The Great Derangement

by Amitav Ghosh

  41 region’s wind patterns: Amato T. Evan, James P. Kossin, et al., “Arabian Sea Tropical Cyclones Intensified by Emissions of Black Carbon and Aerosols,” Nature 479 (2011): 94–98.

  43 “minor cyclonic storms”: Gazetteer of Bombay City and Island, Vol. I (1909), 96. I am grateful to Murali Ranganathan for providing me with this reference.

  43 “end of all things”: Quoted in Gazetteer of Bombay City and Island, Vol. I (1909), 97.

  43 “persons were killed”: Ibid., 98.

  44 people were killed: Ibid., 99.

  44 “number and intensity”: Ibid.

  44 intensity scale: On the Saffir-Simpson hurricane intensity scale, wind speeds of 75 mph are the benchmark for a Category 1 hurricane. In the Tropical Cyclone Intensity Scale used by the India Meteorological Department, any storm with wind speeds of over 39 kmph counts as a “cyclonic storm,” hence this storm was named Cyclone Phyan.

  45 single day: R. B. Bhagat et al., “Mumbai after 26/7 Deluge: Issues and Concerns in Urban Planning,” Population and Environment 27, no. 4 (March 2006): 337–49, 340.

  45 estuarine location: I am deeply grateful to Rahul Srivastava, Manasvini Hariharan, Apoorva Tadepalli, and the team at URBZ for their help with the research for this section.

  45 filth-clogged ditches: In “Drainage Problems of Brihan Mumbai,” B. Arunachalam provides a concise account of how Mumbai’s hydrological systems have been altered over time (Economic and Political Weekly 40, no. 36 [September 3–9, 2005]: 3909–11, 3909).

  45 absorptive ability: Cf. Vidyadhar Date, “Mumbai Floods: The Blame Game Begins,” Economic and Political Weekly 40, no. 34 (August 20–26, 2005): 3714–16, 3716; and Ranger et al., “An Assessment of the Potential Impact of Climate Change on Flood Risk in Mumbai,” Climate Change 104 (2011): 139–67, 142, 146; see also R. B. Bhagat et al., “Mumbai after 26/7 Deluge,” 342.

  46 1.5 million: P. C. Sehgal and Teki Surayya, “Innovative Strategic Management: The Case of Mumbai Suburban Railway System,” Vikalpa 36, no. 1 (January–March 2011): 63.

  46 knocked out as well: Aromar Revi, “Lessons from the Deluge,” 3913.

  46 suffered damage: The paragraphs above are based largely on the Fact Finding Committee on Mumbai Floods, Final Report, vol. 1, 2006, 13–15.

  47 fishing boat: Vidyadhar Date, “Mumbai Floods,” 3714.

  47 trapped by floodwaters: Aromar Revi, “Lessons from the Deluge,” 3913.

  47 homes to strangers: Cf. Carsten Butsch et al., “Risk Governance in the Megacity Mumbai/India—A Complex Adaptive System Perspective,” Habitat International (2016), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.habitatint, 5.

  47 “of the partition”: Aromar Revi, “Lessons from the Deluge,” 3912.

  47 even the courts: See Ranger et al., “An Assessment of the Potential Impact of Climate Change on Flood Risk in Mumbai,” 156.

  47 swamped by floodwaters: Carsten Butsch et al. note that while many improvements have been made to Mumbai’s warning systems and disaster management practices, “there are also doubts about Mumbai’s disaster preparedness. First some of the infrastructures created, are not maintained as good practice would demand; second, many of the measures announced have not been finalized (especially the renovation of the city’s water system) and third, informal practices prohibit planning and applying measures.” (“Risk Governance in the Megacity Mumbai/India,” 9–10).

  47 in recent years: Because of emergency measures the death toll of the 2013 Category 5 storm, Cyclone Phailin, was only a few dozen. See the October 14, 2013, CNN report, “Cyclone Phailin: India Relieved at Low Death Toll.”

  48 planning for disasters: Ranger et al. observe that while Mumbai administration’s risk reducing measures are commendable “they do not appear to consider the potential impacts of climate change on the long-term planning horizon.” (“An Assessment of the Potential Impact of Climate Change on Flood Risk in Mumbai,” 156).

  48 “post-disaster response”: Friedemann Wenzel et al., “Megacities—Megarisks,” Natural Hazards 42 (2007): 481–91, 486.

  48 disasters of this kind: The Municipal Corporation of Great Mumbai’s booklet Standard Operating Procedures for Disaster Management Control (available at http://www.mcgm.gov.in/irj/portalapps/com.mcgm.aDisasterMgmt) is explicitly focused on floods and makes no mention of cyclones. Cyclones are mentioned only generically in the Municipal Corporation’s 2010 publication Disaster Risk Management Master Plan: Legal and Institutional Arrangements; Disaster Risk Management in Greater Mumbai, and that too mainly in the context of directives issued by the National Disaster Management Authority, which was established by the country’s Disaster Management Act of 2005. The Maharashtra State Disaster Management Plan (draft copy) is far more specific, and it includes a lengthy section on cyclones (section 10.4) and the following recommendation: “Evacuate people from unsafe buildings/structures and shift them to relief camps/sites.” However, its primary focus is on rural areas, and it does not make any reference (probably for jurisdictional reasons) to a possible evacuation of Mumbai (the plan is available here: http://gadchiroli.nic.in/pdf-files/state-disaster.pdf). The Greater Mumbai Disaster Management Action Plan: Risk Assessment and Response Plan, vol. 1, does recognize the threat of cyclones, and even lists the areas that may need to be evacuated (section 2.8). But this list accounts for only a small part of the city’s population; the plan does not provide for the possibility that an evacuation on a much larger scale, involving most of the city’s people, may be necessary. The plan is available here: http://www.mcgm.gov.in/irj/portalapps/com.mcgm.aDisasterMgmt.

  48 projects are located: According to an article published in the Indian Express on April 30, 2015, “60 sea-front projects, mostly super luxury residences,” were waiting for clearance “along Mumbai’s western shoreline.” http://indianexpress.com. The Maharashtra government is also opening many unbuilt sea-facing areas, like the city’s old salt pans, to construction (see The Hindu’s Business Line of August 22, 2015: http://m.thehindubusinessline.com/news/national/salt-pan-lands-in-mumbai-to-be-used-for-development-projects/article7569641.ece).

  49 corrugated iron: Carsten Butsch et al., “Risk Governance in the Megacity Mumbai/India,” 5.

  50 Arabian Sea: Cf. C. W. B. Normand, Storm Tracks in the Arabian Sea, India Meteorological Department, 1926. I am grateful to Adam Sobel for this reference.

  51 city as well: During the 2005 deluge “The waterlogging lasted for over seven days in parts of the suburbs and the flood water level had risen by some feet in many built-up areas.” B. Arunachalam, “Drainage Problems of Brihan Mumbai,” 3909.

  51 illness and disease: See Carsten Butsch et al., “Risk Governance in the Megacity Mumbai/India,” 4.

  51 forty thousand beds: Cf. Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai’s City Development Plan, section on “Health” (9.1; available here: http://www.mcgm.gov.in).

  51 urban limits: Aromar Revi, “Lessons from the Deluge,” 3912.

  51 rising seas: Natalie Kopytko, “Uncertain Seas, Uncertain Future for Nuclear Power,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 71, no. 2 (2015): 29–38.

  52 “safety risks”: Ibid., 30–31.

  52 models predict: “All the models are indicating an increase in mean annual rainfall as compared to the observed reference mean of 1936 mm, and the average of all the models in 2350 mm [by 2071–2099].” Arun Rana et al., “Impact of Climate Change on Rainfall over Mumbai using Distribution-Based Scaling of Global Climate Model Projections,” Journal of Hydrology: Regional Studies 1 (2014): 107–28, 118. See also Dim Coumou and Stefan Rahmstorf, “A Decade of Weather Extremes,” Nature Climate Change 2 (July 2012): 491–96: “Many lines of evidence . . . strongly indicate that some types of extreme weather event, most notably heatwaves and precipitation extremes, will greatly increase in a warming climate and have already done so” (494).

  53 become uninhabitable: Aromar Revi notes: “There is a clear need to rationalize land cover and land use in Greater Mumbai in keeping with rational ecolo
gical and equitable economic considerations. . . . The key concern here is that developers’ interests do not overpower ‘public interest,’ that the rights of the poor are upheld; else displacement from one location will force them to relocate to another, often more risk-prone location” (“Lessons from the Deluge,” 3914).

  53 threatened neighborhoods: Climate Risks and Adaptation in Asian Coastal Megacities: A Synthesis Report, World Bank, 2010 (available at file:///C:/Users/chres/Desktop/Current/research/coastal_megacities_fullreport.pdf). The report includes a ward-by-ward listing of the areas of Kolkata that are most vulnerable to climate change (88).

  55 “below this point”: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/21/world/asia/21stones.html.

  56 with the “sublime”: Cf. William Cronon, “The Trouble with Wilderness; or Getting Back to the Wrong Nature,” in Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature, ed. William Cronon (New York: W. W. Norton, 1995), 69–90: “By the second half of the nineteenth century, the terrible awe that Wordsworth and Thoreau regarded as the appropriately pious stance to adopt in the presence of their mountaintop God was giving way to a much more comfortable, almost sentimental demeanor” (6).

  57 they had caused: Cf. A. K. Sen Sarma, “Henry Piddington (1797–1858): A Bicentennial Tribute,” in Weather 52, no. 6 (1997): 187–93.

  57 “five to fifteen feet”: Henry Piddington, “A letter to the most noble James Andrew, Marquis of Dalhousie, Governor-General of India, on the storm wave of the cyclones in the Bay of Bengal and their effects in the Sunderbunds, Baptist Mission Press” (Calcutta, 1853). Quoted in A. K. Sen Sarma, “Henry Piddington (1797–1858): A Bicentennial Tribute.”

  60 “stretches of farmland”: Adwaita Mallabarman, A River Called Titash, tr. Kalpana Bardhan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 16–17.

  60 “geography books”: Ibid., 12.

  61 “Flower-Fruit Mountain”: The Journey to the West, tr. and ed. Anthony C. Yu (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977.

  62 “had to be evacuated”: David Lipset, “Place in the Anthropocene: A Mangrove Lagoon in Papua New Guinea in the Time of Rising Sea-Levels,” Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 4, no. 3 (2014): 215–43, 233.

  63 “inhuman nature”: Henry David Thoreau, In the Maine Woods (1864).

  64 likes and dislikes: Julie Cruikshank, Do Glaciers Listen? Local Knowledge, Colonial Encounters and Social Imagination (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2005), 8.

  64 “living and non-living”: Julia Adeney Thomas, “The Japanese Critique of History’s Suppression of Nature,” Historical Consciousness, Historiography and Modern Japanese Values, International Symposium in North America, International Research Center for Japanese Studies, Kyoto, Japan, 2002, 234.

  64 “never saw an ape”: Quoted by Giorgio Agamben in The Open: Man and Animal, tr. Kevin Attell (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), Kindle edition, loc. 230.

  65 “words and texts”: Michael S. Northcott, A Political Theology of Climate Change (Cambridge: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing, 2013), 34. See also Lynn White, “The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis,” Science 155 (1967): “Christianity is the most anthropocentric religion the world has seen” (1205).

  66 in recorded history: Alexander M. Stoner and Andony Melathopoulos, Freedom in the Anthropocene: Twentieth-Century Helplessness in the Face of Climate Change (New York: Palgrave, 2015), 10.

  66 “without a Summer”: Cf. Michael E. Mann, The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 39; Gillen D’Arcy Wood, “1816, the Year without a Summer,” BRANCH: Britain, Representation and Nineteenth-Century History, ed. Dino Franco Felluga, extension of Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net (http://www.branchcollective.org); and Gillen D’Arcy Wood, Tambora: The Eruption That Changed the World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015).

  67 John Polidori: Fiona MacCarthy, Byron: Life and Legend (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2002), 292.

  67 “amid the darkness”: Quoted by Gillen D’Arcy Wood, “1816, the Year without a Summer”; see also John Buxton, Byron and Shelley: The History of a Friendship (London: Macmillan, 1968), 10.

  67 “August Darvell”: Fiona MacCarthy, Byron, 292.

  67 “vital warmth”: Quoted by John Buxton, Byron and Shelley, 14.

  68 “as we choose”: Geoffrey Parker, Global Crisis, loc. 17871.

  72 “umbrella”: Margaret Atwood, In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination (New York: Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, 2011).

  74 “defend this autonomy”: Timothy Mitchell, Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil (London: Verso, 2011), Kindle edition, loc. 474.

  74 First World War: Ibid., locs. 430, 578.

  74 transportation and distribution: Ibid., locs. 680–797: “Whereas the movement of coal tended to follow dendritic networks, with branches at each end but a single main channel, creating potential choke points at several junctures, oil flowed along networks that had the properties of a grid, like an electricity network, where there is more than one possible path and the flow of energy can switch to avoid blockage or overcome breakdowns” (797).

  74 from coal to oil: Ibid., loc. 653.

  74 “energy flows”: Ibid., loc. 645.

  74 substance itself is not: Stephanie LeMenager’s apt summation in Living Oil: “Oil has been shit and sex, the essence of entertainment” (92).

  75 Sebastião Salgado: There are, however, many exceptions. For a full account, see the chapter “The Aesthetics of Petroleum” in Stephanie LeMenager’s Living Oil.

  76 “literally inconceivable”: The piece is reprinted in the nonfiction collections published under the titles The Imam and the Indian (New Delhi: Penguin India, 2002) and Incendiary Circumstances (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2004).

  77 “historical chronicle”: Leo Tolstoy, “A Few Words Apropos of the Book War and Peace.”

  77 preceding forms: Donna Tussing Orwin, “Introduction,” in Tolstoy on War: Narrative Art and Historical Truth in “War and Peace,” ed. Rick McPeak and Donna Tussing Orwin (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012), 3.

  78 “being an egotist”: Eight Letters from Charlotte Brontë to George Henry Lewes, November 1847–October 1850: http://www.bl.uk.

  78 “collective metamorphosis”: Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 87–88.

  79 “Great Acceleration”: Cf. Will Steffen, Jacques Grinevald, et al., “The Anthropocene: Conceptual and Historical Perspectives,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society 369 (2011): 842–67.

  79 “produce isolation”: Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, 3rd ed., tr. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: Zone Books, 1994), thesis 28.

  79 “as progress”: Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, tr. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), Kindle edition, loc. 1412.

  79 powerful presence: As Latour notes, “the word ‘modern’ is always being thrown into the middle of a fight, in a quarrel where there are winners and losers.” Ibid., loc. 269.

  79 “used-up” after all: As John Barth once suggested in “The Literature of Exhaustion,” in The Friday Book: Essays and Other Nonfiction (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1984).

  80 avant la lettre: Thus, for example, the scientist and water expert Peter Gleick writes, in relation to the drought in California: “But here is what I fear, said best by John Steinbeck in East of Eden: ‘And it never failed that during the dry years the people forgot about the rich years, and during the wet years they lost all memory of the dry years. It was always that way.’” (Learning from Drought: Five Priorities for California, February 10, 2014; available here: http://scienceblogs.com/significantfigures/index.php).

  80 global temperatures: John L. Brooke, Climate Change and the Course of Global History, 551.

  82 move beyond language: “We need . . . to ‘decolonize thought,’ in order to see that thinking is not necessarily c
ircumscribed by language, the symbolic, or the human.” Eduardo Kohn, How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology beyond the Human (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013), Kindle edition, loc. 949. See also John Zerzan, Running on Emptiness: The Pathology of Civilization (Los Angeles: Feral House, 2002), 11: “Language seems often to close an experience, not to help ourselves be open to an experience.”

  83 has literary fiction: Sergio Fava discusses some of the visual artists who have addressed climate change in his book Environmental Apocalypse in Science and Art: Designing Nightmares (London: Routledge, 2013).

  84 “the written word”: Quoted in Arran E. Gare, Postmodernism and the Environmental Crisis (London: Routledge, 1995), 21.

  84 “world more unlivable”: The words are Franco Moretti’s from The Bourgeois (London: Verso, 2013), 89.