Even as the recent floods in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana have started receding, the deadly impacts of climate change are unlikely to diminish any time soon.
With a population of 1.4 billion, of which more than 800 million are classified as being poor, India is now the third largest emitter of carbon dioxide or CO2 in the world, after China and the United States.
A recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report has warned that India is on the verge of a climate catastrophe.
What is being reported as the country’s worst-ever landslide in Wayanad district in Kerala that killed hundreds of people, as well as the extreme heatwave that has hit several northern states during this summer suggests that India appears to be soon approaching the tipping point of passing the 1.5 degrees celsius threshold set by the Paris Climate Change Agreement in 2015.
Yet, the Narendra Modi government appears to have largely ignored the unfolding catastrophic crisis brought about by climate change.
Known for allegedly investing substantial funds for short-term electoral gains while fostering “crony capitalism” based on energy-intensive projects, little wonder that so far there has been a lack of a coordinated nationwide climate strategy.
Even the Opposition parties appear to remain silent on the life-and-death struggles being faced by the poor due to the impact of climate change, including growing health problems.
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“We like fighting each other, we are also kind to each other; we like making alliances, we like our divisions,” says Dipesh Chakrabarty, the renowned Indian historian known for his seminal work in postcolonial theory and subaltern studies.
“But this (Anthropocene) requires us to act together on a particular planetary calendar, and I think that’s the challenge,” says Chakrabarty, in an interview with this correspondent, atPayot bookshop in Geneva, Switzerland.
His latest book, titled The Climate of History in a Planetary Age, translated into French, was awarded the prestigious 46th European Essay Prize (EEP) in Lausanne on 28 August.
A year ago, Arundhati Roy also received the same prize for her book Azadi: Liberte. Fascisme, Fiction (AZADI: Fascism, Fiction & Freedom in the Time of the Virus), also translated into French.
The jury of the EEP concluded that Chakrabarty’s book “provides a better understanding of our era and our responsibility in this world of climatic change.”
It offers a thorough assessment of the planetary approach while enabling a new perception of “time, and therefore of history” as well as the “politicisation of the earth.”
Several historians have called Chakrabarty’s book a “tour de force” for its Socratic-exploration into various areas of Anthropocene, which explains how man-made climate change brought us into this new phase that signals an end to the Holocene (interglacial period) that began some 11,700 years ago.
“The Anthropocene could be said to have started in the latter part of the eighteenth century, when analyses of air trapped in polar ice showed the beginning of growing global concentrations of carbon dioxide and methane,” Chakrabarty argues in his book.
Incidentally, he said that “this date also happens to coincide with James Watt’s design of the steam engine in 1784.”
Given the rich tapestry of weaving the historic, economic, political, philosophical, and more importantly geological processes, this corresponddent asked Chakrabarty to explain what would Anthropocene mean for the lay man.
“The term was actually coined by a famous Nobel-winning chemist who used to work on atmospheric chemistry, Paul Crutzen,” he said.
Subsequently, it acquired salience after several debates within the scientific community in the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme (1987-2015).
He suggests that members of that programme coined the term “earth systems” to describe the “way that geological and biological processes come together to support life in general, not just human life, but all species and the biodiversity supported by these many processes which are sometimes geological, (and) sometimes biological”.
Chakrabarty likens the process of this “new awakening” on Anthropocene to “a bit like Pirandello’s play “Each in His Own Way” (Luigi Pirandello – 28 June 1867-10 December 1936),” a play that explores the blurred lines between reality and fiction.
“Overall, it (Anthropocene) is one way of underlining what a powerful, earth-changing agent the human has become,” he says.
“With our technology, our numbers, our consumption, we are actually destroying the basis, not only for our own existence, but for the existence of other kinds of life — you need other kinds of life for us to survive.”
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Anthropocene, he says, is one of those words that came in the year 2000, meaning many things. It signals a fundamental transition in the human condition.
“I became aware of it around 2003,” he said, referring to the raging forest fires in Australia where he was working on his doctoral thesis in history at the University of Canberra.
“The fires destroyed many of the nature spots I used to love,” he notes, expressing his grief over the decimation of the forests due to extreme heat events.
“You will particularly appreciate, I grew up as a Calcutta boy, and Calcutta has no outdoors — it’s a city, right? We have a park here and a park there, a lake there, but the sense of this wide expanse of outdoors that you find mainly in central colonial countries, but you might also find in the Alps (Switzerland) here, was not part of my life.”
He says that he was disturbed to witness the destruction of the National Park that he loved.
It “blew away one of the assumptions of the kind of history that I did, that was the assumption of there being a separation between natural history and human history.”
This explains the transition of human beings as biological agents to geological agents on a humongous scale.
“We (human beings, a dominant species with predatory instincts) now have the same impact on the planet as the asteroid that killed all the dinosaurs that set off this last great extinction,” he notes grimly.
This “new awakening”, he says, led to the formulation of his first thesis that “there is no separation between human history and natural history and we are a big force affecting natural history.”
That is how he wrote his four theses on climate history in his native mother tongue Bengali in a Calcutta magazine called Baromarsh.
The four of theses are: (1) “Anthropogenic (the study of human origins which was coined first in 1830 from the Greek word “Anthropos”) explanations of climate change spell the collapse of the human distinction between natural history and human history”; (2) “The Idea of the Anthropocene, the New Geological Epoch when Humans Exist as a Geological Force, Severely Qualifies Humanist Histories of Modernity/Globalisation”; (3) “The Geological Hypothesis Regarding the Anthropocene Requires Us To Put Global Histories of Capital (which led to the Industrial Revolution and capitalism) in Conversation with the Species History of Humans”; and (4) “The Crosshatching of Species History and History of Capital is a Process of Probing the Limits of Historical Understanding.”
After his academic pursuits in history under the guidance of the doyen of subaltern history, the late Professor Ranajit Guha and Chakrabarty proceeded to Chicago where he first published these four theses in Critical Inquiry, a journal published by the University of Chicago, highlighting his initial ideas on anthropogenic climate change processes.
These four theses attracted considerable opposition from his Marxist friends, for whom a revisit to Marx’s Das Kapital was adequate to understand the unfolding crisis of climate change.
But, Chakrabarty says that “there were a lot of humanists elsewhere that were interested and some of them were angry with what I was saying because I had a statement where I said, ‘you know, my Marxism, subaltern studies, and globalisation literature, trained me to analyse capitalism and class analysis, but on its own, it didn’t prepare me to understand this phenomenon’.”
“I have to now read geology, earth system science, geophysics, at least to the degree that I can understand it, to understand what this crisis of life is (all about),” he adds.
Despite the continued disagreements with some of his Marxist friends, who maintain that capitalism is the sole cause of climate change, Chakrabarty says that the grave climate crisis is causing havoc in every nook and corner of the planet.
“Planet is not a lazy word,” he maintains, suggesting that “it is a dynamic ensemble of relationships — as Hegel’s State or Marx’s Capital are”.
Pointing out that some people are saying that it is the West’s problem, he says that our own desires to develop and catch up with other developed countries led to massive energy consumption and putting more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, despite opposition from Gandhi and several other leaders/thinkers.
“So, I think this is a problem you cannot comprehend, if you only blame it on the West, if you only blame it on the capitalists; this something that has become part of the definition of a life you want.”
While it is increasingly becoming clear that countries can give up on coal and gas, they are not able to give up on cheap energy because of the lifestyles people are now accustomed to during the past 70-80 years.
“If you asked Mukesh Ambani and [Gautam] Adani this question, they will probably answer the same — that we cannot do without our high-energy lifestyles,” Chakrabarty says. “But what we have to do is that we have to try all kinds of techniques to ensure that our energy-driven lifestyles do not lead to the loss of biodiversity”.
Chakrabarty cites the example of sand which is essential to the production of concrete buildings and infrastructure — but the large-scale removal of sand (India apparently ranks first in the world of the “sand mafias”) has severely disturbed the ecology, as can be witnessed in the recent spate of climate-related disasters in the country.
How do we tackle these existential crises? While technological developments that are currently underway to address climate change in different areas seem beneficial, the fears are that these technologies may be weaponised for defence purposes, he points out.
“So, these technologies need global management, like even if China, America, and India among others develop these technologies, how do you bring in a regulation that ensures that you do not create a weapon”, with a solemn commitment that “I don’t weaponise them.”
In the world of raging geopolitical and geo-economic conflicts, coupled with the emergence of allegedly “xenophobic” national leaders like Donald Trump in the United States and Modi in India, there seems to be little prospect for international agreements to contain climate change.
With Trump having walked out of the Paris Climate Change Agreement of 2015, “the political class is reneging on agreements and also reneging on having to adopt a larger planetary perspective — so that’s why I say in the book that we are still doing our politics as though we are in the age of globalisation,” Chakrabarty says.
