The Great Derangement

by Amitav Ghosh

  These disturbances were almost impossible to ignore: on the web as in the traditional media the phrase “climate change” was everywhere. Few indeed were the quarters that remained unperturbed, but literary fiction and the arts appear to have been among them: short lists for prizes, reviews, and so on, betray no signs of a heightened engagement with climate change.

  But 2015 did produce two very important publications on climate change: the first, Pope Francis’s encyclical letter Laudato Si’, was published in May; while the second, the Paris Agreement on climate change, appeared in December.

  These two documents occupy a realm that few texts can aspire to: one in which words effect changes in the real world. But the documents are also texts, brought into being through the crafts of writing, with meticulous attention being paid to form, vocabulary, and even typography. To read them as texts is revealing in many ways.

  As is only to be expected, the two works, one written by a former teacher of literature and the other by a multitude of diplomats and delegates, are not at all similar, even though they rely on many of the same materials and address some of the same subjects. Yet they also have certain things in common: perhaps the most important of these is that they are both founded on an acceptance of the research produced by climate science. In this sense they together represent a historic milestone: their publication marks a general, worldwide acknowledgment that the earth’s climate is changing and that human beings are largely responsible for these changes. The documents can therefore rightly be seen as a vindication of climate science.

  Beyond that, the documents diverge sharply, although not in predictable ways. It might be thought, for example, that as a primarily religious document the pope’s Encyclical would be written in an allusive and ornate style; it might equally be expected that the Agreement would, by contrast, be terse and workmanlike (as was the Kyoto Protocol, for instance). In fact the opposite is true. The Encyclical is remarkable for the lucidity of its language and the simplicity of its construction; it is the Agreement, rather, that is highly stylized in its wording and complex in structure.

  The Agreement is divided into two parts: the first and longer part is entitled “Proposal by the President,” while the second—which is the Agreement itself—is described as an “Annex.” Each part is preceded by a preamble, as is the convention for treaties—except that in this case these sections are far longer and more elaborate than is customary. The preamble to the Kyoto Protocol, for instance, consists of only five terse declarative clauses; by contrast, the text of the Paris Agreement contains no less than thirty-one ringing declarations. Fifteen of these precede the first part of the document (the president’s proposal); here are some of them:

  Recalling decision 1/CP.17 on the establishment . . .

  Also recalling Articles . . .

  Further recalling relevant decisions . . .

  Welcoming the adoption . . .

  Recognizing that . . .

  Acknowledging that . . .

  Agreeing to uphold and promote . . .

  The lines pour down the page in a waterfall of gerunds and then, without the sentence yet reaching an end, the clauses change into numbered articles as the document switches gear and “Decides to adopt . . .” and “Requests the Secretary-General . . .”

  And so the Proposal continues, covering eighteen densely printed pages: yet this large block of text, with its 140 numbered clauses and six sections, consists of only two sentences, one of which runs on for no less than fifteen pages! Indeed this part of the Agreement is a work of extraordinary compositional virtuosity—thousands of words separated by innumerable colons, semicolons, and commas and only a single, lonely pair of full stops.

  The giddy virtuosity of the text provides a context for the images that streamed out of Paris after the negotiations: of world leaders and business tycoons embracing each other; of negotiators with tears in their eyes; of delegates crowding joyfully together to be photographed. The pictures captured a mood of as much astonishment as joy; it was as if the delegates could not quite believe that they had succeeded in reaching an agreement of such significance. The euphoria that resulted is as clearly evident in the text of the Agreement as it is in the pictures: the virtuosity of its composition is a celebration of its own birth.

  There is no such exuberance in Laudato Si’, which is remarkable instead for the sober clarity with which it addresses complex questions. While the preambles of the Agreement occupy a prosodic domain of their own, somewhere between poetry and prose, Laudato Si’ resorts to poetry only at the very end, in two concluding prayers.

  Here again lies an unexpected difference between the two documents. Because of the prayerful ending of Laudato Si’, it might be thought that there would be more wishful thinking and conjecture in the Encyclical than in the Agreement. But that too is by no means the case. It is the Paris Agreement rather that repeatedly invokes the impossible: for example, the aspirational goal of limiting the rise in global mean temperatures to 1.5 degrees Centigrade—a target that is widely believed to be already beyond reach.

  Although the Paris Agreement does not lay out the premises on which its targets are based, it is thought that they are founded on the belief that technological advances will soon make it possible to whisk greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere and bury them deep underground. But these technologies are still in their nascency, and the most promising of them, known as “biomass energy carbon capture and storage,” would require the planting of bioenergy crops over an area larger than India to succeed at scale. To invest so much trust in what is yet only a remote possibility is little less than an act of faith, not unlike religious belief.

  Laudato Si’, by contrast, does not anywhere suggest that miraculous interventions may provide a solution for climate change. It strives instead to make sense of humanity’s present predicament by mining the wisdom of a tradition that far predates the carbon economy. Yet it does not hesitate to take issue with past positions of the Church, as, for example, in the matter of reconciling an ecological consciousness with the Christian doctrine of Man’s dominion over Nature. Even less does the Encyclical hesitate to criticize the prevalent paradigms of our era; most of all it is fiercely critical of “the idea of infinite or unlimited growth, which proves so attractive to economists, financiers and experts in technology.” It returns to this theme repeatedly, insisting that it is because of the “technocratic paradigm” that “we fail to see the deepest roots of our present failures, which have to do with the direction, goals, meaning and social implications of technological growth.”

  In the text of the Paris Agreement, by contrast, there is not the slightest acknowledgment that something has gone wrong with our dominant paradigms; it contains no clause or article that could be interpreted as a critique of the practices that are known to have created the situation that the Agreement seeks to address. The current paradigm of perpetual growth is enshrined at the core of the text.

  But perhaps criticism is not the business of a treaty? Not true: international narcotics agreements, for example, use quite strong language in condemning “the evil of drug addiction,” and so on. Critical language even figured in earlier climate treaties like the Kyoto Protocol, which did make reference to “market imperfections.” No such phrase is to be found in the Paris Agreement: it merely acknowledges that “climate change is a common concern for humankind.”

  The Agreement is similarly tepid in its naming of the conditions that it is intended to remedy: while words like catastrophe and disaster occur several times in the Encyclical, the Agreement speaks only of the adverse impacts or effects of climate change. The word catastrophe is never used and even disaster occurs only once, and that too only because it figures in the title of a previous conference. It is as if the negotiations had been convened to deal with a minor annoyance. No wonder then that the Agreement’s provisions will come into force (if such a word can be used of voluntary actions) only in 2020 when the window for effective action will already have dwi
ndled to the size of the eye of a celestial needle.

  In contrast to the Agreement’s careful avoidance of disruptive terminology, Laudato Si’ challenges contemporary practices not just in its choice of words but also in the directness of its style. In place of the obscurity and technical jargon that enshrouds the official discourse on climate change, the document strives to open itself, in a manner that explicitly acknowledges the influence of the saint who is the pope’s “guide and inspiration”: “Francis [of Assisi] helps us to see that an integral ecology calls for openness to categories which transcend the language of mathematics and biology and take us to the heart of what it is to be human.”

  In much the same measure that Laudato Si’ strives for openness, the Agreement moves in the opposite direction: toward confinement and occlusion. Its style as well as its vocabulary convey the impression of language being deployed as an instrument of concealment and withdrawal; even its euphoria is suggestive of the heady joy of a small circle of initiates celebrating a rite of passage. In clause after clause, the Agreement summons up mysterious structures, mechanisms, and strange new avatars of officialdom—as, for example, when it “decides that two high-level champions shall be appointed,” and “invites all interested parties . . . to support the work of the champions” (where, one wonders, is the Colosseum in which these champions have dueled their way to the “highest level”?).

  That the word champion is left undefined is telling: it implies that the document’s authors know tacitly whom they are referring to—and who could that be but others like themselves? This is indeed an Agreement of champions, authored by and for those of that ilk.

  Strangely, Laudato Si’ seems to anticipate this possibility: in a passage that refers to the way that decisions are made in “international political and economic discussions,” it points to the role of “professionals, opinion makers, communications media and centres of power [who] being located in affluent urban areas, are far removed from the poor, with little direct contact with their problems. They live and reason from the comfortable position of a high level of development and a quality of life well beyond the reach of the majority of the world’s population.” It is with exactly this in mind that the style of Laudato Si’ seems to have been forged, as an attempt to address those to whom it repeatedly refers as the “excluded.”

  The opacity of the Agreement, on the other hand, hints at the opposite intention: its rhetoric is like a shimmering screen, set up to conceal implicit bargains, unspoken agreements, and loopholes visible only to those in the know. It is no secret that various billionaires, corporations, and “climate entrepreneurs” played an important part in the Paris negotiations. But even if this were not publicly known, it would be deducible from the diction of the Agreement, which is borrowed directly from the free-trade agreements of the neo-liberal era: these clearly are the provenance of its references to “accelerating, encouraging and enabling innovation” and of many of the terms on which it relies, such as stakeholder, good practices, insurance solutions, public and private participation, technology development, and so on.

  As is often the case with texts, the Agreement’s rhetoric serves to clarify much that it leaves unsaid: namely, that its intention, and the essence of what it has achieved, is to create yet another neo-liberal frontier where corporations, entrepreneurs, and public officials will be able to join forces in enriching each other.

  Might the Paris Agreement have taken a different turn if the terrorist attacks of December 2 had not radically changed the context of the negotiations by providing the French government with an alibi for the banning of demonstrations, marches, and protests? What would have happened if the delegates had been forced to deal with a great wave of popular pressure, as climate activists had planned? These questions will haunt historians for years to come, and the answers, of course, will never be known. However, the alacrity with which the French authorities moved against climate activists, and the efficiency with which it put dozens of them under house arrest, suggests that even in the absence of the attacks a means would have been found for corralling the protesters—as has been the case at many other international negotiations during the last two decades. This is one area in which governments and corporations around the world have grown extraordinarily skilled, and there is every reason to believe that the investments that they have made in surveilling environmental activists would have paid off, once again, to enforce the exclusions that are hinted at in the Agreement’s text.

  If exclusion is a recurrent theme in Laudato Si’, it is for exactly the opposite reason: because poverty and justice are among the Encyclical’s central concerns. The document returns over and again to the theme of “how inseparable the bond is between concern for nature, justice for the poor, commitment to society, and interior peace.”

  In Laudato Si’ the words poverty and justice keep close company with each other. Here poverty is not envisaged as a state that can be managed or ameliorated in isolation from other factors; nor are ecological issues seen as problems that can be solved without taking social inequities into account, as is often implied by a certain kind of conservationism. Laudato Si’ excoriates this latter kind of “green rhetoric” and insists that “a true ecological approach always becomes a social approach; it must integrate questions of justice in debates on the environment, so as to hear both the cry of the earth and the cry of the poor.” This in turn leads to the blunt assertion that “a true ‘ecological debt’ exists, particularly between the global north and south.”

  Here again the contrast with the Paris Agreement is stark. When poverty finds mention in the Agreement, it is always as a state in itself, to be alleviated through financial and other mechanisms. The word never occurs in connection with justice—but this is scarcely surprising since there is only one mention of 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. But an implicit disavowal occurs much earlier, in one of the few passages in the text that is pellucid in its 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.

  The differences between the two texts is never clearer than in the manner of their endings. The Agreement concludes by conjuring itself into being through the will of the signatories and by announcing the date of its self-actualization: the twelfth day of December, in the year 2015. The very syntax is an expression of faith in the sovereignty of Man and his ability to shape the future.

  The prayers with which Laudato Si’ concludes, on the other hand, are an appeal for help and guidance. As such they are also acknowledgments of how profoundly humanity has lost its way and of the limits that circumscribe human agency. In this they echo one of the most radical elements of Pope Francis’s critique of the era that he describes as “a period of irrational confidence in progress and human abilities.” It is his questioning of the idea that “human freedom is limitless.” “We have forgotten,” goes the text, “that ‘man is not only a freedom which he creates for himself. . . . He is spirit and will, but also nature.’”

  It is by this route that the themes of Laudato Si’ lead back to the territory that I explored earlier in trying to locate the fronts where climate change resists contemporary literature and the arts. Insofar as the idea of the limitlessness of human freedom is central to the arts of our time, this is also where the Anthropocene will most intransigently resist them.

  9.

  Bleak though the t
errain of climate change may be, there are a few features in it that stand out in relief as signs of hope: a spreading sense of urgency among governments and the public; the emergence of realistic alternative energy solutions; widening activism around the world; and even a few signal victories for environmental movements. But the most promising development, in my view, is the increasing involvement of religious groups and leaders in the politics of climate change. Pope Francis is, of course, the most prominent example, but some Hindu, Muslim, Buddhist, and other groups and organizations have also recently voiced their concern.

  I take this to be a sign of hope because it is increasingly clear to me that the formal political structures of our time are incapable of confronting this crisis on their own. The reason for this is simple: the basic building block of these structures is the nation-state, inherent to the nature of which is the pursuit of the interests of a particular group of people. So powerful is this imperative that even transnational groupings of nation-states, like the UN, seem unable to overcome it. This is partly due, of course, to questions of power and geo-political rivalries. But it may also be that climate change represents, in its very nature, an unresolvable problem for modern nations in terms of their biopolitical mission and the practices of governance that are associated with it.

  I would like to believe that a great upsurge of secular protest movements around the world could break through the deadlock and bring about fundamental changes. The problem, however, is time. One of the reasons why climate change is a “wicked” as opposed to a “normal” problem is that the time horizon in which effective action can be taken is very narrow: every year that passes without a drastic reduction in global emissions makes catastrophe more certain.