Good earth gone bad: Amitav Ghosh shares concerns about climate change and vulnerable future on earth

How would you explain your deep interest in nature?

I began my working life as a journalist at The Indian Express, and the topic has always been of interest to me. There's something problematic about the word 'nature'. I have had a long-standing interest in our interaction with our surroundings. I would read about natural history, geology and botany without any inclination of becoming a science student.

In the book, you talk about an individual's moment of 'recognition', when they come to terms with a central realisation; When was your moment in the context?

When I was in the Suderbans, where I spent a lot of time in the early 2000s, it was clear that some unprecedented events were happening. Some of them seemed to be merely environmental, like a decline in the bird population and fish stocks, or the disappearance of crabs from the mud banks. What came next was a recognition that some of these were not just local environmental impacts, but connected to a much larger phenomenon — climate change. It is very important to recognise the difference between environment and climate change. With environment, we are talking about local ecologies and landscapes, but when we speak of climate, we are speaking of something global, something much larger. At that point, you could already see some of the effects of sea level rise or salt-water intrusion. Then came cyclone Aila, which was really a catastrophe. Huge tracts of land went under water, and because it's salt water, the land takes a long time to recreate the original fertility.

You suggest that land is not a mere stage for the enactment of human history, but an entity alive in itself. This is almost reminiscent of Thomas Hardy's treatment of Heath in The Return of the Native. At what point in literature, or life, do you think we turned away from this notion of nature as an element integral to the human dialogue?

It is interesting that you cite the example of Thomas Hardy, who is not that distant from us in terms of his lifespan. He's also not that distant from James Joyce, who came to define modernism, while Hardy became someone leftover from the past. Why do we look at it like that? Because Hardy was a rural novelist writing about nature. It happens constantly. We see that writers who write about the natural world have increasingly come to be thought of as archaic. The trajectory of the modernist imagination is such that being tied to anything other than human will and agency is considered archaic. People who are tied to the landscape are thought of as archaic as our narratives become increasingly urban. Adwaita Mallabarman, and his Titash Ekti Nodir Naam (A River Called Titash) is a perfect example of a profoundly unbourgeoisie novel without a central protagonist, where it is the landscape that is really alive.

Did you anticipate the dire picture that your research for the book threw up?

Although I've been dealing with this issue for a long time, I wasn't really aware of how dire the situation is until I started really informing myself. But the direness of the results prepares us for what is going to happen, which, at a personal level, is not entirely a negative thing. Knowing what lies ahead creates an urgency of reflection. I hope that we will begin to live our lives with greater awareness of what is meaningful. In that sense, it is not unlike thinking about death. In some general sense, every human being is headed towards death, and this is much larger than an individual death, which is precisely why it demands a greater contemplation. Roy Scranton, who has written a marvellous book called Learning to Die in the Anthropocene: Reflections on the End of a Civilization, presents exactly that argument; at this point what is really important for us is to confront the reality that lies ahead, to confront that we have created these circumstances ourselves and to derive some meaning from what we have left of life, as it were.

You mention that Mumbai is one of the most vulnerable cities in India exposed to the threat of climate change and the resultant sea-level rise. Why is that?

All coastal cities are extremely vulnerable. Kolkata cannot be said to be a coastal city as it is protected by the Sunderbans, but Kolkata is also extraordinarily vulnerable to sea-level rise. What makes Mumbai extremely exposed is the fact that it is built on an estuary landscape. You could say Mumbai is what Kolkata would have been, had Kolkata been where the Sagar island (an island in the Ganga delta, 100km south of Kolkata) is. Much of Mumbai is low-lying, reclaimed land, originally six or seven islands that would change shape and height according to the tide. From the eighteenth century onwards, the British connected these islands through reclamation projects. Basically, most of these islands did not exist naturally— it is a man-made chunk of land created by filling in the sea. But when it was filled in, the sea was at a certain level. The sea is now rising, and very quickly.

The great deluge of 2005 was a very strange configuration of weather where the clouds stayed position to the north of Mumbai and dumped all the rain there. What would have happened if those clouds had instead chosen to focus on south Mumbai is unimaginable. Because of climate change, cyclonic activity is intensifying in the Arabian sea. Last year, there were more cyclones generated by the Arabian sea than by the Bay of Bengal, which is scary. On the east coast, we grow up with cyclones, especially along the coast of Andhra and Orissa. There are all sorts of evacuation measures in place, which has saved countless lives so far. We are talking about evacuating 11 million people in South Mumbai alone, an incredible concentration of population. Some of India's most important institutions, including the Reserve Bank headquarters and the Stock Exchange are here. If a major cyclone were to come towards Mumbai, and evacuation were necessary, even with a 4-5 day window, it'd be a very difficult process. Some people will have nowhere to go. Others, unaware of the dangers of such storms, would stay behind to protect property, thinking they can ride it out.

That really would make people vulnerable.

We often say that the poor are the most vulnerable in such situations but actually, in this case, the poor would be much more mobile than the middle-class. The working classes of Mumbai has extensive connection with the Konkan, Ratnagiri and the countryside. The middle-class would be tied down by property, other commitments and the belief that they are somehow immune from nature. They wouldn't know how to cope.

Yet awareness and physical preparedness are different things...

That's the thing. I looked at several disaster management plans. Disaster preparedness in India tends to focus mostly on post-disaster recovery. There's no early warning for earthquakes. With something like a cyclone, there is a window to act. You have to act very swiftly and persuade people to make that move. Unfortunately one of the habits of state structures around the world is to avoid creating panic — their first response will be don't panic, all will be well. True, but you should certainly take some action.

So what is 'The Great Derangement' that you talk about?

I'm not going to give you a definition of the derangement, but I'll give you analogies and examples. A perfect example is how in Mumbai, bigger and bigger buildings are being built closer and closer to the sea, with higher prices. People buy those houses because the sea is tranquil most of the time. But that's the thing with the sea, it only has to happen once.

Other than raising awareness through your work, are there any simple day-to-day methods that you have adopted to do your bit for the environment?

It is very important not to look upon this problem as a problem of individual choices. It's a problem of collective action. We should not try to reduce it to the individual level, none of the individual choices you or I make can stop the deforestation in Indonesia. It is a country that has surpassed all European emissions. The deforestation is happening because they want to plant palm oil, because Europe wants biodiesel, which is not environment friendly at all. These are the meta-impacts, to address which, actions have to be implemented collectively. At the same time, we all express our concerns in our own ways. I have solarised my house — not easy to do — that in itself was eye-opening for me. The first and most important thing to do is bring pressure to bear upon our collective institutions and politicians. That is far more important than changing light-bulbs.

You often use history as a reference frame in fiction; for example, the Marichjhanpi incident in The Hungry Tide. How do you ensure that the specificity of either domain (history and fiction) are not diluted?

There's no formulae to it, of course. If you spend time in the Sunderbans, you will realise that while for most of us Marichjhanpi is something completely forgotten, for the people there, it is a very live memory — just as for many Bengalis partition is a very live memory. People say that was the moment they understood that for the state, tigers were more important than human beings. It is very poignant when people feel that way.

We know a fair amount about Amitav Ghosh, the author. What about Amitav Ghosh, the reader?

I am reading a book by Bahar Dutt and I finished reading a book called Jihadi Jane by a brilliant young writer called Tabish Khair. Works that I keep going back to all the time are Moby Dick and the endlessly rewarding Kashiram Das-i (by Kashiram Das) Mahabharat.