Imagining a pathway out of climate doom

13 September 2024 - Wits University

To attune to the planet will take the power of stories, the power of people and returning to old wisdoms

World-renowned author, global thinker, and environmental advocate Amitav Ghosh delivered the 2024 Pro Vice-Chancellor’s lecture at Wits on 11 September. His was a powerful warning of climate reductionism and the perils of ignoring context, community, the locally appropriate and even the loss of wonder in navigating the crisis of our time.

Ghosh is a multi-award winning author who was born in Kolkata, India and now spends his time between India and the United States. He studied social anthropology at Oxford and is the author of 20 fiction and non-fiction books including The Circle of Reason, The Calcutta Chromosome, The Shadow Lines, Sea of Poppies, and Gun Island, as well as The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable and The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis. His latest book is Smoke and Ashes and this year he added to his list of accolades and prizes, the prestigious Erasmus Prize. His essays appear regularly in major publications and journals around the world.

Described as “genre defining,” Ghosh has used his mastery of storytelling to reflect the reality of climate disasters, while his anthropology background deepens the understanding of humans’ relationships with and responses to their environments and nature. He has over the years made the case for closing the gaps in understanding the role of the cultural, political, economic, and historical roots of climate change. In his activism he has been critical of the continued impacts of extractivism, profit chasing, the corrupted climate change funding and the still unaddressed legacies of imperialism and colonisation.

He started his speech in the Wits Senate Room taking aim at the prevailing dominance of data, modelling, and numbers in framing the narrative of climate change, even as it’s shown to be limited in making climate change more relatable. The numbers don’t help people to imagine a world at 1.5 or 2 degrees warmer, or to grasp the mechanics or significance of carbon capture, for instance. And perhaps most damning, Ghosh pointed out, was that the explanation by data and numbers ramp up the dystopian imaginings of the planet and have the effect of leaving humans further slumped into Max Weber’s state of “disenchantment with the world.” This, even as humans need to imagine, with urgency, paths out of climate doom, he said.

“Just as people once made sense of their times through poetry, music, stories, or scripture, we now live in a world that is made thinkable through numbers. Today all ways of knowing aspire to ground themselves in mathematics, because numbers command an almost supernatural trust, like incantations and mantras once did.

So what does this mean for those of us who don't have a head for numbers? That is to say, people like me –it's at least partly to be an exile to modernity,” he said.

But Ghosh told the audience at Wits and over 200 participants online that the seeming “disability” of a lack of proficiency in mathematics was his “magic ring” as a schoolboy. It was the way he came to sharpen his sense of wonder and to affirm his “instinctive affinity for geology, botany and zoology and their kinship” because, he said, of their “kinship with my interest in subjects like philology and history.” Together these elements have shaped his strident voice on climate change.

Ghosh went on to challenge how climate science has remained out of touch with the most vulnerable people in the world. These are the people least responsible for carbon emissions but also most inadequately equipped and resourced to put in place the adaptation and mitigation strategies needed to buffer the impacts of more extreme weather events.

“The vastness of the gulf that separates the perceptions of climate experts and people in countries like India is difficult to overstate. I have never once come across anyone in India who has professed a desire to target fossil fuel infrastructure. The idea of an uprising directed at fossil fuels is merely a wishful fantasy of a technocratic vision of the future.

It's essential to remember that the climate crisis is embedded within a much wider crisis of geopolitical and economic societies. It is this central reality that is rendered invisible by reductionist narratives.”

Also made invisible, he argued, is local knowledge and local people’s know-how in working with nature. He homed in on Bangladesh, where he has ancestral roots, as example. Ghosh said interventions to limit the impact of extreme flooding in the region are often undertaken by misguided international aid agencies that perpetuate colonial era stopgap solutions that don’t factor in the likes of local patterns of construction and development, local politics and how networks of corruption prop up structures of inequality. Worse still, many of the interventions simply don’t work and become mere checkbox exercises.

He went further, saying that climate finance has also become prone to corruption. Ghosh said in the Bangladeshi example that some development brokers have seen the climate crisis as a way to exploit funding and donor monies, rather than to make sustainable, impactful interventions.

Ghosh added that solutions must come from overlooked areas. He added: “Bangladeshis are not at all resistant to the idea of global warming. On the contrary, they're well aware that the environments are changing. Farmers especially know perfectly well their environments are changing, and they have their own ideas about how to deal with those new realities. These ideas are not based on abstract projections about the future and are rooted instead in the grounded, material realities of the places they inhabit [like seed banks and a pivot to growing heritage varieties of staple crops]. Instead of future disasters, they focus on practical strategies of maintaining the productivity of their land even as their environment changes. What is important about these strategies it that they are focused primarily on communities.”

For Ghosh, the “breathless rush” to untested technologies, including carbon capture, is imprudent as it allows science and technology to supplant other forms of knowledge, know-how and intervention.

“It may well be that to confront the challenges of the future we will need to look to the past and to the vast range of indigenous adaptive practices and beliefs … Through the reductionist gaze focused on numerical abstractions, practical measures such as those rooted in indigenous localised knowledge appear to be of trivial importance.”

But for Ghosh the reality of a current state of collective inability in fighting climate change with greater urgency should be a wake-up call that the numbers, the science, the technology have their place but they are an incomplete arsenal without storytelling, without people and without imagination.

“Now more than ever, it is essential to recall that human beings do not experience their environments through models and numbers. They relate to their world through their senses, and have always done so,” Ghosh said.

* Ghosh’s Pro-VC lecture at Wits formed part of a lecture and events series co-hosted by Wits, WISER, the Presidential Climate Commission and the University of Pretoria.