while I pulled the wagon with rusty color bee balm flowers leaning out the back.

In the middle of my flower bed a beech tree healthy a month ago showed evidence of impending death. It might have been faster to grab a chainsaw but instead I cradled my crosscut and a smaller saw, as back-up, for the felling. It was a small tree.

Two tasks, arguably resolved more quickly with fossil fuels, I instead decided to employ human powered effort and energy. This, a choice. Alternatives are not always this easy and I acknowledge my daily hypocrisy.

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Keeping Up with the Joneses

Reading The Great Derangement is to understand entanglement. A complicated knot so big that it literally functions as a noose around our individual necks. A morass that reminds: if you pull on one strand, the repercussion might well be far distant and unexpected. Our quandary requires collective action to achieve a collective beneficial result. I am not using the term collective loosely. I believe in community, and there exists a role for every individual within the populace.

In the enlightenment of self, we have retreated away from the collective and insulated ourselves in the notion that dangerous incidents won’t happen or affect me. Our morality lies in our individual protection (locked car doors, house alarms/cameras, gated communities, well-paying jobs, best schools, money for groceries). As a byproduct of our righteous irreproachability is a mirage of goodness.

“Keeping up with the Joneses” entered the American lexicon in 1913 through a comic strip by Arthur R. “Pop” Momand. Social climbing, accumulation of material goods, cultural inferiority discourse—the Joneses have been neighbors in conversation since the 1850s. Betterment, because what else should I name this rise of improvement and status, slowly erodes. But what does it erode? Maybe a better query is what doesn’t improvement and status erode? Ghosh writes about a bourgeois mindset. I am in the early stages of considering its insidious results, a destructive oozing depravity.

Improvement has had the unfortunate consequence of bumping into the environment. Stuff that makes our individual lives easier require resources from the land. The more we take from the land the fewer fundamental assets remain. Leftovers are a reduction in the conditions necessary for our species to survive. In a moment of fairness, I am going to give a single humanity pass to later generations—I have previously written about the loss of collective memory. Read this essay The Sea Forgets, But We Must Not: On Shifting Baseline Syndrome from Skylar’s Field Diaries. This is, by far, the most succinct explanation of this generational phenomenon.

This isn’t a pass for excuse, merely acknowledgement that current generations can no way understand that decades ago, it was only on Saturday that we watched cartoons (often with a couple of donuts). Sesame Street and 3-2-1 Contact were summer options, but only in the morning and then we were shushed outside to run wild in the woods that backed our homes. We built worm farms in a cardboard boxes, ate carrots directly from the garden, and felt the leaves, the bark of trees, and the bites of chiggers. In college we had a Brother computer that was simply a glorified typewriter, carried change for the payphone, made a collect call with the wrong name so the family knew we arrived safely from our travels but did not have to pay for the call. We still honored our natural land, place, and connections with outside.

But before that which was my childhood was a different childhood. Probably ones without subdivisions, more farms and small schoolhouses. What about the time before automobiles when a horse was attached to the wagon and chickens fended for themselves in the pecked yard.

And before that?

Not so far removed from those times, I wonder why humans believe an evolution of human practices is unwarranted. We evolved to want improvements and status, so can want seek a new status of improvement? Is it possible that without a shift in mindset our species be conferred the Darwin Award?

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Three Parts: Stories, History, and Politics

Ghosh breaks up The Great Derangement, into three sections.

Part I: Stories

Let me say from the onset, The Great Derangement, is nearly a decade old and storytelling has shifted. More writers are penning meaningful cli-fi (climate-fiction), a literary genre only recognized for about two decades. As such, this section, the largest of the three, is somewhat outdated but its historical relevance is not.

What is the responsibility of a writer? In the opening chapter, Ghosh proclaims,

Let us make no mistake: the climate crisis is also a crisis of culture, and thus of the imagination. (9)

Is there a history of how writing has shifted over the centuries and how might that be significant now, particularly as it relates to the human relationship with a shifting climate? Culturally, there is approval of theatrics, avatars, and super heroes which Ghosh portends should be an inkling that humans are prepared for rare events. Yet, this is not true. Instead, these fictional characters enforce an escapism protocol. I’d argue the scope is too large and unintentionally dissuades. The power is in a single sacrifice for greater good—the do-gooder. Power exists in the imagination to push against struggles and hardships. There is a sense of enlightenment and hope with the characters, yet the hype is make believe. What alienates is a lack of connection or even instinctive awareness of catastrophe.

Through the generations, nature has been pushed far in the background. She is unnoticed. Less real and tangible even as we are each a part of nature, part of an expansive physical world. It is not an exaggerated example to say that a nature experience more often consists of driving the Blue Ridge Parkway and looking out of the window of our vehicle. The air conditioner is on high, the radio is loud, the views passing. Instead of getting out of the vehicle and feeling the hot air or smelling the scent of drying leaves or seeing the ants that walk on the CCC constructed rock border walls, we glance from our seats and drive on until the next lodge where we stop and drink a huckleberry shake while perusing the gift shop.

There was never a time, of course, when the forces of weather and geology did not have a bearing on our lives – but neither has there ever been a time when they have pressed themselves on us with such relentless directness. (62)

Words like improbable or uncanny creep into the reporting of disasters –100-year floods, 1000-year potentials. Phrases like rare events or fluke of chance provide a sanctuary of illusion that the disasters happen to someone else but not me. The improbable is becoming the everyday but again not to me but to someone else.

To the contrary, these highly improbable occurrences are overwhelmingly, urgently, astoundingly real. (27)

It is difficult if not impossible to understand the gravity of the shifting climate when it is easier to believe that the bubbles of insulation will keep the waters from flowing into my neighborhood. How do we talk about lower water levels when water continues to flow from taps? How do we talk about forest diversity with a red sun on a smoky day? Here is an example from our house (we maintain a Tracking the Weather chart). This month (July), to date, we have had 15 days above 85-degrees. There were 12 in 2024, 9 in 2023, and 3 in 2022. We had zero 90-plus-degree days in July 2022 but have had four this year. How does anyone understand rising temperatures if the air conditioner simply runs all day instead of part of the day.

We can talk about it.

We can talk about it through storytelling.

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Novel, as a fictional form, can operate within a self-contained ecosystem and this is Ghosh’s point. Stories should reflect the present and not in the form of non-fiction which can isolate the story to a single person, the writer. In fiction a larger scope setting of the scene is possible. Fiction stories can incorporate the climate and can give attention to what is changing.

This exactly is why “a sense of place” is famously one of the great conjurations of the novel as form. (59)

In the past, novel words have been a pulse of the culture, society expectations and norms, a prod of movements and shifts that change democratic actions and congressional decisions. Writers can move the meter, otherwise the only action is demonstrations with sign waving. Is this true or possible with a shifting climate, that more who are aware can create momentum of action that offers a new status?

As a reminder, the great derangement Ghosh writes of is the future looking backwards. He looks at art, storytelling in particular, as an ill-used effort to confront our humaneness and our blinders to effectuate change.

And when they fail to find them [traces and indicators through art of an altered world], what should they – what can they – do other than to conclude that ours was a time when most forms of art and literature were drawn into the modes of concealment that prevented people from recognizing the realities of their plight? (11)

But to that point, what are the shades of gray in sci-fi and cli-fi and how do books like Ernest Callenbach’s, Ecotopia (1975) or Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1979), even Stephen King’s, The Stand (1978) or Octavia Butler’s, Parable of the Sower (1993) differ from more recent cli-fi novels. Books like Palo Bacigalupi’s, The Water Knife (2015), Barbara Kingsolver’s, Flight Behavior (2012), Lily Brooks-Datton’s, The Light Pirate (2022), or even Kim Stanley Robinson’s, The Ministry for the Future (2022)? I’d argue that there is a forming differential boundary between sci-fi and cli-fi. Each explores distinct shifting aspects, but each is/can be futuristic. One is truth, current, happening with a consequence. One encounters fictitious maybes. Are the distinctions sufficient for a general reader to be interested in cli-fi novels. fictional works, that bring attention to a changing world?

When nature is not inert, when the human/non-human divide is breaking down, when events and actors are no longer confined to slices of place and time, and when the seemingly enclosed and orderly world is interrupted by external, uncanny powers, the modern realist novel is at a loss, unable to represent such a world.¹

Was it Richard Powers, The Overstory (2018) that brought a shift in notice? Flight Behaviors was a finalist for the Orion Book Award, The Overstory won a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. What changed between those years and how has the novel as fiction, with a form of reporting (my thought) impacted, or not, readers? How do writers engage those beyond the demographic of 18–35-year-old, liberal, already concerned about a shifting climate, readers?

Some research is available: The Influence of Climate Fiction, Environmental Humanities, Duke University Press.

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Part II: History

In this section of The Great Derangement (only about 30 pages), Ghosh writes a weary chapter of empire building with capitalism and how a system of layers was structured as a trap, of sorts. For someone like me who likes to believe people are mostly good, the knowledge that comes with a greater understanding of the fossil-fuel economy, how that was led by the West, and its relationship with political power is unsettling in a way that becomes more personally actionable.

… carbon emissions were, from very early on, closely co-related to power in all its aspects: this continues to be a major, although unacknowledged, factor in the politics of contemporary global warming. (109)

Ghosh is not speaking of power as: a source or means of supplying energy but the more sinister power: possession of control, authority, or influence over others.² As such, a shifting climate, he argues, is the outcome of human beings as a species.

To the contrary, it places that argument [global justice and emissions] withing the same contexts as debates about inequality, poverty, and social justice within countries like Britain and the United States: it is to assert that the poor nations of the world are not poor because they were indolent or unwilling; their poverty is itself an effect of the inequities created by the carbon economy; it is the result of systems that were set up by brute force to ensure that poor nations remained always at a disadvantage in terms of both wealth and power. (110)

Our very existence created this current predicament. The insulated worldviews I write about above are tightly woven with continued economic growth. A reliant society that stretches more and more distantly from tightly mingled communities which offer their own sustainable practices and development. From small town main streets, diner conversations, and all hands-on deck for planting and harvesting. From a 25-mile radius of living, family, and relationships to the click of a button to fly thousands of miles distant.

As it relates to power, governments have created an agency whereby despite the knowledge and disregard or even claims of a shifting climate being a hoax, it is more important for governments to not secede the taunt line of power, even if it is at the expense of the individuals within their borders and boundaries.

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Part III: Politics

Here is where I pause. As mentioned above, shortly after reading The Great Derangement, Philosopher of the Oil Sands posted a new essay. I would venture that for many, this essay is too long and too philosophical for reading. I’ve read it twice, listened once and will learn more when I read again. Read it - it will take an hour - or at the very least skim the seven masques and Tuesday I’ll try to finish this very long essay blending The Great Derangement with what the philosopher shares.

The Seven Masques of Oil

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Add to the comment section ⬇️. With enough voices, we can have a conversation about our individual perspectives. Thank you for reading with me.

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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 POWER Definition & Meaning - Merriam-Webster