[This article first appeared in the Caravan magazine, June 1, 2023.]
India’s approach to global warming cannot mirror the West
THE GODAVARI RIVER wends its lazy way between the Papikondalu Hills of the Eastern Ghats in Andhra Pradesh. Bright jungle spills down the steep hillsides, reflected in the broad, slow bends of the magnificent river. On the December day I visited, a pall of pollution damped the view. The flanks of the hills were dotted with small villages, but nearly all of them were ghost towns—empty, voided spaces where not a child played, not a dog snoozed, not a cow grazed. These were the remains of a few of the over two hundred and fifty villages that will be flooded1 when the Polavaram dam is finished, not far downriver, creating a vast reservoir that will drown this spectacular landscape.
At the site of the Polavaram project, where the dam is currently under construction, dozens of gargantuan steel cylinders towered above the dusty road, awaiting their placement in what will become one of Asia’s largest hydroelectric dams. Dams are not only disastrous for the people who must leave their villages but are environmentally calamitous as well, destroying wetlands, inundating ecosystems, disrupting the natural flows of silt and nutrients and the migrations of riverine creatures. They affect the livelihoods of people living downriver, too, as conditions for fishing and farming change around them. For towns and farms above the dam, the reservoir may provide a source of water more reliable than the changing monsoons. Yet, having directly displaced around a hundred thousand families2 from relatively poor and marginalised rural communities, the power generated by the dam will primarily serve a different set of people: those who can most afford to pay for it. Much of what we call “development” across the globe has followed this modus operandi for centuries, dismantling the systems of the non-human world in service to “economic growth,” while doling out the costs and benefits unevenly among people.
This hints at the shape of things to come.
Closer to the coast, the Godavari fans out into India’s third-largest river delta before emptying into the Bay of Bengal. Its network of distributary rivers delineates verdant islets edged by mangrove swamps or soft, wide beaches. Much of the land is occupied by shady coconut groves surrounding low-density villages, whose inhabitants are regularly seen standing along the roads to fish the rivers or taking small boats out to fish the sea. One resident of the Konaseema islets told me that the sea level has been rising in recent decades, causing saltwater intrusion into their fields. As a result, some years ago, they were forced to adjust their livelihoods by abandoning paddy to cultivate coconuts and prawns instead.
The sea level has been rising because the ocean is heating up, causing its volume to expand. Ancient mountain glaciers and the ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica are also melting away, slowly adding their volumes of water to the sea. When we burn fossil fuels and destroy forests, carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gasses accumulate in the atmosphere, forming a layer of insulation around our planet that traps the sun’s heat. As the globe warms, familiar patterns of heat, drought, wind and precipitation are changing.
A recent paper based on new methodology finds that the global sea level is expected to rise by at least twenty-seven centimetres3, even if we somehow arrest global warming at our present 1.2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial temperatures4. That rise could happen more steadily—maybe at the current rate of about three-and-a-half millimetres per year5—or in bursts, if larger chunks of ice begin to slough off of Antarctica, suddenly sloshing the level by several centimetres in a single year.
Climate scientists expect this year and the next to be hotter than 2022, with a fifty-percent likelihood that the global average temperature will breach the “safe” 1.5-degree threshold within the next five years6. A new, AI-modelled study finds the world’s present course of heating suggests “a nearly 70% chance that the two-degree threshold would be crossed between 2044 and 2065, even if emissions rapidly decline,”7 thus surpassing the catastrophic threshold set by the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change half a century before 2100—the expected timeline upon which the IPCC bases its carefully calculated scenarios for reducing emissions globally.
Exactly how this will play out remains uncertain. The only real certainties are that, as we continue to burn fossil fuels, the planet will continue to warm, and each fraction of a degree of warming intensifies climate consequences by more than the previous fraction. The climate will become more unstable and the sea will rise even higher and faster, with devastating effects.
Given India’s long coastline and its total reliance on predictable patterns of rainfall and steady rates of snow-replenished, glacial meltwater to feed its people, the mounting threats of climate change are real and urgent. It behoves us, as a nation, to take aggressive action to mitigate these threats by reducing our use of coal, oil and gas, by preserving and expanding mature forests. But, given that we demand more electricity and gasoline to power our increasingly urban, consumerist lives while pursuing a model of development based on pulling more people into energy-intensive lifestyles, the central government has declared its intention to more than double energy generation capacity by 2030, mostly by rapidly expanding low-carbon energy sources. As a low-emissions, renewable resource, the Polavaram dam might be regarded as an example of “green” energy, never mind its immense ecological and human costs.
But, to get a real handle on our predicament, we cannot ignore these costs. We must reckon with the underlying reality that our mounting harms to natural systems have thrust us into a condition of ecological overshoot. This means we are depleting essential resources—perhaps most alarmingly, healthy soils—by annihilating living systems, extracting resources and producing pollution at a rate faster than planetary systems can replenish themselves, faster than natural geochemical cycles can restabilise themselves or the beleaguered biosphere can regain its integrity. Humanity’s rate of environmental despoliation has already exceeded at least six of nine known biophysical limits to our planet’s stabilising systems8. Only one of these systems is the climate.
Carbon dioxide, methane and other greenhouse gases that drive global warming, and the associated particulate matter that clogs and destroys our lungs—as well as, no doubt, the lungs of other animals—are only two types of pollution that industrial consumerist lifestyles generate. There is also the massive chemical runoff from intensive farming, including artificial fertilisers and pesticides, which cause disastrous harm to soil, insects and water bodies. Pollution, acidification and overfishing of the oceans damage marine life. Industrial effluents poison lands and waterways. Meanwhile, per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances—also called “forever chemicals”—and microplastics have become so pervasive in the environment that every person and other living being is constantly eating, drinking and breathing them in, likely contributing to the present epidemic of infertility, among other health concerns. Light pollution disrupts the nocturnal cycles of plants and animals.
Likewise, ongoing habitat destruction—including the cutting of forests; the damming, diversion and draining of rivers, swamps and marshlands; the dredging of mountains, riverbanks and seabeds; the planting of vast acreages of monocultures—is rapidly depleting the planet of animal and plant populations, reducing the diversity of life both within and across species. With these actions, we are fundamentally destroying the complex, inter-networked system of living beings that top predator species such as humans require for basic survival. These living systems literally produce the air, clean the water, and comprise the soil upon which our lives depend. By threatening the stability of this environmental substrate, ecological overshoot represents an existential crisis for humanity as a species—and, certainly, for industrial civilisation.
All attempts to mitigate climate change must take heed of overshoot. Elevating solutions that narrowly target only the single symptom of climate change will certainly prove ineffective at safeguarding living systems. Pursuing technological fixes that are designed to maintain the geopolitical and socioeconomic structures of industrial capitalism, and its mythology of eternally rising gross domestic product, is likely even to exacerbate ecological overshoot. Even renewable energies—whether solar, wind or hydropower—are harvested only by building non-renewable infrastructures that will massively accelerate mining and industrial-waste production, further annihilation of habitats and loss of biodiversity.
AS PART OF INDIA’S internationally declared commitment to help mitigate climate change, the central government intends to install five hundred gigawatts of renewable energy capacity during this decade. With this, it aims to reduce the nation’s emissions intensity—the amount of greenhouse gas emissions per unit of GDP—by forty-five percent, relative to what it had been in 20059. Plans to decarbonise the energy sector include building solar and wind farms, hydroelectric dams and nuclear plants10; retrofitting coal thermal plants to burn crop stubble11; exploring the production of “green” hydrogen12; and encouraging the public to adopt electric vehicles13.
Solar is slated to comprise the bulk of energy generation capacity—although, significantly, its problem of requiring companion capacity for power storage has not yet been worked out. Wind will account for the second largest slice. Meanwhile, coal energy capacity is also being expanded. Coal use is expected to peak between 202714 and 2032, at a rate forty percent higher than today15. Presumably, only after that would it be slowly phased out over four decades, in order to achieve India’s declared target of “net-zero” greenhouse gas emissions by 2070, perhaps as low-carbon energy sources and battery capacities are further developed, although no explicit roadmap for the ultimate phaseout of coal use has yet been made clear.
Some international experts have welcomed India’s expanded ambitions, even while critics point out that these efforts remain insufficient to help the world meet its target of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius16. Yet, a different angle of criticism notes that this litany of megaprojects, including dams and solar farms, ultimately constitute a kind of internal colonialism, wherein the needs and desires of the upper classes are prioritised over those of people living closer to the land. These include oppressed castes and Adivasis, whose traditional lands, resources and livelihoods are stripped away in order to provide materials, from water to timber to fuel, and space for dams, power plants and other projects, that serve primarily the wealthier, urban-dwelling people of disproportionately upper-caste backgrounds, who consume the most. In fact, India’s climate mitigation scheme is chiefly about producing more power, even if that comes from burning coal, in the interest of economic growth and industrial development, while allowing the resultant burdens—of displacement, lost livelihoods, compounding economic insecurity, degraded ecosystems and depleted landscapes—to accrue mostly to the rural poor, the marginalised, as well as the land and all its creatures. I mention the land and its creatures here not as a romantic, rhetorical flourish but because they must not be left out of consideration, as essential as people.
It is worth noting that none of the ambitious-sounding facts and figures included in India’s updated climate change mitigation declaration account for justice or equitability in supporting and protecting its most vulnerable citizens, as though these matters are a separate concern. Nor does it enumerate intentions to extend mature forests and wetlands, regenerate soils, preserve biodiversity, nor any other broad environmental concern. Government authorities may speak of “sustainable development,” but sustainable, socially equitable programmes that finally ameliorate livelihood insecurity and childhood undernourishment, through environmental renewal, remain as elusive as ever.
But India can meet its narrowly focused climate-mitigation targets without addressing the larger problem of ecological overshoot. In fact, this approach tends to be preferred at various international summits, all of which are committed first to upholding the economics of capitalist growth above everything else. Indian elites across party lines remain committed to the dominant model of progress and development based on the unsustainable, consumption-led playbook of the West, the same approach that reproduces the dynamics of colonialism.
Can we imagine no other way forward? What might a just transition to a sustainable mode of life even look like?
Four recent books provide an array of insights and ideas from scientists, policy wonks, government spokespersons, environmentalists, activists, educators and others. The essays and reports that make up these volumes are all concerned with implementing sound responses to climate change that are inclusive and equitable. Three of them deal primarily with the challenges and inadequacies of present policymaking. Climate Justice in India, edited by Prakash Kashwan and published in 2022, demonstrates how historical disenfranchisement leaves some groups not only more vulnerable to the impacts of the climate crisis but, potentially, also to the technological, market-minded solutions that constitute India’s primary response.
Published in the same year, The Politics of Climate Change and Uncertainty in India, edited by Lyla Mehta, Hans Nicolai Adam and Shilpi Srivastava, takes a more anthropological approach, focussing on how marginal communities perceive environmental uncertainty differently than civic authorities tend to do. It considers how a lack of direct engagement with the perspectives of marginalised groups in formulating climate action plans adversely affects the outcomes. The 2019 book India in a Warming World: Integrating Climate Change and Development, edited by Navroz K Dubash, presents some of the intricacies involved in turning abstract goals, such as emissions reduction targets, into policy agendas. And then there is Alternative Futures: India Unshackled, edited by Ashish Kothari and KJ Joy and published in 2017, which refreshingly attempts to imagine what truly sustainable and just futures might actually look like.
IN 2008, the central government created the National Action Plan on Climate Change, focussed around emissions mitigation and climate adaptation. As part of this, it directed states to create their own State Actions Plans on Climate Change, to be aligned with the missions of the NAPCC, guided by an overarching principle of “co-benefits”—that is, states were to find opportunities where development objectives could be met with climate mitigation or adaptation efforts. As India in a Warming World describes, while this co-benefits approach sounds promising in principle, it has not spurred novel thinking or new approaches to development. Neither has it provided clear guidance around which to build well-developed SAPCCs or a broadly shared vision and unified effort between the centre and the states, which are primarily concerned with issues that impact their local political contests. States and cities then back-fit their pet programmes into the logic of climate co-benefits. As Elizabeth Gogoi, who is involved with the process, explains, “State governments drafted their SAPCC with the understanding (or assumption) that they would receive central government funding to implement it and, as such, the plans were conceived as a set of fundable projects—often reading more like a ‘wish list.’”17 Another participant admitted bluntly, “The alignment is happening only for budgetary reasons.”18 This disconnection is further exacerbated by the lack of expertise and capacity among state governments to adequately study and forecast the effects of climate change in order to properly respond in their development plans.
It cannot help that central-government policies on climate change are not formulated first around what is feasible to meet people’s needs at home but rather the need to meet emissions targets declared in response to global climate accords. Indeed, reading about the formal intrigues of international climate negotiations, covered in some detail by contributors to Warming World, it is striking how much the thinking and strategising around the table devolves to political, non-environmental considerations—potential contributions to global warming become negotiating chips in unrelated geopolitical games or business concerns. One contributor, Sandeep Sengupta, tells us that “the enhanced importance that it attached to building a closer bilateral relationship with the US and the material and security benefits that it secured in return,” such as the bilateral nuclear deal in 2005, is what ultimately made India more receptive to the climate accord terms preferred by the West.19 Another contributor, D Raghunandan, argues that India has been late to appreciate the seriousness of climate change impacts within its own borders and, in fact, “approached the climate negotiations as primarily a problem of foreign relations, rather than as a forum to deal with and help tackle its serious vulnerabilities to climate impacts.”20
At times, the apparent lack of fear or urgency about the actual changing climate and what it means for ordinary people is exasperating. From the longstanding recalcitrance of many nations against accepting responsibility for their share of emissions, including India’s own resistance to commit to emissions reductions, to the “artful ambiguity”21 of the texts under debate and the incessant posturing and bullying, the accounts of climate gamesmanship included in this volume strongly edify the sense that what goes on in the name of climate talks is, to borrow the apt phrasing of the activist Greta Thunberg, just more “blah, blah, blah.” Of course, Indian officialdom is not at all unique in their apparent lack of urgency or efficacy. We know from Warming World and other coverage that most participants at the annual climate summits— except perhaps those from the Small Island Developing States, the impassioned youth groups and the UN secretary general—routinely come off as more concerned about projecting their power, preserving their own piece of the pie and shielding their own modes of denialism.
What results from this prevailing international approach is a load of technocracy—layers of generalised, technical details about climate change and mitigation intended to direct government policymaking—that finds no graspable touch points with lives on the ground. To take but one sample of the difficulties involved in managing the implementation of abstract technological solutionism, consider the depth and scale of social upheaval required in the transition to a renewable-energy economy, as outlined in Warming World by Ashim Roy, Benny Kuruvilla and Ankit Bhardwaj. To begin with, the project requires a rethink of who should even own the energy infrastructure, from generation to distribution. It means reskilling the labour force for jobs supporting wind, solar, nuclear and other growing energy sector technologies. This includes rebuilding local economies that are presently dependent upon coal-mining, in part by revitalising labour unions to transition coal workers into the renewable sector and provide protections. And then there is the matter of justly addressing resistance movements against forced population removals to accommodate the megaprojects, as well as creating social safety nets against the impacts of climate change and the disruptions of these new infrastructures themselves. “A ‘just transition’ approach,” the authors observe, “requires a wider framing than public ownership and orientation of energy infrastructure, to one that encompasses most social infrastructure.”22
Elaborating on how deliberations in the global halls of power trickle down with little effective translation for meaningful action in towns and villages, Kashwan states in the preface to Climate Justice,
The journey that market-based solutions would have to take, from Bali [which hosted the global climate summit in 2007] to places like Bastar in Chhattisgarh, where they would be eventually implemented, is not paved with the freedom of choice that pro-market advocates like to celebrate. Markets are designed to facilitate the accumulation of surplus in the hands of those who can channel it higher up in the ‘food chain’. In most cases, the market ecosystem is essentially a centralizing force and does not work for the poor and marginalized.23
Consider, for example, the coalminers of Jharia, Jharkhand, where coalfield fires have been burning for over a century, subjecting workers and nearby communities to toxic levels of pollution—even as they remain among the most underserved by the electrification they bring to the rest of the country. Since the mass burning of coal first took root, the landscapes surrounding mining sites have been so environmentally devastated that Adivasis and other oppressed communities living nearby have been unable to pursue their traditional livelihoods of subsistence horticulture and collecting forest produce, pursuits that require a healthy local ecology. In response, many of those affected were forced to take up labour as miners, an occupation injurious to their own health, the health of their communities and the health of those who live near the coal-fired power plants.
Miners constitute an easily exploited underclass of labourers, who not only disproportionately suffer the ravages of coal-mining but also stand to lose their livelihoods without recompense when India transitions away from coal toward “greener” energy systems. While policymakers might readily point out these problems, precious little seems to be in the works to address these inequities. Indeed, other vulnerable communities continue to be similarly disrupted and displaced, losing their livelihoods to make way for new energy projects, such as Polavaram and the Charanka Solar Park in Gujarat.
Or consider that, as glaciers recede and groundwater levels drop, oppressed communities across India face greater threats of water scarcity. In a country where the upper classes routinely waste water—not least in ubiquitous RO purification systems, which are known to discard up to eighty percent of the water they filter—fewer than half of Indian households even have access to piped water. In cities, families of oppressed castes, who are often forced to live in “slums” due to hereditary poverty and social stigma, are denied water connections because their settlements are not sanctioned, even though upper-class housing colonies that also violate construction regulations are not similarly penalised.
In nearly half of India’s villages, Dalit families face obstacles in accessing water24. Even attempts to make potable water more available often get corrupted by elite capture, in which the privileged castes are able to control the new resources. For example, when the Gujarat government’s Water and Sanitation Management Organisation worked with villagers to install a new drinking well, upper-caste representatives were able to influence the site selection to their own advantage. Similarly, when local authorities build new stand pumps meant for all villagers to access water, upper-caste members have been known in some cases to violently attack Dalits who attempt to use the pumps. As Arpitha Kodiveri and Rishiraj Sen point out in Climate Justice, even when Dalit workers were tasked to clean up Chennai and clear the dead bodies after flooding in 2018, they were not provided adequate drinking water. Working in the heat, especially without access to adequate drinking water, is already causing rising rates of kidney disease in India25, placing an increasing disease burden upon labourers who, again, disproportionately belong to oppressed castes. These are but a few ways inequality is enmeshed with climate concerns.
Yet, while several of the city and state action plans do acknowledge that women and the poor are especially vulnerable to the harms of climate change, none of the several reviewed in Climate Justice provide any specifics on how to address these vulnerabilities—and none of the plans acknowledge the particular vulnerabilities of oppressed castes at all. In failing to do so, they fail to safeguard against the many ways by which the burdens of climate change and of its mitigation are shifted onto these already vulnerable groups. Poverty, gender, caste and other systemic inequalities are the very conduits through which the depredations and challenges of climate change reach into individual lives, and must be understood as central to the issues that the SAPCCs attempt to address. Any programme that seeks to protect people from the risks of climate change or promote real development must, then, address the inequality itself.
As a mode of redressal, Kashwan suggests,
In the context of the climate crisis, philosophers argue that some actors, for example, fossil fuel corporations and the countries of the Global North, which are responsible for the climate crisis, owe restitution to those most affected by it. This principle informs the demands of countries in the Global South, that industrially advanced countries pay for the loss and damages linked to the climate crisis. Indeed, such demands could also be applied within national borders. In India, this relates most directly to the restitution of land, forest, and other resource rights to Dalits and Adivasis, who suffer high rates of landlessness and criminalization of resource use because of state control of resources.26
What then emerges most powerfully in Climate Justice is a discussion of environmental attitudes and practices within India that encourage ongoing forms of internal colonialism—though the authors never use this term—which, today, is also an arm of global neocolonialism. The construction of solar farms drives but the latest land grab in a historical trend of co-opting the resources and labour of the less powerful, beginning, arguably, with the entrenchment of the caste system itself, some two thousand years ago. By the Mughal period, forest dwellers were increasingly displaced from their ancestral lands, as the commons were slowly enclosed for the benefit of royal trophy-hunting and animal-collecting. This trend gained speed when the British not only enclosed forest commons but also forcibly settled pastoralists and other nomadic communities, branding some as “criminal tribes.”27 Such policies resulted from the worldview of British commercialism, in which only profit-generating lands and labour were regarded as desirable and developed. The British began industrial-scale logging programmes, sometimes planting non-native trees as cash crops in place of native trees, which degraded the forests upon which Adivasis had long been dependent for their subsistence. However, the enclosure of the commons and destruction of the forests, displacing Dalits, Adivasis and other marginalised communities, gained its greatest force in independent India, which accelerated the process even further after liberalisation in the 1990s.
This history has come to define the priorities and beneficiaries of modern environmental interventions. In this way, mainstream environmental ideals lead us to seek solutions that disregard the lives that fall beyond the state’s project of industrial capitalism, such as those displaced by solar farms and dams, even though their ways of life might have been genuinely less damaging to the environment. They lead us to imagine that poverty degrades the environment when, in fact, wealthier people produce far vaster quantities of pollution and environmental damage through a greater consumption of energy and materials, while they live at a distance from the resultant harms produced, including trash, sewage, coal-burning particulates, plastic waste and toxic effluents from mining and the manufacture of goods.
Mainstream notions of environmentalism also simplistically lead us to presume that merely planting trees—any tree, anywhere—is an unalloyed environmental good. In fact, planting trees is not at all similar to preserving mature forest and, if the wrong trees are planted in the wrong locations, it can be deleterious to local environments. We end up pursuing “conservation” on the Western model, which entails the enclosure of erstwhile commons into protected parks and preserves, as if to recreate some imagined state of “pristine nature.” No such condition has ever existed, not since the first people arrived in the subcontinent, some seventy thousand years ago.
Today, Adivasis are not allowed to hunt wild game in their ancestral forests because we imagine them responsible for the endangerment of forest animals. But it was not their hunting that decimated Indian forest life. That distinction goes to the members of the Mughal and, especially, the colonial elite, Indian and British, whose modes of sport and status-seeking extirpated whole populations of lions, tigers, elephants and other prized animals28, destabilising entire ecosystems that have never recovered. Adivasis, by contrast, had been thriving far more sustainably within the limits of their forest ecosystems, until the past several centuries, during which their social and subsistence systems were officiously dismantled, by degrees, and refashioned to make them more similar to townsfolk, whose subsistence options are tied to markets. This impoverished them in the name of “development” while giving control of their lands and resources to sport-hunters, loggers, miners and property developers. In seeking climate mitigation and adaption strategies, it is, therefore, essential to address not only existing social inequities but also mainstream attitudes that prevent us from framing the problems and their redressals in a manner that is compatible with social and environmental justice and ecological sustainability. In order to do so, authorities must engage directly with the most vulnerable groups, allowing them to define the problems they face and help formulate appropriate answers nearer to their own needs and lived realities.
AS THE CONTRIBUTORS to Politics of Climate Change and Uncertaintypoint out, communities living in marginal environments—areas that states have historically found difficult to develop for large-scale agriculture or regularised urban development, including Kutch, the Sundarbans and parts of Mumbai—have always lived with uncertainty. Their own knowledge systems often provide guidance for dealing with fluctuating conditions, based on past experience. Their modes of resilience did not require them to be able to quantify or predict difficult conditions or opportunities, only that they had the freedom to choose the best response at the moment when conditions arose.
Government authorities and their spokespersons, by contrast, typically attempt to address uncertainty in probabilistic terms, looking for narrow causal agents that can be statistically accounted for in scientific models. But trying to master, rather than learning to accommodate, the unpredictability of the environment can shut down viable pathways of resilience for those in marginal environments and thereby end up worsening their situation. For instance, attempting to build concrete embankments against the encroaching sea, as has been tried in irregular colonies in Mumbai and the Sundarbans, is both costly and ineffective, ultimately compounding the risks for those who undertake it.
The most tried-and-true strategy to mitigate livelihood uncertainty had always been migration. But, in today’s world of settled lives and bureaucratised social infrastructures, national borders, capitalist property and labour regimes, this poses problems. As the commons disappear, nomadic groups find it difficult to move freely to gather resources as needed or, in some cases, even to graze their animals. And, when land is lost to erosion or salination—an increasingly common disaster in coastal areas, due to rising seas and strengthening cyclones—families cannot simply take up a fresh patch of land somewhere nearby, as earlier generations had done. Owing to the twists and turns of land ownership or tenureship, through centuries of migrations and various forms of conquest—including land grabs, population relocations and displacements—families who lose their land to the seas often hold no deeds and are left without recompense or recourse through official systems.
People on the margins also recognise that their scope of uncertainty reaches beyond climate change to include the full spectrum of environmental changes in their region: encroaching urban developments, annihilation of mangroves and wetlands, incursions from industrial modes of extraction—such as fishing trawlers—and the construction of factories, roads, piers or other obstacles that restrict their movement and degrade the lands and resources they depend upon. On top of this, being subject to government policies, such as the requirement for property deeds or the enclosure of commons, or falling through the cracks of responsibility between various ministries or departments, introduces its own survival uncertainties. Women experience additional factors of uncertainty when men in their families must migrate in search of wage work, leaving them desperately seeking sources of income more reliably close to hand, disadvantaged by patriarchal norms, including wage suppression, while remaining simultaneously responsible for the care of the young, the elderly and the ill. Often, they must travel ever farther to access water, find fuel or avail other essential resources and services.
Today, it is all these factors working together that lead to what the authors of Politics of Climate Change term “radical uncertainty,” wherein traditional knowledge systems or coping strategies no longer provide adequate guidance for adaptation. This forces already marginalised people to undertake riskier, less familiar, more labour intensive, less provisionally supportive livelihoods—what the authors call “distress diversification”—which does little to surmount their vulnerability. For example, in the face of saltwater intrusion into their fields, some communities of wet rice farmers in the Sundarbans have switched to farming betel leaf, requiring them to take loans from moneylenders at high interest rates. The shift away from growing food they could eat in favour of a cash crop they must farm dangerously close to the water’s edge, and the undertaking of loans to do so, bring these farmers into a riskier livelihood strategy, taken on only because all better options have fallen away in the new, market-led subsistence environment.
It is these lived realities that climate change action plans must address if they are to succeed in protecting people or in delivering them meaningful development. One way to begin is for scientists and other authorities to engage those with indigenous experiential knowledge, to understand what constitutes the best survival response for them. At the same time, officialdom also stands to learn from their familiarity with the land, with plant or animal breeds that yield better in drought, for instance, or their knowledge of how patterns of precipitation have changed, which can then even be useful for scientific modelling.
And yet, as Shrivastava and her colleagues point out,
While India is on track to achieve—or even surpass—its ambitious INDCs [Intended Nationally Determined Contributions, a country’s declared goals for emissions reduction], which is a positive signal, questions remain on the fundamental premise of being closely linked to a green economy discourse that is associated with business and market-friendly principles, technological optimism and neglect of issues concerning power inequity, marginalisation and resource distribution … prioritising mitigation in state-led discourses on climate change within cities has led to the dominance of market-driven agendas and business ventures, often in the name of energy efficiency and the green economy.29
Prioritising metrics such as GDP growth, rather than easing vulnerability or creating bottom-up strategies to advance wellbeing, generates a homogenising notion of development that draws all peoples further into the orbit of industrial capitalism. But, when this economic system ultimately seeks to extract more resources for less investment—whether in terms of money or the general wellbeing of humans and other living things—funnelling the greatest benefits upward to those at the centre, while “externalising” the costs to the margins, including the most powerless human and non-human communities, and the commons, including the atmosphere, the waterways, the oceans, the soils, and all forms of wilderness, it compounds the vulnerabilities of the marginal. Indeed, it is this very logic of capitalism, as several authors in both Climate Justice and Politics of Climate Change allude, that ultimately drives climate change and other forms of environmental breakdown.
Another thought that arises from Politics of Climate Change in its discussion of environmental uncertainty—though the authors do not directly grapple with this angle—is that bureaucratic nation states are by design ill-equipped to deal with the compounding uncertainties that the changing climate deals out. For instance, governments need to know when, what and where to plant, predictably, across years; their top-down systems falter when conditions change drastically and suddenly, requiring a rapid response. Modern governments want everyone to settle into fixed addresses, with papers proving property ownership. They want people to maintain steady, formal employment and consume market-traded commodities in a relentlessly growing economy, and they want industry to be able to maximise their extraction of resources and labour as cheaply as possible, both to serve the appetites of their citizens who belong to the mainstream and to remain economically competitive in the global market.
These governments can manage change, even crisis, if it comes with slow trendlines and predictability. If not, the systems they manage begin to sputter and fail, as was visible during the COVID-19 pandemic. But the acute threat of the pandemic fortunately receded within a few years, before medical and other systems were rendered broken beyond recovery. Climate change, however, is just getting started. It will continue to change relentlessly and aggressively for decades, if not centuries. And, while its global patterns have been modelled and are broadly foreseeable, the character and magnitude of its localised effects remain unpredictable, beyond mastery.
It is no wonder that the SAPCCs remain inadequate to the task of translating the goals of the centre into the practical schemes needed to deal with pressing local issues like migration, livelihood insecurity, access to water, contestations over land rights, urbanisation, and social and economic disenfranchisement. The plans’ deficits are not likely to be rectified by merely changing the bureaucratic processes. They are, after all, produced by a system that is built to preserve the status quo: the top-down arrangements of power, the finance-centric ideologies and presumptions of civic development. Plans and visions that seek to protect this sociopolitical edifice cannot and do not question the system itself. As such, they will never be adequate to the task of confronting climate change, which is not a crisis lying atop this system but rather a crisis lurking within its very machinery.
INDIA’S ONGOING DEVELOPMENT toward an industrial economy has produced at most 3.4 percent of cumulative atmospheric carbon emissions since 185030. And, though India’s emissions are rising, each individual in India today emits, on average, 1.9 tons of carbon dioxide annually, placing us well below the global average of 4.9 tons.31 But this again masks deep inequalities within India. The carbon footprints of the wealthier segments are up to seven times higher than those of the poorest32, with the wealthiest ten percent carrying an average carbon footprint closer to five tons—matching the global average—which also means that most Indians produce far less than two tons of carbon emissions annually.
In order to equitably meet the goal of limiting global heating to under two degrees Celsius, nobody’s carbon footprint should ideally exceed the range of about 1.6 to 2.8 tons33, closer to the level of the average Indian. So until all of us adjust our lifestyles to bring down the consumption and emissions of the wealthiest to a similar level as the average, allowing the poorest to raise their consumption levels, this argument enables access to resources for the upper classes, while glossing over the damages we cause.
Achieving development in the way the West has done cannot be separated from the intensive material extraction, pollution and habitat destruction that inevitably result in ecological overshoot, including climate change. Increasing our fossil fuel infrastructure and dependence upon growing rates of energy consumption can never be a path toward emissions reduction, just as promoting nicotine addiction before banning smoking is not a way to stop people from smoking. A systemic “addiction” to fossil fuels and overconsumption is, in fact, a key part of the problem faced by the West, impeding their own hopes for social and economic transition. It will not behove India to get more deeply mired in their same predicament by chasing the same illusions of development.
Meanwhile, most of us continue to envision a future in which we commute to our jobs and send our children to school to prepare them for the kinds of work we do in an economy similar to the one that presently employs us. This is in denial of the fact that the planet around us is fundamentally changing. In truth, we face an increasingly unknown world: a changing climate regime and shrinking of the biosphere unlike anything any human community has experienced since the dawn of humanity. It is a fact so startling that it hovers beyond our imaginations, even as it engulfs us in real time. Meeting our moment in history will require us all to engage in broader imaginative exercises. It is this that Ashish Kothari and KJ Joy have attempted in Alternative Futures. Contributed by a broad range of social and environmental thinkers and activists, the essays in this volume go well beyond the usual prescriptions to reduce private vehicle usage, increase public transit, plant more trees and more closely monitor tiger populations—all of which are in their limited ways important, but will not amount to nearly enough. Rather, this fresher imaginary suggests that, using as guides a range of principles long understood by communities who have lived much closer to the land, more heedful of ecological limits, it is possible to envision sustainable societies of the future.
For example, official land use policy has so far amounted to creating exclusive patches of protected forest, casting out the peoples who had sustainably stewarded it for generations while simultaneously encouraging industries to inflict extreme environmental harm to the vaster tracts outside of these reserves in the form of logging, mining, obstruction of waterways and other economically privileged activities. But fragmented patches of exclusionary conservation cannot support the same breadth of biodiversity as larger, whole forests once did. Nor can wildlife crowded into these small, protected enclaves move freely between them to expand their ranges or their available gene pools. So, if the goal is to preserve biodiversity, the present methods are poorly conceived. Similarly, targeting individual species for protection, such as tigers or turtles, without also maintaining their fully intact ecosystems can lead to ecological imbalances that cause other problems, including overpopulation of some species and conflict with humans.
Despite this modern history of accelerating environmental harms, however, India has managed to retain enough biodiversity to remain one of the world’s 17 megadiversity countries. In one essay in Alternative Futures, Kartik Shanker, Meera Anna Oommen and Nitin Rai suggest this is largely due to India’s much longer history in which its various communities had found ways to live alongside other species, often building indigenous forms of conservation into their cultural practices. But indigenous knowledge and conservation systems have been increasingly pushed aside, especially since economic liberalisation resulted in increasing exploitation of forests and other wilderness resources. Today, even protected areas have been commodified, first for tourism income and now as repositories of carbon.
In contrast to the present schemes, the authors suggest reconciliation ecology, an approach that advocates creating mosaics of openly conjoined landscapes that simultaneously fulfil a multiplicity of uses for both people and wildlife, allowing for greater movement and coexistence of human and non-human beings. Among other policy impacts, the socioeconomic costs and benefits of various agrarian practices, urbanisation, transit and other considerations would have to be weighed more equally with the ecological costs and benefits, such as watershed replenishment, soil health, forest integrity, plant pollination and animal migration. No doubt, this challenges the paramountcy of the industrial capitalist paradigm that defines land use development. But, especially in India, where a great diversity of subsistence practices and lifeways still exist, including regions of low-intensity agriculture and common land tenureship that remain friendlier to biodiversity, reconciliation ecology could be a viable strategy for conservation into the future, one that is far more sensible than importing Western notions such as exclusive wilderness.
Shripad Dharmadhikary and Himanshu Thakkar imagine a future in which water is valued as an integral part of many different ecosystems, rather than solely for its usage by humans. “One of the central and defining features of our prevailing mindset,” they write, “has been the notion that any drop of water that is not extracted out for human use is a ‘waste.’”34 But India has well-developed traditional knowledges for water conservation and harvesting technologies, which do not rely upon building large-scale, environmentally catastrophic infrastructures, such as river interlinking systems and dams. Addressing India’s water stresses would mean, among other policy changes, handing over the management of water bodies to local communities—returning them to the public commons. In so doing, water can be conserved and managed where it falls, protecting local wetlands, sustaining watersheds and recharging underground aquifers. Farmers would have to adjust their cropping patterns to fit the local ecology, rather than trying to grow crops in environments unsuited to them, as access is democratised through the cooperative decision-making that once characterised commons management.
In a similar vein, Pallav Das uses the example of Mendha Lekha to observe how Adivasi movements are attempting to resist state and corporate power. In this Maharashtrian village, the Gond community voted to reassert their traditional system of working the land as a commons by transferring all two hundred hectares of their farmlands into the ownership of their gram sabha—village council—representing 52 families. Now, the villagers make collective decisions regarding the land and control the management of their own forest produce, water-harvesting, and any related projects for income generation. In this way, all the villagers are fully locally employed, according to their capabilities. Men and women share power equally in the village committees. Das asks whether it is “possible to replicate this experiment elsewhere in India”—a question that resonates with those also posed by Aruna Roy, Nikhil Dey and Praavita Kashyap, whose essay traces the history of people’s movements against elite capture of political power since Indian independence.
Or let us imagine, with Ilse Köhler-Rollefson and Hanwant Singh Rathore, a future in which pastoralists are again given range to roam with their herds. Millions of Indians still follow pastoralist ways, despite the disappearance of the commons through which they once freely travelled. Their ancient, decentralised mode of care for their herds significantly benefits the health of the animals, the environment and the people who depend on their produce. Travelling herds can enjoy a robust diet of wild grasses and crop stubble, which they turn into wholesome milk, meat and fertiliser. That fertiliser not only plays a crucial part in upholding the fertility of the landscapes the animals are a part of, it is also a key component of KJ Joy’s vision: a biomass-based production system that would revitalise rural landscapes and livelihoods through renewable energy and materials in a bountiful, but circular, economy.
These are a mere sampling from a thick repository of frameworks and ideas, each of them thoughtfully argued and enthusiastically imagined, many based upon a combination of historical data and living proof-of-concept projects the authors are involved with. Taken together, the essays in Alternative Futures do not constitute a singular blueprint. Nor do they promise pat answers. But all of them are conceptually sourced from India’s indigenous strengths, knowledges, environmental realities and experiential understandings, wherever bits and pieces of sustainable and equitable strategies have arisen and persisted. On the whole, the essays implicitly or explicitly recognise that human beings are part and parcel of nature—the more human societies have attempted to separate themselves from the rest of nature, the more unsustainable those societies have become. And the authors work with the understanding that any human economy is a subsystem of the larger ecological system in which it occurs, and is therefore bound by its ecological limits.
Each of these vast concerns of any human society—from the conservation of water, land and biodiversity to matters of democracy, governance and legal structures; strategies for managing natural resources, human livelihoods, and patterns of production and consumption; visions for sustainable and equitable urban and rural living; support for arts, languages and education—are deeply intertwined, as the essays make clear. From the way we distribute social power and material wealth to the way we distribute water. From the way we build our cities to the way we use the countryside. These essays and ideas like them need to become part of the discourse on climate, the environment and India’s future for, unlike market-based, technological solutions, they can provide a framework for a more sustainable and equitable future. As Sharachchandra Lele and Geetanjoy Sahu put it in their essay on environmental governance,
environmentalism would not be just about sustaining a certain lifestyle into the future, but also about rethinking the content of that lifestyle itself, as well as its repercussions on others (human and non-human) in the present, that is, quality of life, sustainability as well as environmental justice. Closely coupled to these values would be concern for social justice (concern for the marginalized). Conversely, economic growth as a social goal would be replaced by a focus on meeting basic needs and the quality of life for all within environmental limits—with the understanding that these limits may be flexed through technological innovation but may not be broken, and, in tinkering with them, one must observe the ‘precautionary principle.’ Finally, there would be a deep commitment to democratic governance, for its own sake, as the process to be adopted in taking decisions about balancing between material needs, non-material quality of life, long-term sustainability, equity, and justice.35
SO MANY PEOPLE today are flummoxed by global and domestic lack of progress in staunching climate change. After all, if we have known about this threat for decades, why is so little actually being accomplished? With all the plans and models and scientific knowhow, why does nothing seem to be working? But the answers to these questions are not at all surprising. First, those with power and wealth do not easily concede their power or wealth or the mechanisms that enabled it, though precisely this is what is required to effectively respond to climate change. Second, most plans to “solve” climate change involve doing more of what caused the problem in the first place, which was to work against natural systems, rather than with them, by diverting excessive amounts of energy and materials toward our narrow human project of constructing deep social hierarchies based around expanding overconsumption, a process that has reached its zenith under fossil-fuelled industrial capitalism.
Pursuing any increasingly energy- and materials-intensive growth strategy is not a path to a liveable future. Any appropriate and salutary response to such a deeply systemic problem as climate change caused by ecological overshoot—or anthropogenic climate change—will not vainly attempt to rectify it through the logic of markets that seek to churn ecosystems into industrial profits. It will have to reshape more profoundly the present systems and cultural institutions that are unsustainable. Even the usually staid and conservative IPCC admitted this in its 2018 report, saying that “limiting warming to 1.5ºC is possible within the laws of chemistry and physics but would require unprecedented transitions in all aspects of society.”36
Any effective response to this planet now reinventing itself under our feet and over our heads will be, by definition, revolutionary. The end of petroleum-mining alone—whether that is reached by choice or by resource exhaustion—is a world in which most products we use in our everyday lives, made of ultra-cheap plastics, will no longer be feasible to produce. A vast range of industrial materials, from paints and lubricants to medical equipment and pharmaceuticals—all petroleum products: gone. This is a reality that no power grid transition can relieve. This is not to say that renewable energy sources will not be needed—electricity is required for essential considerations such as cooking and transportation—as the world transitions. But it is unavoidably clear that 1.4 billion Indians cannot consume energy and materials at the rate of the wealthiest ten percent. Questions about moderation and limits must become part of the national, and international, discussion. We need to be asking who benefits and who loses with each next lot of coal or lithium mined, or forest razed, or river dammed, or each next megaton of carbon dioxide burned off. Where do we locate the justice in that unit of extraction and pollution and destruction? How is it sustainable? How much is enough? And what, do we figure, will come next?
Meeting our moment in history requires of us the most difficult task of all: an individual and collective reckoning with our past, with our present, with who we are and who we want to be as a people and as a world. Building a sustainable and resilient human enterprise is neither the task of corporations nor the promise of modern technology. It is the work of humane societies and the promise of communities. It begins with telling stories about what is possible and desirable that are different from the stories that brought us to this brink.
If India truly wants to leapfrog the mistakes of the West and develop differently, it can begin by ceasing to follow it through any further missteps along the path of industrial consumerism, careening further into ecological overshoot and its existential risks for human beings and other living things. India can, instead, make good on the opening pledges contained in its INDC statement, apparently pulled from the deepest cultural substrate of this subcontinent:
To put forward and further propagate a healthy and sustainable way of living based on traditions and values of conservation and moderation, including through a mass movement for ‘LIFE’– ‘Lifestyle for Environment’ as a key to combating climate change. …
To adopt a climate friendly and a cleaner path than the one followed hitherto by others at corresponding level of economic development.37
But, at present, these words resound with the muffled thud of empty rhetoric.
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NOTES
1. Floods in Godavari put focus on plight of those displaced due to Polavaram project by Srinivasa Rao Apprasu. Hindustan Times, Aug 21, 2021
2. Polavaram—displaced and nowhere to go: Ineligible for rehabilitation, many in a fix by Shagun. Down to Earth, Dec 15 2021
3. Box, J.E., Hubbard, A., Bahr, D.B. et al. Greenland ice sheet climate disequilibrium and committed sea-level rise. Nat. Clim. Chang. 12, 808–813 (2022)
4. State of the climate: How the world warmed in 2022 by Zeke Hausfater. Carbon Brief, January, 2023
5. Climate Change: Global Sea Level by Rebecca Lindsey. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, USA, April, 2022
6. Warning of unprecedented heatwaves as El Niño set to return in 2023 by Damian Carrington. Guardian, January 16, 2023.
7. Earth is on track to exceed 1.5C warming in the next decade, study using AI finds by Gabrielle Canon. Guardian, January 30, 2023
8. For a discussion on the matter, see the webpages of the Stockholm Resilience Center.
9. India’s Updated First Nationally Determined Contribution Under Paris Agreement (2021-2030)
10. ibid
11. National Electricity Plan (Draft) Generation Vol-I. Ministry of Power. Central Electricity Authority, September, 2022
12. India set to achieve 450 GW renewable energy installed capacity by 2030. Ministry of New and Renewable Energy, October 2021
13. Mapping India's Energy Policy 2022 by By Prateek Aggarwal, et. al. International Institute for Sustainable Development, June 2022
14. Coal in 2022: India’s Climate and Energy Evolution by Madhura Joshi. E3G, January, 2022
15. Coal will stay strong even as solar shines in India’s energy transition by Kundan Panday. Mongabay, September 21, 2022
16. Q&A: What Does India’s Updated Paris Agreement Pledge Mean for Climate Change? Aruna Chandrasekhar in Carbon Brief, September 2022
17. State Climate Change Planning: Has It Reached the Mainstream? by Elizabeth Gogoi. India in a Warming World, p 371
18. From Margins to Mainstream? State Climate Change Planning in India by Navroz K. Dubash and Anu Jogesh. India in a Warming World, p 362
19. India’s Engagement in Global Climate Negotiations from Rio to Paris* by Sandeep Sengupta. India in a Warming World, p 137–8
20. India in International Climate Negotiations: Chequered Trajectory by D. Raghunandan. India in a Warming World, p 188
21. Present at the Creation by Chandrasekha Dasgupta. India in a Warming World, p 151
22. Energy and Climate Change: A Just Transition for Indian Labour by Ashim Roy, Benny Kuruvilla, and Ankit Bhardwaj. India in a Warming World, page 286
23. Preface and Acknowledgements by Prakash Kashwan. Climate Justice in India, pg xvii
24. Caste Discrimination in UP’s Bundelkhand is Worsening the Water Woes of Dalits by Khabar Layariya. The Wire, June 7, 2019
25. Climate change is bad for your kidneys by Jeremy Plester. The Guardian, June 20, 2016
26. Introduction by Prakash Kashwan. Climate Justice in India, pg 13
27. See also Dishonoured by History: Criminal Tribes and British Colonial Policy by Meena Radhakrishna. Sangam Books, Ltd. 2001
28. For a range of details on this topic, see Shifting Ground: People, Animals, and Mobility in India's Environmental History by Mahesh Rangarajan and K. Sivaramakrishnan.
29. Climate Change and Uncertainty: Politics and perspectives by Shilpi Srivastava, Lyla Mehta, and Hans Nicolai Adam. The Politics of Climate Change and Uncertainty in India, pg 5
30. Analysis: Which Countries Are Responsible for Climate Change, Simon Evans in Carbon Brief, May 2021
31. CO2 Emissions per Capita, Worldometer, 2016
32. Climate Change and Uncertainty: Politics and perspectives by Shilpi Srivastava, Lyla Mehta, and Hans Nicolai Adam. The Politics of Climate Change and Uncertainty in India, pg 5
33. Bruckner, B., Hubacek, K., Shan, Y. et al. Impacts of poverty alleviation on national and global carbon emissions. Nat Sustain 5, 311–320 (2022).
34. The Future of Water in India by Shripad Dharmadhikary and Himanshu Thakkar. Alternative Futures: India Unleashed, pg 64
35. Environmental Governance in Future India: Principles, Structures, and Pathways by Sharachchandra Lele and Geetanjoy Sahu. Alternative Futures: India Unleashed, pg 52
36. Foreword to the IPCC Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5°C, 2018
37. India’s Updated First Nationally Determined Contribution Under Paris Agreement (2021-2030)
A review of a 'documentary' film on Doordarshan about India's heritage. First published in The Wire (PDF).
A nation is an ‘imagined community’, wrote Benedict Anderson in his influential book Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (1983). A nation is imagined, he argued, because its members feel a sense of solidarity with one another, even though the vast majority of them are strangers. Nations are not natural or pre-existing entities, but are modern social constructs. They are forged by the dominant classes in each society, who emphasize certain cultural, social, and political ideas that ‘glue’ people into a sense of shared identity and belonging.
For every nation, the past plays a pivotal role in creating the ‘imagined community’. Stories about a nation’s past, including stories about its origins, shape its members’ collective memory and identity, creating a ‘national consciousness’. Certain historical moments, figures, and symbols are elevated to a position of great importance within the imagined community. These help fortify the ideas, beliefs, and values that are said to underpin a ‘national identity’. This is also why nations fixate on history curriculums so much.
History can of course be approached in many ways. There is no perfectly objective way of doing so, but some approaches are decidedly better than others. At one end of the spectrum are academic scholars in diverse communities, who lean on the latest evidence, make reasoned interpretations, and openly debate one another in peer-reviewed forums to evolve our knowledge of the past. At the other end are chauvinists who interpret the past with the objective of favoring a particular group, often willfully ignoring or fabricating evidence. Their unashamedly partisan approach is led by a hegemonic sense of identity. The goal is to bolster pride, even supremacist pride, in a subgroup. If that subgroup happens to be the majority, it produces majoritarian politics at the expense of minorities. History seen from such insular points of view tends to inflate the fears, resentments, and tribal loyalties among its target audience, thereby exacerbating civil and communal strife.
India is now drowning in the latter kind of historical storytelling. A recent example is a Hindi ‘documentary’ film, clumsily titled Dharohar Bharat Ki Punarutthaan Ki Kahani (‘The Story of the Resurgence of Indian Heritage’). It recently aired in two 30-minute episodes on Doordarshan (whose charade of autonomy finally collapsed when it agreed to receive all its news from an RSS affiliated agency). The film begins with some reasonable questions: Where did our ancestors come from? Where do the roots of our culture and civilization begin? Shouldn’t a proud nation preserve the stories and heritage of its past? But the narrative is promptly derailed by partisan rhetoric: Who is taking up the burden of restoring to our heritage the respect it deserves? Who is preserving and rejuvenating it for future generations? None other than our own Prime Minister Narendra Modi ji!
From there, the film descends steeply into travesty, as it reveals its skewed view of the dharohar (heritage) that’s worth preserving: Hindu pilgrimage sites, and memorials related to anti-colonial leaders favored by Hindu nationalists. The film begins its account of India’s past with a story from Satya Yuga, when Shiva’s anger at Brahma and Vishnu lights up twelve spots on earth, each with a Shiva Lingam. The filmmakers simply present this as historical fact without any dates or context. This recurs throughout the film. It’s one thing for a village priest to relate things this way, quite another for the narrator of a prime-time documentary on national public television. Worse, one suspects that the filmmakers’ disinterest in separating fact from fiction isn’t accidental but deliberate. Indeed, the intellectually curious will find in the film practically no historical insights about Indian heritage. Let me share some examples.
The first and the foremost of the twelve spots mentioned above is apparently Somnath temple. The filmmakers remind us twice that it was plundered and destroyed often. That the film begins with this site is revealing enough. Its desecration by Mahmud of Ghazni in 1026 CE is central to Hindu Nationalists’ animus against Muslims, and claims of the Hindu community’s lingering social trauma and memories of humiliation. But of course they never tell us that Hindu historical sources of that era are silent about this raid. Wouldn’t Hindu chroniclers have recorded and remembered such a painful event? Scholars have examined and offered reasons for how this event was evidently soon forgotten. Eight centuries later, its historicity was only discovered in dusty Turko-Persian sources by British Orientalists in mid-nineteenth century—and through them by modern Hindus. The alleged thousand years of memory and ‘social trauma’ was then invented and weaponized by modern Hindu nationalists for their partisan ends and emerging identity politics. Inheriting that legacy, this film, too, glibly claims that the revamped Somnath temple complex represents ‘our growing self-confidence and reawakened spirit’.
The film then jumps across yugas to the founding of the Mahakaal temple in Ujjain. According to a Puranic myth, Shiva had appeared here to kill an asura. But the film presents this too as historical fact. We see sumptuous drone footage of the upgraded sites: Somnath temple, Mahakaal temple, Pavagarh temple, Kashi Vishwanath temple, Kedarnath temple, and the upcoming Ram temple in Ayodhya. Each is discussed with devotional awe and cloying piety. We’re told that perhaps God himself commanded that the foundation stone of the Ram temple be laid by none other than PM Modi ji—echoing Hindu kings establishing their divine right to rule—a task he carried out on national TV in full religious regalia in August 2020.
The segment on freedom fighters lovingly lingers on VD Savarkar, and Modi is shown offering prayers to his likeness at Cellular Jail on Andaman Island. The film takes us to Patel’s Statue of Unity and Subhas Bose’s new statue by India Gate in Delhi. While Savarkar, the godfather of Hindutva ideology, oddly dominates the many montages of freedom fighters who won us our freedom, Nehru is entirely missing—a comic, childish, and sinister move, all rolled into one. This erasure is akin to the Indian government’s recent move to wipe all Mughals from school textbooks. It’s also reminiscent of Joseph Stalin vindictively erasing his ideological enemies from historical photographs.
Gandhi’s stature with Hindu nationalists has declined over the decades, but he still remains un-erasable, for now. In this film, he plays second fiddle to Savarkar. We hear of plans to turn Sabarmati Ashram into a ‘world class’ attraction (a favorite term of the filmmakers). This means it will likely lose forever the austere realism of Gandhi’s former home. Likewise, we learn of plans to turn five places associated with Ambedkar into hi-tech teerths, or pilgrimage sites. There is no mention of caste or untouchability, only his long struggle for ‘deprived classes’. The host, Kamiya Jani, continuing her relentlessly bland and whitewashed commentary in designer outfits, tells us that Ambedkar is a symbol of equality and was very fond of reading and writing. You don’t say! We do not learn from her that he called Hinduism a disease and exited it publicly to embrace Buddhism. But even then, the proud Hindus behind this film can’t ignore him. A little matter of electoral calculus, eh? We witness the botched-up restoration job at Jallianwala Bagh that was widely criticized in 2021. We watch Modi inaugurating a national war memorial in Delhi. A saccharine patriotism suffuses the film, evoking the last refuge of scoundrels.
Not a single heritage or religious site associated with Muslims appears in this film. Not even Sufi shrines, such as Ajmer Sharif or Nizamuddin Auliya, that have crossover appeal for Hindus. No Christian sites. No Buddhist sites. Not even the wrong kinds of Hindu sites—those with non-living temples or an excess of genitals on display. Are such heritage sites not worthy of investment? ‘No’ seems to be the implied answer in the film. It manifestly sees India as a pious Hindu nation. It brazenly shows the officially secular Indian state touting its vigorous investment in Hindu religion but not in other faiths. Upper-caste Hindu views of India’s past overwhelm all others. It’s amply clear what ‘imagined community’ and aspirational nation the filmmakers are reaching for.
This film about Modi ‘rejuvenating’ the nation’s long-neglected heritage is also deceptive in other ways. It comes months after his own Union Minister of Culture revealed in Parliament that 50 out of India’s 3,693 centrally protected monuments of national importance have gone missing. Yes, missing, as in untraceable! A disproportionate number of these are non-Hindu sites. A further 42 monuments were earlier deemed untraceable but have now been technically located, though the ministry is silent about their found state. Budgetary restrictions have meant that only 248 of these 3,693 monuments of national importance have security guards. The rest are fair game for vandalism and urban development led by unscrupulous builders and public officials. So much for protecting the nation’s dharohar!
The film’s unabashed lack of equity, historical sense, or scientific temper also exposes its actual genre: propaganda and cult worship of the Dear Leader, in the tradition of Leni Riefenstahl. Dear Leader appears frequently, inaugurates, utters social and religious platitudes, does puja, and takes pride in the Disneyfication of various sites. Fawning, gushing visitor testimonies abound. He thinks his Central Vista vanity project and the renaming of Raj Path to Kartavya Path are acts of decolonisation, even as he inhabits that quintessentially colonial ideology of divide and rule. In conclusion, dear reader, save yourself from an hour of unremitting odium and tedium. Watch this film only if you’re an anthropologist, a masochist, or a true blue bhakt.
This sectarian film is in fact a symptom of the larger malaise that’s afflicting India and darkening its horizons. Benedict Anderson knew that of the many ways of forging an ‘imagined community’, the more salutary ones rely on secular identities, shared history, civic values, and inclusive social practices. Whereas relying on racial or religious identities to make a nation only produces strife-ridden polities. Yet experiments of the latter kind abound, including neighboring Pakistan and Sri Lanka—and now increasingly, also India. Will enough Indians change course and avoid the abyss?
[This essay appeared in "What Have Animals Ever Done for Us?", an anthology put together by the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA) in celebration of their bicentennial year. All essays, including ones by Jane Goodall and Frans de Waal, also appear on the RSPCA website.]
India is known for its cows wandering the streets, but no less common are its feral dogs. On a December night in Goa, as I walked towards my hotel, one such mutt dozed next to the footpath. Lean, yellow, frizzy-haired. She glanced warily at me, while I stopped to empty my 'doggie bag' from dinner onto the pavement near her. After I stepped away, she ate every bite. The following night, she was there again, this time seated in the middle of the path, alert, between two of her friends. I was tickled when she approached me, dancing with merriment, glad I'd arrived as expected. Her friends, meanwhile, kept their distance, their heads low, their tails wagging as they circled round us. They weren't begging for food; they were checking me out.
Even though I'd only given a paltry gift the previous night, this happy dog had bragged about it to her friends. This wasn't the first time I'd befriended a feral dog who then brought her friends to meet me. It wasn't the last time I've felt a stray was trying to tell me about his social world or had communicated something about me to his fellows. Even in my casual observations of street dogs in my Delhi neighbourhood, I've noticed that those who claim human friends are sometimes granted a degree of special regard within their cohort, as if their pals think they're cool. Sometimes this also provokes jealousies.
I can prove none of this, of course; I can't really know what the dogs are thinking. Yet I expect that people who are familiar with dogs won't find my version of events entirely implausible. Dog lovers often grant anthropomorphic interpretations to dog behaviours. But what about the behaviours of other animals? These days the internet is awash with viral videos depicting similarly complex behaviours among our favourite wild animals. We see elephants and primates mourning their dead. We see all manner of species studiously confronting themselves in mirrors, planning with intent for the future, cooperating with their fellows to complete simple tasks. We see astonishing intelligence from birds and octopuses, solving puzzles. We even see what appears to be empathetic encounters between species: whales and crows asking humans for help to untangle them from twine; a goat rescuing a chicken from a hawk; an owl and a cat palling around like besties.
We are amused and astonished, charmed and fascinated in the moment, as we immediately recognise our own desires, needs, emotions, vulnerabilities and social-filial attachments in the ways these animals behave. Yet, upon further reflection, so many of us discount our initial responses and intuitions. We remind ourselves that, unlike us, these other animals probably aren't genuinely as curious or caring as they might appear. They aren't driven by complex inner lives coloured by pride, shame, revenge, sorrow, ego, love and joy, but are primarily governed by reflexive urges to procreate, obtain food and seek safety. Suspicious of our anthropomorphic bias and hesitant to credit a familiar, complex sentience to non-human animals, we reduce their inner lives to utilitarian impulses and shallow reflexes.
We are taught to think this way. After all, western philosophy and our dominant monotheistic religions have long held that non-human animals don't have 'souls'. Many scientists, until just decades ago, even held that they don't feel pain. We're told in every context that other animals are essentially different from us humans, that they're spiritually and materially beneath us, both in their teleological development and their inherent value. This bias is so intrinsic to western culture that it feels as solid as natural law. When thinkers and naturalists do talk about complex animal behaviours, their approach is usually constrained by the principle that when we imagine we see human-like motives, impulses and feelings in other animals, we must assume we're only projecting our humanity onto them, the way we see human faces in the clouds.
But what if it’s not that? What if, in fact, it’s the opposite: not me imbuing a non-human animal with human emotionality but, rather, me recognising the common feelings and sentience of non-human animals within myself? After all, science also tells us that we evolved from the same source as all other animals, that we share a great deal in common with our fellow species, from our DNA and physiology to our enmeshment in a web of deep ecological interdependence. Though widely accepted, this knowledge of our relatedness remains, for many of us, merely a scrap of abstract and esoteric information, detached from our more foundational philosophical certainty of human exceptionalism, supremacy, and paramountcy. Rather than dislodging our cultural presumptions or sparking broader empathy with our fellow Earthlings[1], it merely inspires attempts to reify our difference from them, to measure the distance, as we doggedly search for characteristics or thresholds of behavior that might categorically delimit the human from the non-human: dexterity, tool use, reasoning, problem solving, sense of fairness, theory of mind, symbol use, language… to mention a few.
But what if watching animals can spark a broader and stronger empathy within us? Perhaps we so love to watch other animals in the first place because we’re evolved to learn about our world through our empathetic observations of them across a range of species—a realm of experience now almost wholly missing from our urban lives. So what if—before silencing our intuitions about them—we hearkened more intently to what our senses plainly tell us: that non-human animals are not so entirely different from us; that we do recognise their feelings within our own hearts; that we share a kinship with them? Our animal encounters, real or virtual, do threaten to enflame innate feelings of kinship and empathy, before our cultural conditioning kicks in to deny it. Why do we discount this recognition?
In fact, not all peoples do discount it. Many Indigenous cultures greatly value the relationships between the human and non-human. This more integrated worldview is clearly articulated in the Rights of Mother Earth, drawn up at the World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth, held in Bolivia in 2010. In their proposed universal declaration, representatives of Indigenous peoples and organisations from around the world tell us that “Mother Earth is a living being” with rights, and that these rights “are inalienable in that they arise from the same source as existence.” Indeed, rights accrue to every being, they assert, without distinction of any kind, “such as may be made between organic and inorganic beings, species, origin, use to human beings, or any other status.”[2] Our human duty, they say, is to live in harmony with the Earth. In fact, their declaration posits more than a sense of kinship with, or recognition of sentience in, our fellow Earthlings. It reflects a profound awareness of human beings as but one among innumerable, co-equal forms of creation. It expresses the understanding that every being is reliant upon the integrity and wellness of the whole Earth system. Though a quaint idea to many of us today, such Earth-centricity was once common among all successful human societies. It flows from the same, instinctive perceptions that our fascinated observations of other animals seem to pull us back toward, though we’re trained to resist it.
Why are we trained to resist this salient intuition about the living world? How did we lose our visceral understanding of the Earth as a living system, which all peoples once held? What changed for us, and when?
It’s often said that we now live in the Anthropocene, a time when human domination of the Earth is the greatest single factor shaping its future trajectory. Ours certainly is an age of planet-wide environmental reshaping driven by human activity. Regardless of when one might date the start of this present age, one of its defining features is surely the pervasive idea that humans are entitled to use the Earth and its lifeforms with regard neither for the wholeness of other beings nor for the integrity of the biosphere. Though the World People’s Conference linked the rise of this blinkered, human-centric worldview to the Industrial Revolution, there’s reason to believe it began much earlier. The idea was already in play in the Middle East by the time the creation myths were set down in the Old Testament, wherein the Biblical god instructs Adam and Eve to dominate and subdue the Earth and all its living things. A human chauvinism can be detected thousands of years before that even, as far back as the Epic of Gilgamesh, the oldest surviving written tale, set down by the inhabitants of the earliest Mesopotamian city-states, through its storylines that hinge upon the struggles and conflicts of domination: rebuilding after epic floods, cutting down the forests, elevating a civilisation defined by production of agricultural excess enough to support classes of elites who rule the rest. These mid-Holocene stories from West Asia encapsulated a new way of seeing the world and living in it, that departed from the Earth-centric worldviews of countless human generations through hundreds of millennia before. Something was changing for the peoples of the ancient Fertile Crescent, the earliest tellers of these tales: they were developing a cognitive detachment of the human from the non-human world—that which we now call Nature[3]—distinct from and subservient to humanity.
This paradigm change, which centered and elevated humanity above all other lifeforms, may be connected to the mid-Holocene rise of statist agricultural civilizations. By agriculture I don’t mean subsistence farming or horticulture, which is usually practiced in accordance with a primal understanding of humans as beholden to the wellbeing of the Earth, in interdependence with its living systems. Agriculture, here, is a large-scale, fixed-field, surplus-producing system that constricts land-usage rights so as to sustain deep sociopolitical and economic hierarchies, such as we see in state societies. Agriculture, associated with this emergent conception of ourselves—that we are separate from Nature, that our power arises from dismantling Nature and using its parts to fashion a human-centric world—became the foundational substrate for our modern, capitalist worldview, in which the planet and all its beings are regarded as commodities, bearing no intrinsic value beyond their utility for human use and consumption. This break from our sense of kinship with other animals to our presumption that we are rulers, owners, and entitled users of the Earth and everything on it, living or inert, became the thematic basis for the story of human domination that has since spread around the world, chewing up all of Nature for the unprecedented enrichment of a minority of the global population.
In order for our programme of domination, extraction, and exploitation to work, especially in the extremes that it manifests today, we are required to deny our feelings of kinship with the non-human, our recognition of their sentience and relatable inner lives. We must resist what humans have long known innately to be true about other living beings—because our present world economy is built upon exploiting and destroying the non-human world with unbearably cruel force and reckless hunger. While many of us do acknowledge the sentience and emotional life of our beloved pets, with whom we tend to form individual bonds of affection, and whom we treat with consideration and care, this remains highly selective and contingent upon the “use” these animals provide to us or the tamed role they play in our society. Even dogs—arguably the most widely beloved non-human animals—are routinely rounded up and killed across much of the Western world when they’re unwanted, stray and in the way. Yet if we recognized the inner lives of all dogs in principle, as we do within our favourite pets, we wouldn’t so callously annihilate the rest. If we similarly acknowledged the sentience and emotional lives of cattle and pigs, chickens and turkeys, we couldn’t torture them as we do, raising them in factory farms and slaughtering them by the billions, our primary care being only how to do so faster and more cheaply.
In the same way, had we not so long sequestered ourselves from the wholeness of wilderness, where once we intimately observed the complex lives and sentient awareness of other animals as a part of understanding ourselves and our world, we couldn’t now destroy entire ecosystems by clearcutting forests, dredging marine depths, draining wetlands, damming rivers, and routinely conducting other annihilating harms. We couldn’t carelessly drive scores of species to extinction at an ever-accelerating rate. We couldn’t push the global climate toward rapid and extreme disruption. We couldn’t commit the ecocide we are responsible for in the Anthropocene.
To heal our relationship with the Earth and our fellow beings, we need to stop telling the story that we humans are entitled to planetary dominion, that this garden was put here only for our use and has no other value. We must stop seeing ourselves as central to the cosmic order, but rather, as merely one among countless players, each with its part to play in a wild and incomprehensible ensemble dance. We must learn to live and let live. Not to do so will be to die.
Perhaps one place to begin is by letting ourselves know what we know when we encounter other animals. To feel what we feel when we observe them. We might remember that we are all animals, and the non-human ones must be seen and valued in their own right, as much as respected for their essential roles in the dance of the biosphere that literally produces the air that we breathe and nourishes the food that we eat, giving us everything we need to be well. We might acknowledge their kinship with us, recognise their sentience within ourselves, and accept the wonder and struggle of our interdependence, as all peoples once did. Maybe we need a different word that turns anthropomorphisation on its head, a word that means to project non-human likenesses onto ourselves, to realise how much we are like them. Zoomorphisation. Gaiamorphisation. Whatever makes sense to retrain our sensibilities toward truly seeing and respecting the lives of the non-human.
If we could do that, new stories would bloom. Stories in which human beings are de-centered, as once we had been, long before the Anthropocene stretched its calloused fingers across the whole of the world. Stories that lead us away from ecocide and mass slaughter and species extinction towards a new way of living among our fellow Earthlings.
Notes
[1] I capitalize Earth in all instances, to help make explicit that it’s not merely dirt or land or someplace where things happen, but a planetary system, one even more complex than that of Mars or Jupiter or any other we can name, because ours includes a thriving biosphere. This is our home planet we speak of, the one we belong to.
[2] World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth. Cochabamba, Bolivia, 2010. https://pwccc.wordpress.com/programa/
[3] I capitalize the word Nature in this context to frame it as an artificial construct, a character in a story that we tell, in which Nature is something apart from and inferior to gods and humans. This is in contrast to a conception of humans as an inseparable part of the natural world.
[The 19th (and final) part in a series of essays, On Climate Truth and Fiction, in which I raise questions about environmental distress, the human experience, and storytelling. It first appeared on 3 Quarks Daily. The previous part is here.]
No, it’s not your imagination, this feeling that we are entering a time of escalating crises brought by Nature: more frequent and severe storms, floods, and forest fires; more debilitating heat-waves; mounting crop losses and failures; rising water stress, hunger, and related conflicts; unrelenting pest and disease threats for us, our “livestock,” and our crops. Our planet is moving beyond the stability of the Holocene—the narrow climatic range that enabled our modern civilization—to enter a much harsher climate regime, and its effects are starting to engulf us. Today, these effects are being felt much more by some than others, with weather related disasters primarily responsible for having forcibly displaced more than one percent of humanity from their homes by the middle of 2021—already an unprecedented human calamity. Ten times that number—eight-hundred and eighty million people—now lack sufficient food to eat, an increase of over a hundred-million hungry souls compared to two years ago.
And if you worry that it might get worse, the answer is a hard yes: under the best-case scenarios, it will get much worse—and at a faster rate. This is according to the most comprehensive assessment of climate-change impacts compiled to date, part two of the IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report by Working Group II, released in March 2022. The report projects, for instance, that in Africa alone half the population—seven-hundred million people—may be displaced due to water stress by 2030. Earlier forecasts cited by UN agencies that a billion people could be desperately displaced by 2050 do not seem improbable.
But I get it. This isn’t how we’re supposed to talk about the future. I too grew up imbibing and propagating the common technotopian fantasies of the late-20th Century zeitgeist, of a belief in humanity’s manifest destiny of multi-planetary spread and dominion. I imagined I might live to see people permanently inhabiting distant space stations or launching forays to colonize and terraform Mars. Though I’d always been aware that the non-human world around me was being annihilated, I squashed my intuitive fear about that growing danger with my learned techno-optimism about the future. Like most people of my time and place, I just didn’t put the pieces of the puzzle together. Not until very recently, that is. Not until I began truly digging in and trying to understand climate change.
At the start of this effort, I had no idea how much of everything I thought I knew about the world would come unraveled. But the more I learned about climate disruption, the more I began to understand its links to broader patterns of environmental damage, to the very history, culture, and economy of the modern world. I came to see how all these forces, working in tandem, gave rise to an aggressive religious faith in market-driven technologies as a path to unfettered human growth and godlike power—a creed that hallows our industrialist, capitalist, nation-state system built to privilege an elite minority, above the rest of humanity, and the growth of the human world, over the wellbeing of the whole Earth system. This new religion has ancient roots, built upon faiths that first arose and spread across the Eastern Mediterranean region during the early Holocene, claiming divine dispensation for humans to reshape the planet that shaped us, asserting divine mandate to submit ourselves to the structures of urban agriculturalist civilizations. But now the lacunae in this view of things reveal themselves garishly, as festering wounds blotching the very fabric of civilization. And I now understand why so many people resist asking the questions that need to be asked: It’s terrifying when our fine tapestry of illusions comes undone and we’re left with no clear way to put our world back together again.
Climate change, pollution, deforestation, biodiversity loss, habitat annihilation, mass extinction, hunger, poverty, patriarchy, racism, environmental colonialism, human and non-human exploitation, the spread of disease and blight—all these causes and symptoms of our sustainability crisis aren’t just problems. Together they present a predicament, an adversely developing situation that has no neat remedies. Any adequate action taken to arrest planetary heating and biodiversity loss, to cure the sum of these ills, will cause drastic shocks to other parts of the system—in particular, to the global economy and geopolitics—resulting in joblessness, poverty, and suffering. Yet allowing it all to continue, without remedy, will do worse, creating far more advanced crises of famine, dislocation, and disease, as well as accelerating the ongoing mass extinction—ultimately, including human extinction. Still, many people continue to hold that today’s capitalist system can provide “solutions” to atmospheric carbon dioxide accumulation or plastic pollution or species extinction or other detached pieces of the generalized breakdown. They would rather not reckon and wrestle with the messiness of uncertainty and interconnectedness, which is precisely what a predicament requires of us. In fact, without first acknowledging our fear, our grief, our overwhelm and even bafflement at the scope and scale and precariousness of our situation, we are in no position to imagine the most salutary ways to deal with it. The causes lie far deeper than the energy grid; effective responses aren’t about tinkering with new energy sources or other technologies. More than anything, our predicament must be answered with social innovation.
None of us want our children to grow up in a world of violence engendered by border conflicts, natural disasters, and unmanaged resource scarcity. Or to leave anyone vulnerable to the human exploitation and trafficking that thrive in such desperate situations, especially if our capitalist system is allowed to turn increasingly catabolic. We need to be asking what it will take to minimize conflict and violence as disaster multiplies and desperation mounts. For without fundamentally reconsidering our ideas of what actually constitutes civilization, new solar panels and windmills and electric vehicles will only go on powering the same ecocidal, ethnocidal machine that is our presently dominant way of life. These technologies will only create an illusion of change while continuing to perpetuate the same pattern of overexploitation, overpollution, and overshoot. So rather than focusing on more efficient extraction of energy and materials to continue our current lifestyle, we need to prepare ourselves to consume less of everything, to live much more lightly on Earth. The most holistic, effective, and enduring responses to our planetary predicament will be character-driven and social—not technological.
And yet, social avenues for mitigation and adaptation remain a relatively empty field of endeavor or commentary in the mainstream. The handful of good ideas circulating at the peripheries deserve far greater engagement. For instance, international agreements could create a legal category for climate refugees, granting displaced persons access to aid or resettlement options. Building upon this is the idea of climate passports, whereby countries that historically contributed the greater part of greenhouse gas emissions would grant commensurately more passports to those in need of relocation; overwhelmingly, those most in need are peoples who have contributed the least to global warming. Of course, limiting the program to refugees of climate disasters as somehow more deserving than refugees fleeing other egregious environmental damages caused by mining, deforestation, or other modes of industrial extraction and its sociopolitical fallout, remains an inadequate framing. But at least this conversation is a new way of looking at our predicament, ultimately entailing a reimagining of borders and the very meaning of nation-states, alongside other social and political features of our modern world. Tackling the problem of unrelenting, mass influxes of refugees will ipso facto alter our present systems so fundamentally that we’ll start seeing our problems quite differently.
Other social innovations to reduce general ecocide and increase equitability include enacting laws that support intergenerational justice. Or taking more seriously certain concepts that many of us have long regarded as fringe, such as recognizing the personhood and rights of non-human beings and even landforms. Chileans are presently attempting to do this by rewriting their national constitution to reflect the intentions laid out in the Universal Declaration on the Rights of Mother Earth; similar initiatives are being spearheaded by Indigenous groups from Ecuador to New Zealand to Africa, inflected by their own traditional cosmologies. All of these efforts represent resurgences of pre-Colonial stories into the neocolonial mainstream, asserted as concrete and tractable measures that impact our legal, social, and political frameworks.
By requiring us to question and reconceive our power structures and systems of value, these legal challenges break open our operational paradigms, creating space for our societies to alter our intellectual, spiritual, and mythic landscapes too. By changing the public conversation, such efforts disrupt our narratives of how the world works, as much as how human beings work together in the world, preparing the ground for new stories to arise. To help us face the existential and moral challenges of the future, it’s essential to crack open the dominant stories that perpetuate the status quo, including our narratives about who we are and what it means to be human, as much as our geopolitics, our gender roles and relations, what has meaning, what constitutes “success” in life, what is even possible. As law professor Jacinta Ruru observed in 2017, referring to new laws passed in Aotearoa (New Zealand) that recognize certain landforms as legal persons,
“Legal personality offers us an incredible moment to transform our understanding or appreciation of all that is around us and to give us a Maori understanding of the world. Or, in the words of Sir Peter Sharples, the then Minister of Maori affairs in 2014—he said, ‘Legal personality offers us a profound alternative to the human presumption of sovereignty over nature.’” [14.5 minutes]
We are on the cusp of a civilizational paradigm shift as profound as the one that moved our ancestors from nomadic lives of gathering wild foods to settling down and planting crops on a scale to support dense, urban settlements. In the same way in which that transition changed our stories of ourselves and our world, giving birth to entirely new forms of religion, social and political structures, living arrangements, dietary norms, even new frames of identity, we must begin to imagine a human cultural future that’s a departure from the past. But eleven thousand years ago, the shift happened very slowly: thousands of years and hundreds of generations passed between the earliest, semi-sedentary habitations and the rise of agricultural cities. Today, we don’t have thousands of years to shift our paradigms. The changes are bearing down upon us at disorienting speed, requiring us to respond within a single generation. We are challenged to be proactive about this transition. And, although this time we have a different kind of detailed information about the world than what the ancients had, which can surely play a useful role, it bears keeping in mind that, for all its insights, our dominant knowledge system is primarily aimed at manipulating the living and non-living world to advance the interests of a minority of human beings at the expense of the rest, including the whole of the biosphere, and the very geochemical balance of the soil, sea, and sky. If we hope for a different end result, we must begin by changing ourselves, our expectations of the future, our own hearts and minds.
Radically Reimagine Hope
Once you connect the dots in our constellation of planetary woes, it becomes clear that any effective response requires us to face conditions as they are, to shed whatever comforting illusions prevent us from thinking clearly and acting boldly. We need to interrogate the stories and false promises that brought us to this point in the first place, looking beyond the narrow path that our modern history has carried us down, taking a view broad enough to venture off-road, so we don’t recreate the self-destructive patterns of the past. It’s time to question everything, to experiment with new social and political ways of life that work within this ecological and geophysical transition that’s upon us, to stop thinking of humanity as somehow above the rest of creation. If we’re not more proactive about social avenues for mitigation and adaptation than we are about technological mitigation and adaptation, we’ll find ourselves re-acting to the changes thrust upon us, resorting to panicked or short-term thinking, and likely causing greater harm in the long term.
Yet, rather than avidly exploring possibilities for social transformation, today people talk far more about “hope” and “doom,” as though these were clear and mutually exclusive moral responses to our crises, as though rallying unexamined “hope” were a virtue. But this is a false dichotomy that has enabled a shallow framing of our dilemma. For it matters very much what we hope for. And it matters just as much what vision of doom we set those hopes against. False hopes—those built upon the quicksands of denial—are nothing more than cunning avatars of despair. Hoping for futures built on fantasy—especially the fantasy of maintaining your own social or economic privilege—because you can’t find the courage to accept the limits of reality or new avenues for light, is a way of giving up on humanity.
Holding onto any hope that we can preserve industrial civilization, indeed, any hope borne of faith in market-driven technology, capitalism, cryptocurrency—or any other ahistorical figment built upon the transient conditions of the Holocene world—is actually worse than merely false or hollow hope: it is an annihilating hope. It is a hope that embraces obscene global inequities and injustices wrought by ongoing colonial extractivism, favoring the desires of the Global North at the cost of everything else. It is a hope that will keep eroding the integrity of our planet’s living systems, until the last of us are gone. That is not hyperbole. Only by understanding what the stakes really are can we even begin to find real hope. After all, how can it be possible to effectively address any crisis without first confronting it and investigating its complexities, even when the honest assessment must include reckoning with outcomes that are nothing short of doom—for certain ways of life; for so many dreams; for familiar landscapes, ecosystems, seasons; for untold numbers of living beings? In fact, pretending our predicament is either less serious, less difficult, or less far-advanced than it actually is, pretending the “solutions” are simpler than they are, has consistently produced only delays, dismissals, and delusions that continue to block any real and effective action against climate change—let alone against all the other forms of ecocide, which even today hardly merit a mention in the mainstream discourse, apparently for fear of complicating the picture or opening the door to “doomist” thoughts.
Yet, layers of denial remain in our discourse of our shared future. Even among those campaigning to mitigate global warming, there’s a widespread tendency to promote denialist hopes. Regrettably, those who insist upon only the most emotionally soothing conversations limited to advocating only the most politically expedient techno-fixes at the expense of acknowledging the broader reality of our predicament are the ones who presently hold the talking stick—handed to them by a media machine that’s more invested in their short-term value for shareholders than in protecting a human future within a robust biosphere. But peddling narratives about the continuation of the consumerist world as the only sensible goal or meaningful measure of wellbeing, however transiently comforting, is not helping to build stories or paths toward a sustainable human future. If there is a moral choice facing us, it is this: Do we want to preserve industrial civilization, which by its very nature is suicidally ecocidal—even if we can slow climate change—and systematically riven with abuses of both human and non-human beings, in order for a minority of people to enjoy their comforts for a few more decades? Or do we want to choose the possibility of long-term, holistic wellbeing for people living in sustainable balance with the rest of creation? This is the fork we face in the path to the future. It is stark. And the matter rests upon us, upon our living generations today.
So here we stand at a novel inflection point in the human story, one of profound reckoning perhaps unmatched in human experience, even as our stories presently fail us in providing insight and language, let alone imagination and guidance for what is to come. Lacking ready narratives to prepare us for epic change, we dismiss its very possibility; we expect the world we knew in our lifetimes to magically reassert itself and continue as it had been, as though past performance were a guarantee of future results. But we would do well to pierce the bubble of illusions our dominant narratives wrap around us. They limit what we can see and understand, where we can explore in order to find new solutions within in the multi-hued, iridescent muck of who we are beyond what we think we know.
Still, for those of us who’ve internalized that more is more and we’re entitled to unlimited power and control, I get that we aren’t supposed to talk about the future as one of diminished material circumstances, requiring us to alter ourselves—our values, identities, and dreams. We aren’t supposed to say that human potential is not limitless, that we cannot overcome every “obstacle” to get whatever we desire in the universe. Speaking of the future as mounting instability that will test our humanity, or as a need for proactive cultural and individual transformations negates our dominant and motivating folktales, where superheroes arrive just in time to swoop away the bomb, where one person’s act of bravery or sacrifice saves the day, where “winning” means preserving the present global power structures dependent upon neocolonial patterns of extraction. Nor does it resonate with the flip-side of all that, the other increasingly popular mythic narrative: the despairing, post-apocalyptic nightmare, the brutal worlds of Us versus Them that finds little “goodness” or productive possibility within humanity outside the grip of statist power, stories that glorify the struggles of individualistic leadership, one man alone at the top, who’s mostly good at black-and-white thinking and very handy with a gun. Such are the narratives entwined with the belief that industrial civilization is the pinnacle of human achievement, and thus that purveyors of “green” technologies can swoop down to save the day by preserving the same ecocidal, ethnocidal, genocidal systems that brought us to this brink, in order to save us from ourselves.
But when you strip away the denial—about entropy and ecology and history and violence and social worlds and true costs and the conundrums of complex systems—our dominant narratives are revealed as self-destructive delusions. Our present conception of civilization is unsustainable. Indeed, it is already finished—even if those of us near the top, shielded as we are from its losses, don’t know it yet. Market-driven techno-fixes cannot save it. Only if we confront our changing world not merely as a technical problem or an economic problem or a logistical problem in need of tech-genius saviors, but as the deeply entangled, environmental and cultural predicament that it is, can we ask the questions that might lead us to discover new ways of living with each other on this Earth. Ours must be a time of paradigm shifts and transitions. Changes. Choices. Heroically, radically, collectively reimagining.
Stories are the essential tools for creating human societies out of human individuals. And when they fail us, we must change them. In fact, we will. But to build a future based on everything we’ve discovered—this time, in tune with broader human solidarity, wellbeing, and fairness, with a value for sustainably preserving human societies within the greater living world—we must first clearly envision that future: a thriving, transitioned world that isn’t based around the excess consumption and domination we expect today. To do that is an undertaking borne of genuine hope. Yet we cannot even begin to hope without openly engaging with the real dilemmas that face us, wondering courageously, and creatively imagining new directions for civilization, questioning our own values and beliefs and priorities as a part of the changing world. I don’t know if a just transition will eventually be achieved, but I do know that if most of us can’t or won’t even engage honestly with the real questions and begin to dream the possibility, it certainly never will be. For we cannot attempt to create that which we can’t first imagine.
****
“I am because you are. You are because we are.” —Professor James Ogude, Director of the Centre for the Advancement of Scholarship, University of Pretoria, speaking on the concept of ubuntu, or “interdependence,” in What We Can Learn from the African Philosophy of Ubuntu [9 minutes]
[END]
Notes:
For anyone searching for popularly and critically recognized fiction that literally or metaphorically deals with themes of ecocide, or that imagines the impacted human future or an alternate, ecologically sustainable society, all without resorting to the usual triumphalist or monotonously dystopian narratives, here are a handful I might suggest, in no particular order:
1. The Overstory, a realist novel about trees and humans, by Richard Powers
2. How Beautiful We Were, a realist novel illustrating one way that industrial resource extraction destroys people, histories, and social worlds, by Imbolo Mbue
3. Station Eleven, a realist novel set in an imagined near-term future where an extreme pandemic has precipitated the collapse of industrial civilization, but survival is insufficient, by Emily St. John Mandel
3. The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View from the Future, a “novel of ideas” about the effects of climate change and the human response, by Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway
4. Ishmael, a “novel of ideas” about the paradigm of human exceptionalism and its harms, by Daniel Quinn
5. The Dispossessed, a classic speculative novel interrogating the idea of utopia, by Ursula K. Le Guin
6. Years and Years, a science-fiction limited series about the near-term, climate-changed future, produced by BBC One
7. The House, a surrealist stop-motion animated film (maybe) regarding the modern condition of human relatedness to our planet and each other…? produced by Netflix
8. Don’t Look Up, a satirical feature film about the threat of existential disaster and the mainstream media, produced by Netflix
Earlier Essays in this Series
1 What We Talk About When We Talk About The Weather
10 On Progress as Human Destiny
11 Of Gods and Men and Human Destiny
12 Musings on the Anthropocene
13 Stories of Wealth and Distribution
14 Toward a Polyphony of Stories
18 This Is Not the Zombie Apocalypse
Images
India: A Forecast 🧵
— Namit Arora (@NamitArora0) May 3, 2022
India is on a sinister path, much darker than most worried citizens foresaw in 2014. Things have gone downhill rather fast. So what do I see as the near-term outlook (5–7 years) for India? I offer my provisional thoughts in this thread. Hope I’m wrong. (1/20)
Below are all the tweets in the thread:
[The 18th in a series of essays, On Climate Truth and Fiction, in which I raise questions about environmental distress, the human experience, and storytelling. It first appeared on 3 Quarks Daily. The previous part is here.]
Early in the story of The Walking Dead—the enormously popular, post-apocalyptic, television series—sharpshooting everyman, Rick Grimes, finds himself cast as leader to a group of beleaguered survivors, who must navigate the malignant chaos of a world suddenly overtaken by zombies. Every comfort, convenience, and civic structure of modern American life has collapsed. The threat of death lurks beyond every hillock or behind any tree. Ordinary people are left to fend for themselves against overwhelming forces, with nothing but guns (and the odd pickaxe or crossbow) for aid. And sentimental attachments to other people only leave individuals more vulnerable to attack. In this world that has slipped the grip of civilization, Grimes works to keep a strain of justice and mercy aloft within his desperate band.
But torn away from the cogency of his ordinary, 21st-century life, and cast into unrelenting danger and uncertainty, even Grimes’s kinder impulses are slowly ground away by his unabating experiences of horror and loss. His moral compass spins erratically. By the fifth season of The Walking Dead, the line separating Grimes from the threats he’s fought for years to hold at bay has worn distressingly thin. In fact, much before this, the show’s storylines and characters have already notably shifted their attention from the horrors of the zombies to the horrors of relying upon one’s fellow dislocated human beings for refuge and assistance in an ongoing crisis. Confronting the atrocities committed by the living profoundly changes Grimes and every member of his crew, as they also become more adept killers. Yet, uncannily, the social world they inhabit together doesn’t change much at all.1 New narratives or mythologies grasping for new understandings of their changed environment, moral quandaries, or identities have not begun to emerge. None among them bothers much about making a reliable living or teaching the children or searching for meaning. Oddly, they remain wholly fixated upon their enemies and armaments. Seemingly lacking in dreams, imaginative hunger, or pragmatic creativity, they don’t begin to re-conceive society in ways that take shape in collaboration with whomever and whatever is left. They remain, throughout, an eternally ragtag cadre of survivalists hoping or despairing for the world only as it was, rather than as they might make it.
American zombie tales regularly feature this functional collapse of modern civilization and the subsequent slide of civil society into relentlessly violent confrontation. Visions of our post-collapse future as a battlefield of all against all, with storylines centering questions of individual survival, leadership, moral rectitude, or heroism seem increasingly common. In fact, preoccupation with these themes isn’t limited to worlds beset by zombies; it’s widely shared across contemporary post-apocalyptic stories, all of which seem to be growing in popularity. I’m not the first to suspect that the rise in the appeal of these tropes might reflect a genuine cultural anxiety about the potential collapse of our present global civilization.
Civilizational collapse is not an easy thing to imagine; it asks us to extend ourselves beyond almost our entire known world. Still, it bears asking what leads so many storytellers to presume that without modern, Western-hegemonic civilization there can be no civilization—only chaos and barbarity. American writers, in particular, apparently find it difficult to conjure a post-collapse future where guns aren’t the most important tool, ammunition isn’t magically limitless, and killing the enemy (or even one’s allies) isn’t a person’s primary occupation on an ordinary day.2 Consider hit films of the past decade—The Quiet Place, Bird Box, The Road, Mad Max, and others—in which humanity has been beset by aliens or plague or some other, often unspecified, civilization-ending event. On some level, these stories seem to say, forget the zombies/aliens/plague/unnamed agents of catastrophe—for we are the monsters; without modern civilization to contain and police us, all is brutality and Hobbesian terror. Removed from modern conveniences and state structures, it seems, we readily slide back to some brutish primordial state.
Perhaps these stories are our modern-day answer to Grimms’ fairy tales, projections of our collective cultural nightmare—in our case, of losing control of Nature and ourselves in it, of witnessing the dissolution of our “social contract.” Such nightmares, grounded in underlying worldviews that our humanity is separate from and superior to Nature, can keep us holding onto the folly that the present civilization must be continued at any cost—especially if that cost is “merely” a future for the least empowered among us—for beyond it lies the lethal wilderness of our inner dragons. But such Lord of the Flies assessments of the human material that keep surfacing are unimaginatively ethnocentric. And if we fear the collapse of modern civilization, it’s worthwhile to understand what collapse could actually mean, beyond the unexamined projections of our worst nightmares.
What Actually Happens When Societies Collapse
While we fictionally imagine apocalypse, collapse has become a loaded term in serious discussions about the future of our capitalist-consumerist global civilization. As the possibility of collapse begins to feel more vivid to many of us, others more stringently deny its relevance as a historical process. Thus the Rapanui civilization didn’t collapse; the Roman Empire, the Mayan states, the early Mesopotamian states didn’t collapse. It’s not as if all those people simply died, we’re reminded, or that nothing of their culture survived to be inherited by later societies. They merely faded and morphed into something new. So there’s no such thing as civilizational collapse, only decline.
But, like most things, collapse isn’t usefully understood as a binary or static concept. Studies of the collapse of complex societies—those with larger populations that are socially and economically diversified and stratified, yet politically integrated through centralizing institutions, as in kingdoms, nations, or empires—reveal that not every case is identical in magnitude or effect; much depends on the proximate triggers, the sociocultural substrate, the environmental context, and how people respond. Nor does collapse occur evenly across all parts of a society. It produces random and unexpected outcomes, pockets of resilience and novel social adaptations. It’s a process that typically plays out over decades, even if one can identify a swift, triggering incident. For example, the catastrophic explosion of a nearby volcano dealt a sudden and devastating blow to the ancient Minoans of Crete, covering much of their island with ash and inundating it with a disastrous tsunami. But the consequent collapse of Minoan civilization occurred over the following generation or two, ultimately fading behind the concomitant rise of Mycenaean arrivistes from the Greek mainland, who took advantage of the Minoans’ weakened condition to impose their own power and displace the Minoans on Crete.
While the collapse of any society isn’t uniform or instantaneous, it does occur over a shorter timeframe than the rise of that society to its peak. By that yardstick, collapse is relatively abrupt, in contrast to a decline. When complex societies collapse, centralized power devolves to more regionalized power. Elites loose significant wealth and status; sometimes they’re completely felled, their lineages dissipating into oblivion. Monumental works cease; official levers of power and communication wither; economic diversity shrinks. Patterns of residence may shift dramatically, due to some combination of mass migration and mass death. Stories are lost, even whole languages or writing systems. These periods are sometimes identified as “dark ages” or “intermediate periods” of history. But what this characterization misses is the subaltern vantage—for what those at the center of empire experience as collapse, those at the peripheries may experience more as liberation. As much as stories die out, new ones also arise. So that, in fact, when we look at historical examples of collapse, we see that despite the severe difficulties such episodes create for many people, they can’t be simplified as a time of unmitigated horrors the way our popular myths would have it.
Classist Ellen Morris describes, for example, the collapse that ensued in Ancient Egypt, when a spate of great floods along the Nile River caused prolonged and widespread famines, toppling the pharaohs of the Old Kingdom. With centralizing authority gone, lesser elites up and down the Nile valley vied with each other for power.3 Cities and small settlements across the shattered empire had to rely upon their immediate neighbors for aid and sustenance. Local militias, bandits, criminals, and foreign raiders terrorized people in the streets and in their fields. Cemeteries filled up faster than before, due to violence as much as famine. Yet cities, towns, and villages did carry on. Despite the trenchant hunger and degrees of mayhem, people were busily figuring out new ways to get by as smaller, but still functioning, societies. Some non-elite families, relieved of empire’s heavy tax burden, now had more spending power and could compete for status previously denied them. The former nobility, reduced to relative penury, bemoaned the fact that servants now wore precious stones and spoke unabashedly to their superiors. New styles proliferated in clothing, ceramics, writing, religious and artistic expression. Social hierarchies weren’t totally leveled but the old structures of power were challenged and changed—in ways that proved both good and bad for individuals and ultimately changed their stories, reshaping their future expectations of monarchy.
Perhaps an even greater remixing of status was experienced in pre-Classical Greece, when the world of the Mycenaean warlords crumbled into the Aegean Dark Age. According to archaeologist Ian Morris, massive population shifts occurred as urban settlements shrank and some regions of Greece were entirely abandoned.4 Those who tilled the land and tended the herds of the great Mycenaean palaces decamped, coalescing into myriad tiny hamlets, more locally self-reliant yet still productively farming and plying some trades, without the yoke of their former masters. Of course, though the warlords had fallen, violence continued to stalk the Peloponnese in new permutations. But the previously stark social distinctions of wealth and rank faded from the burials of their dead. And even as the Greeks’ collective memory of the Mycenaean period morphed into legends of heroes and battles and odysseys, over the next five-hundred years, it also seeded strands of cultural resistance to tyranny. Perhaps it’s this that would later flower in Athenian experiments with democracy.
So while history shows that the collapse of complex societies results in a breakdown of law and order and the disruption of official trade networks and markets, leading to increased privation and hardship for many, we don’t see the wholesale annihilation of any and all civic or community structures, such as we’re given to imagine in our apocalyptic fantasies. Functional social organization doesn’t require centralized authority. It doesn’t depend upon sophisticated scientific knowledge or plumbing or energy grids. When such things are taken away, we’re not cut morally adrift to devolve into the beasts of our zombie-apocalypse nightmares. Rather, in the midst of the ensuing uncertainties, we reinvent functioning social worlds within our changed circumstances. Social identities shift, or dissolve and reconstitute anew. Vestiges of traditions mapping older or regionally based ways of life, social structures, and institutions may also emerge to become foundations for new sociopolitical or economic organization. Wherever civic structures can still be found—whether through resilient local governance, materially supportive bonds of kinship, trade networks, political alliances, or something else—these may serve as nodes for maintaining selective cultural continuity, cohesion, and sustenance. Such a dynamic is observed in Lebanon today, in the wake of that country’s devastating economic collapse.
Indeed, as journalist Rebecca Solnit reminds us in A Paradise Built in Hell, in times of acute crisis, there are at least as many people pulling together as are pulling apart. Resourceful people organize and lead. Those most severely affected by crisis seem to lean toward cooperation, sharing their energy and pooling their resources, broadly awakening a palpable spirit of pro-sociality. And while there are always problematically selfish or “antisocial” individuals among us, most societies don’t preferentially reward sociopaths with leadership roles (as ours does), nor does the challenge they present necessitate a wholesale devolution to mutually antagonistic bands, as our popular myths suggest. Human societies—particularly non-state societies—have always found stories that normalize sharing and social cohesion, permit broad personal autonomy, and provide strategies for reckoning with with antisocial individuals. I imagine that even suburbanites-turned-foragers wandering the zombie-infested, American countryside of our apocalyptic imaginings would begin to re-discover how. It is absolutely essential to acknowledge this likelihood—without the zombies—even to foreground it. For if barbarity is the only post-collapse future we can imagine, then it’s the one we’ll aim to fashion—building bunkers, stockpiling weapons, hoarding food, fixating on enemies and armaments—whether we wish to or not. For we can only ever reach toward that which we first imagine; never what we don’t.
In short, collapse need not be conceived as an End of History nor reduced to a story of unmitigated human depravity. In the words of anthropologist Joseph Tainter,
“What may be a catastrophe to administrators (and later observers) need not be to the bulk of the population. It may only be among those members of a society who have neither the opportunity nor the ability to produce primary food resources that the collapse of administrative hierarchies is a clear disaster. Among those less specialized, severing the ties that link local groups to a regional entity is often attractive. Collapse then is not intrinsically a catastrophe. It is a rational, economizing process that may well benefit much of the population.”5
Notably, those lacking the ability to produce food includes primarily the urban poor—hundreds of millions of people today. Collapse leaves too many people vulnerable to starvation, crime, dislocation, war, and social disorientation. Of course, all of these things are already experienced in our world today. And while, in a collapse scenario, these disasters would surely begin to afflict a wider cross-section of people, anthropologist Norman Yoffee observes that both collapse and any subsequent societal regeneration are modes of change that can ultimately be understood in terms of familiar social dynamics.6 That is: despite the disruptions, societies remain recognizable as societies. The key, I think, is to understand the collapse of complex societies as rapid social change—or transition—toward simplification or more localized, smaller-scale societies, rather than as the end of society or the void of civil humanity that many of us learn to imagine through our contemporary fables.
Collapse leads to social transformation; how that plays out depends on the conditions and context of the collapse. So, while collapse is the end of a world, it’s not usually the end of the world.
The Looming Collapse
What—apart from zombies and alien invasions—causes complex societies to collapse? In Tainter’s analysis, collapse is an economic adjustment that results from the growing costs associated with growing social and technological complexity—eventually, the civilizational bubble bursts.7 Environmental and systems’ scientist Donatella Meadows instructs us that, in fact, any complex system growing exponentially will eventually collapse; no simple intervention can prevent it.8 At best, a properly timed series of systemic corrections might hope to achieve a managed decline and equilibration, rather than more precipitous collapse. Centralizing complexity is ultimately a self-limiting phenomenon. History bears this out, given that every complex society ever built has fallen.
So what does this mean for our modern world? After all, we live in an exponentially growing, complex society. Today, the challenges and costs of managing urban and industrial pollution, mitigating global warming, recovering from the catastrophes of our changing climate, maintaining agricultural productivity in an eroding biosphere, and battling pandemic continue to mount every year and will only increase more steeply into the future—just as models of complex systems predict. The present trend of rising costs and continued growth is quite plausibly approaching its inflection point. And though we’re constantly reminded that “it’s not too late” to stop global warming with solar panels and windmills, there’s little to suggest that we’ve not already missed our window for the dramatic actions necessary to manage a humane degrowth of the global economy, an equitable and systematic reduction of overall energy use and consumption, that might slow collapse into decline and equilibration.
Nor are the necessary actions even now being genuinely considered. Regrettably, this very fact illustrates the several, interrelated social, cultural, and psychological dynamics that allow complex societies to collapse, rather than engineer a gentler decline. For one, politically influential elites are buffered from the damages of environmental overshoot until it’s too late to effectively respond. After all, they’re not among the species going extinct. They aren’t even breathing the foul air or drinking the poisoned water near the refineries and mines. They aren’t collapsing in farm fields under the rising heat, going hungry due to drought or flood, working longer hours to catch fewer fish, splashing and spraying greater amounts of noxious chemicals to grow the same quantity of grain, or sending their children deeper underground to dig up more cobalt. Unaffected by the fundament crumbling away far beneath them, not only do the elites do nothing to prevent collapse, they may actually work to prevent its potential remedies—because the remedies, of course, include dispossessing them of their disproportionate wealth.
But non-elites enable collapse too. They too want what the elites have, after all; they want what the present system is known to provide. And for all of us—elites and non-elites alike—the experience of past abundance or predictability biases us, or lulls us, into the expectation of future abundance or stability. This kind of ignorance or denial, sometimes shading into willful blindness, keeps individuals engrossed in the dominant illusion factory—religion, pop culture, media circus, propaganda, or whatever carries the day—encouraging them to not look up, as it were, and to disregard the actual trajectory of the larger system in which they live, even as it palpably tips toward collapse. Of course, civilizational restructuring is always difficult once a society gets locked into a particular track of development. All of its material and sociocultural infrastructure then carry it farther along the rails it builds as it goes. And the more complex a society, the more tightly its members are bound up within its self-referential realities, the more blithely they continue to lay the tracks in the same direction. All of this creates a material barrier to the adoption of new paradigms or possibilities of thought and behavior. As stresses mount, people who are persuaded society is on the right track will double-down on their present beliefs and practices in the expectation that these are what will solve society’s problems, even when these are the very source of those problems.
The climate and the biosphere are perhaps the two most fundamental systems upon which our civilization is inalienably dependent. Today, the biosphere is collapsing in what may prove to be the Sixth Great Mass Extinction event, caused by humans having annihilated habitats, obliterated non-human populations, and distributed unimaginably vast quantities of poison and waste across the planet. At the same time, our climate has been wildly destabilized by the rapid injection of greenhouse gases, resulting from humans having made sweeping and destructive changes to the Earth’s land- and seascapes and having burned great lakes’ and mountains’ worth of fossil fuels. As collapsologists Pablo Servigne and Raphaël Stevens timidly sum it up, considering our ecological and social limits, as well as the dynamics of complex systems,
“Today, we are sure of four things: (1) the physical growth of our societies will come to a halt in the near future; (2) we have irreversibly damaged the entire Earth system (at least on the geological scale of human beings); (3) we are moving towards a very unstable, ‘non-linear’ future, where major disruptions (internal and external) will be the norm; and (4) we are now potentially subject to global systemic collapses.”9
The looming collapse, upon whose precipice all of humanity presently stands, promises to be of a greater magnitude and deeper consequence than any previous civilizational collapse. Its potency results from its ecological overshoot having exceeded that of any past society, as well as its planetary scope. Such a monumental degree of potential collapse can perhaps only proceed from a society of exceptional complexity, like our own, maintained through unprecedented flows of energy and materials supplied by centuries of accelerating environmental degradation, which have eroded the carrying capacity of the planet. This extreme degree of ecological overshoot has only been achieved through the installment of layers upon layers of technology and social hierarchy working in tandem to delay the consequences of overexploitation and overgrowth, allowing us to most efficiently steal the planet’s future productivity for short-term gain, while simultaneously separating the high-living, decision-making minority from the realities of the land and lives that sustain them.
New technologies have proliferated to address the mounting problems created by the previous technologies—yet without ever adequately addressing the root problems of overpollution and overexploitation. Social and economic tiers have mounted to facilitate the rising complexity of all the complex subsystems of extraction, production, distribution, consumption, and technology creation, to do all the increasing amounts of work and wastage that keep it afloat. These hierarchies are further reinforced by our system’s rewards for greater efficiency of hoarding, control, and domination of people and planet. And such extraordinary layers of Earth-alienating technology and socioeconomic hierarchy have only been possible due to the unique fund of concentrated energy that came to us in the form of fossil fuels.
But now the living world is exhausted. Pollution builds up. Cheap fuel runs low—and isn’t being replaced nearly fast enough by any alternative, nor can it be without further accelerating overexploitation and overpollution. The layers of technology and society are stretched and squeezed beyond their limits to facilitate more and more and more. Collapse seems inevitable. The open questions are when, how, and what follows in its wake?
Collapse and Regeneration
So we are left with this painfully unwelcome but eminently likely future. How will it feel? How do we navigate it? How might we mitigate it? Many of us are grappling with such questions, lacking sufficiently cogent, honest, and humane narratives to help us look beyond the breach. For those who feel anxious or despairing, I believe it’s important to acknowledge what our gut is telling us. Not to acknowledge our fright and despair prevents us from changing our paradigms. And if we can’t change our paradigms, our choices will only reproduce and extend the problem, rather than allow us to discover new paths. Yet each of us, in our own lives, in the lives of our communities and our shared world, must prepare to discover something new.
Of course, if complex societies always eventually fail, we might ask, how does it matter what we do today? It matters because the dynamics and results of collapse are neither binary nor static. It matters because the conditions of the disintegration determine so much of what’s possible both during and afterward. How we receive refugees today and into the near future will set the conditions for how things break down, how much suffering prevails, how well community regrouping and reinvention can proceed or new narratives find purchase. What we choose to create, inherit, and carry forward to navigate the calamity could help to cushion (or worsen) the fall for many. Multiple correct interventions might yet even steer us some meaningful bit closer toward decline than collapse. Helpful initiatives include mitigation of greenhouse gas emissions; forays into transformative agriculture and regenerative farming; exploring alternative farmable food sources, vegetarian aquaculture or polyculture, and more localized food production; reductions of private-car transport infrastructure in favor of pedestrian, cyclist, and mass-transit services; reducing consumption of goods and energy through recycling and downscaling. If such projects are designed and undertaken as part of an overall strategy for degrowth—which, regrettably, excludes perhaps most of the initiatives presently underway—they could help to reign in some degree of global warming, feed and house more people awhile longer, save more living species and maintain more pillars of ecosystem integrity.
And every bit of wilderness and biodiversity we can still preserve intact and unpoisoned, every fraction of a degree we can forestall from global heating will allow the biosphere to stabilize and regenerate that much faster. Adapting to the future Earth will surely prove challenging enough for many of today’s species, including our own, but it needn’t be reduced to the worst possible case. Whatever seeds of community and however much awareness of ecologically sensitive practices we’re able to plant today may become nodes of resilience in an uncertain tomorrow. If today we begin to genuinely reflect upon what is worth carrying forward, we might move in more promising directions. Voluntarily accepting degrowth of the human enterprise, in exchange for its resilience and continuance alongside the non-human world we cherish—and need—requires a profound change in how we see our place in the world and what we expect from it. It requires nothing less than social and personal transformation. But fighting against what the privileged among us would experience as civilizational decline will likely only lead us to choices that make the impacts of collapse much worse for all.
We are on the cusp of the end of a world. But not necessarily at the end of the world. For if we are able to imagine it, something new might yet be made.
****
“Complex societies, it must be emphasized again, are recent in human history. Collapse then is not a fall to some primordial chaos, but a return to the normal human condition of lower complexity.”10 —Joseph A. Tainter
[Part 19: What We Talk About When We Talk About the Future]
Notes:
1 The social world of The Walking Dead characters doesn’t change much at least up through season 5, a few years into its storyline. That was as much as I could stomach of zombie gore and the constant fighting, in the absence of much else. But the series goes on for well over a hundred television episodes and webisodes, plus multiple spin-off series, continuing in the same vein, as far as I can tell.
2 A notable exception to this trope can be seen in the zombie apocalypse film, Cargo (Netflix, 2018). Perhaps because this film is set in Australia and features Australian Aboriginal characters, who have their own way of understanding and dealing with both the zombies and the apocalypse, it offers a completely different approach to the situation. Another example of alternative, post-apocalyptic storytelling is Snowpiercer (the ongoing Netflix series, not the film), in which the apocalypse is caused by a climate geoengineering project gone wrong. While the characters do frequently fight and vie for power (and viewers must forgive some major plot holes), the story centers on the microcosm of their functioning society of survivors as they try to imagine and make a better world.
3 “Lo, Nobles Lament, the Poor Rejoice”: State Formation in the Wake of Social Flux, by Ellen Morris. In After Collapse: The Regeneration of Complex Societies, edited by Glenn M Schwartz and John J Nichols. The University of Arizona Press, 2006.
4 The Collapse and Regeneration of Complex Society in Greece, 1500–500 bc, by Ian Morris. In After Collapse: The Regeneration of Complex Societies, edited by Glenn M Schwartz and John J Nichols. The University of Arizona Press, 2006.
5 Page 266, The Collapse of Complex Societies (New Studies in Archaeology) by Joseph A. Tainter. Cambridge University Press, 1998.
6 Notes on Regeneration, by Norman Yoffee. In After Collapse: The Regeneration of Complex Societies, edited by Glenn M Schwartz and John J Nichols. The University of Arizona Press, 2006.
7 The Collapse of Complex Societies (New Studies in Archaeology) by Joseph A. Tainter. Cambridge University Press, 1998.
8 Thinking in Systems: A Primer by Donella H. Meadows. Chelsea Green Publishing, 2008.
9 Page 89. How Everything Can Collapse: A Manual for Our Times by Pablo Servigne and Raphaël Stevens Translated by Andrew Brown. Polity Press, 2020.
10 Page 485, The Collapse of Complex Societies (New Studies in Archaeology) by Joseph A. Tainter. Cambridge University Press, 1998.
Earlier Essays in this Series
1 What We Talk About When We Talk About The Weather
10 On Progress as Human Destiny
11 Of Gods and Men and Human Destiny
12 Musings on the Anthropocene
13 Stories of Wealth and Distribution
14 Toward a Polyphony of Stories
Images
[The 17th in a series of essays, On Climate Truth and Fiction, in which I raise questions about environmental distress, the human experience, and storytelling. It first appeared on 3 Quarks Daily. The previous part is here.]
The peopling of Polynesia was an epic chapter in world exploration. Stirred by adventure and hungry for land, intrepid pioneers sailed for days or weeks beyond their known horizons to discover landscapes and living things never before seen by human eyes. Survival was never easy or assured, yet they managed to find and colonize nearly every spot of land across the entire southern Pacific Ocean. On each island, they forged new societies based on familiar Polynesian models of ranked patrilineages, family bonds and obligations, social care and cohesion, cooperation and duty. Each culture that arose was unique and changeable, as islanders continually adjusted to altered conditions, new information, and shifting political tides. Through trial and hardship, most of these civilizations—even on some of the tiniest islands, like Anuta and Tikopia, discussed in the preceding essay—persisted for centuries or millennia, up to the present day. But others faltered, failing to thrive or even to maintain continuity.
Most Polynesian societies that met the tragic fate of famine and disintegration were on remote islands measuring but a few square miles. But size alone was not the decisive factor. In fact, the most famous case occurred on a substantially larger island of about sixty square miles, called Rapa Nui1, widely known as Easter Island. Despite its relatively generous size, Rapa Nui suffered certain drawbacks. Owing to its more southerly latitude, outside the tropics, it was cooler, drier, and windier than most Polynesian islands—suboptimal conditions for some of their primary crops. Freshwater sources were also few, relative to the island’s size, and sometimes difficult to access. And the cooler surrounding ocean didn’t support the shallow reefs more common to tropical seas, making the islanders’ survival dependent on deep-sea fishing.
On the other hand, when the migrants first arrived, almost eleven hundred years ago, the pristine island was crowned with a dense forest of enormous trees, including a colossal species of palm found nowhere else on Earth, as well as other edible and useful plants. Small fish and shellfish could be gathered along the coast. In addition to several species of non-migratory birds inhabiting the forestland, seabird rookeries crowded the surfaces of rocky mounts just offshore. And the island’s three dormant volcanoes provided great quarries of stone suitable for making fine tools. The fate of the Rapanui people was in no way preordained.
In Pursuit of Greatness
Rapa Nui is a distant outlier among the Polynesian islands, a multi-week voyage from the nearest island of Mangareva, the colonizers’ possible starting point. According to Rapanui oral traditions, their island was first discovered on an exploratory mission in search of new land; soon after, it was settled by a royal entourage—an ariki of divine birth, with his wife and children—alongside a complement of working families with their chickens, Pacific rats, taro, purple yam, sweet potato, sugar cane, paper mulberry and other crops in tow. Heedful of the island’s cool and dry conditions, the colonizers opted to leave behind some of their staples, including the cold-sensitive coconut and breadfruit trees, as well as pigs, who disturb gardens and consume more calories than they provide.
Within a few years of landing, during the 10th century CE, the ariki partitioned the island among his sons who dispersed across the land, establishing the founding clans and territories of a unified agricultural state to be ruled by divine royals, possessed of the supernatural force called mana. As elsewhere in Polynesia, the ariki was responsible for redistributing food and goods, but in the Rapanui system, he and his aristocrats enjoyed real advantages and privileges, including a life of relative leisure, exclusive access to choice seafoods and, significantly, the power to make and enforce rules on others’ behavior. Close to the aristocrats were the astronomer-priests; below them were warriors and craftspeople, followed by fishers and farmers, then servants.
The settlers got to work, industriously cutting and burning forest cover in order to plant their crops. They constructed massive stone aqueducts to irrigate their fields with the rainwater that collected in volcanic crater lakes. They built fleets of canoes to provision porpoises and fishes from the deep seas, mostly for the upper-classes. Low-ranking people relied mainly on their intensively farmed diet, based around their tubers, bananas, and sugarcane, supplemented with birds’ eggs, shellfish, local fruits, and rats. They thrived and grew. In the early centuries, the Rapanui likely remained in contact with their ancestral homeland, sending delegations to participate in inter-island cultural events and festivals. They mastered quarrying and working the several types of volcanic stone and began to carve sacred likenesses of their male ancestors, called moai, as tall as a man and imbued with mana. They built wide roads to link people across the island with fields and quarries. They developed a writing system to record genealogies, so central to their social structure, alongside their mythic and secular lore.2
After several centuries, that initial founding colony of perhaps several score individuals had mushroomed to as many as seventeen-thousand. By this time, inter-island communication had waned. But the production of moai and the ritual activities surrounding them were well established as the crowning industry of royal patronage, having expanded to megalithic proportions. The islanders would carve nearly a thousand monoliths over some six centuries (though not all would be completed or mounted upright), culminating in those iconic, gargantuan stone “heads”3 that today litter the barren hillocks of Easter Island, mounted upon massive stone platforms (ahu), themselves marvels of engineering. As clans across the island competed to outdo each other in the glory of their erections, the moai grew to exceed thirty feet in height and ninety tons in weight. With increasing effort expended in the production of moai, this industry became a peculiar engine of economic growth. The Rapanui had built up a civilization no less majestic (if less opulent) than had the early Egyptians, all without gold or iron or bronze, without oxen or donkeys, without regional trade.
Yet, not all was well. Amid their mounting greatness, the breakdown of their island ecosystem was already becoming plain. Several species of non-migratory birds, whose eggs they were eating and whose habitat they were chopping down, rapidly went extinct. Perhaps, at first, they hadn’t realized how slowly the trees grew on this island. Or that their rats had taken a liking to the little seeds of the giant palm tree, eating its nuts nearly as fast as they were falling, so that few new trees even had a chance to take root. The shrinking forest cover caused the island’s thin soils to erode—to the point that some regions of the island had to be abandoned over the centuries. Reduced forest cover also meant less rain fell on the island, affecting all crop production.
Living as they did so close to the land—and cognizant of their geographic isolation—the Rapanui were undoubtedly far more attentive to the changes their island was undergoing than we have been to our global environmental changes over the past three centuries. From early on, the Rapanui had imposed seasonal taboos on hunting sea turtles and other animals to prevent their overexploitation. As the island grew increasingly arid, farmers developed new techniques. For instance, they covered large tracts of land with “stone gardens,” fields densely covered with chunks of volcanic stone, to nurture taro and sweet potatoes. This form of farming, known as mulching, retains water and protects the soil from erosion. The stones keep the ground warm for these tropical plants and leech out minerals that help fertilize the soil. Purple yams grew well in pits dug between these stone gardens. Tall, semi-circular walls of stone protected stands of sugarcane and bananas from the strong winds. The Rapanui built terraces, canals, and reservoirs of superb craftsmanship, breaking, gathering, moving, hewing incredible quantities of stone to support their subsistence. Their innovative farming methods and conservation measures helped to extend their way of life against the rising damage to their ecosystem.
But they did not stop cutting down the trees or fashioning ever greater moai. Trees were essential to the Rapanui way of life. You might say, they were central to the Rapanui economy. The hard wood of the local trees was required for building canoes, which they needed for fishing and visiting the rocks where seabirds still roosted, across rough waters. The Rapanui used wood to cook, to keep warm during the island’s chilly winters, to cremate their dead, and to build their sturdy houses. They used wood to help transport each moai to its awaiting ahu. Without the grand trees, this way of life would no longer be possible. But by the latter half of the seventeenth century, the forest was completely razed and the endemic tree species were extinct.
Discontinuity and Disorder
One might conjure an apocryphal image of a group of Rapanui, stone axes in hand, gathered round the last copse of tall trees left standing on their isolated trace of land. All the other great trees in the ancient forest that once covered the island had been felled over the preceding seven centuries. What were they thinking, we wonder, when they stood ready to cut down those last solid specimens? These represented their last chance at sea-worthy canoes—to fish, or maybe to escape to another land. These would be the last fuel for their moai-centered economic engine. Their last hope to regrow the forest! How could they have knowingly come to the precipice of their own way of life? What did they think would happen after the trees were gone? It beggars the mind with distress and disbelief at their wanton destruction or knowing disregard for consequences. Or does it?
In fact, it’s not that hard to imagine what they were thinking, if you admit the parallels between their predicament and ours. We hear the same thoughts echoing all around us in our similar moment of crisis today. I imagine most Rapanui decision-makers thinking, We can’t just stop cutting down the trees. They’re the only thing that can save us! Maybe they reasoned, Wood is the basis of all of our innovations to solve our problems—which are mounting every decade. We need this wood to maintain what we have and improve what’s broken. Perhaps they reassured themselves, Surely, a new forest will grow in time, or a new way to continue will be found. They trusted the invisible hand of the moai to aid their efforts and kindly direct their fate, for they had done everything right. Hadn’t they achieved a level of understanding and technology unimagined by their forebears? Didn’t they now know, better than ever, what they were doing and how best to live? Had they not built a monumental civilization of unparalleled wealth and achievement? No doubt, as popular faith in the power of royal mana first began to crack, entrenched political interests doubled down to keep alive, relevant, and persuasive those stories that defended the status quo and further fortified royal power and their cults of moai. Even as those stories were failing them, their historical success continued to blind them to the limits of their paradigm of civilization; they wanted to believe that more of the same would save them.
Archaeology and oral histories provide some clues to the fate of the Rapanui, as their island was denuded. Porpoises and tuna had already disappeared from their diets a century before the last trees were cut. Perhaps, as the forest shrank, fishing canoes were no longer maintained in the interest of keeping the rest of the civilizational machinery running. Native fruits were becoming harder to find. Crop yields too were declining. There came a point when so much effort was required to produce adequate food for the populace that none remained to continue carving the moai, whose production, distribution, and ritual use were so intricately enmeshed within their systems of meaning and social order. There came a point when people began to starve. When there wasn’t enough wood to cremate the dead. Warrior factions rose up and deposed the royalty, imposing a new social order. Clan structures were disrupted and reconstituted. Short, bloody confrontations periodically erupted across the land, prompting people to seek refuge in caves; these they fortified with stones poached from earlier engineering projects—raiding the infrastructures of a collapsing civilization. Eventually, they even desecrated the sacred moai, no longer afraid of their mana, toppling them and gouging out their coral eyes. They hollowed out chambers in the ahu to hold bones of the dead. At times, people resorted to cannibalism.
While we don’t know just how these political and cultural upheavals played out, we know they occurred much more quickly than the seven centuries required to build up that monumental civilization, which likely had reached its apex by the late 16th Century. Less than a hundred years later, the last moai had been carved; the last stands of forest were gone; the upland plantations had been abandoned; and commoners had moved into coastal areas, previously forbidden to them. On Easter Day of 1722, when the first Europeans set eyes upon Rapa Nui, Dutch explorer Jacob Roggeveen described a landscape of “parched-up grass, and hay or other scorched and charred brushwood… an extraordinarily sparse and meagre vegetation”. As they drew nearer to land, his officer Behrens reported, “thousands” of islanders jumped into the water, swimming toward the ships or arriving in little dinghies. The Rapanui stared with wonder at the three European ships, “desirous of finding out what design had brought us there” and offered gifts of chickens and tubers. Many more islanders were seen on the beach, “running up and down like deer”. The Europeans also spotted “great numbers of heathen idols erected on shore.” Priests were lighting fires and prostrating themselves prayerfully before the moai.4
Over a hundred Europeans went ashore, thronged by crowds of islanders, who pressed around them, snatching at their belongings. Roggeveen noted several sturdy longhouses in use. But he was flummoxed by the sight of their giant moai, wondering “how it was possible that people who are destitute of heavy or thick timber, and also of stout cordage, out of which to construct gear, had been able to erect them”. Their little skiffs, too, Roggeveen observed, were of very flimsy construction and full of leaks, having been so “skillfully” stitched together from short planks of wood. These Europeans spent hardly two days among the Rapanui and couldn’t begin to form a comprehensive idea of their society, but their huge party was greeted by no obvious person of rank on the island—no king or chief or royal official came forward to meet the first outsiders to stop on the island in over five hundred years. Behrens surmised, “there are no great distinctions between them…. each household was independent, wherein the most elderly of its men took the lead.” This first landing of Europeans on Rapa Nui would begin with a dozen islanders shot dead and more of them injured, the victims of a few trigger-happy sailors. In spite of this horrific massacre, the islanders generously fed their visitors.
It would be two generations before the Rapanui encountered Europeans again, when Captain Gonzalez’s Spanish ships arrived in 1770. The Spaniards hosted “hundreds” of Rapanui aboard their ships, cavorting to fife music and gifting trinkets. Over the course of four days spent carefully surveying the entire island, one of Gonzalez’s pilots noticed traces of former agricultural fields, now abandoned in favor of small garden plots. He learned that many Rapanui “dwell in underground caves or in the hollow of some rock” fortified with stones and provided with exceedingly narrow entrances. And he observed the reverence paid to the moai, as well as to a smaller “idol” he saw, fashioned from plant fibers.
Both European expeditions, separated by half a century, encountered a people they described as notably tall, strong, healthy, and of a happy disposition, scantily clothed in colored barkcloth and sporting all manner of intricate bodily adornments. All the commentators from these voyages also mentioned the island’s missing women, who comprised much less than half the island’s population; one of the Spaniards also noted a conspicuous absence of boys. But apart from this, none of them log any note of real concern for the condition of the Rapanui. In fact, having received copious quantities of chickens and high-quality produce as gifts from the islanders, all were quite convinced that, despite initial appearances, the island must constitute fertile land that could be profitably farmed under European guidance. One wonders whether, after an initial phase of catastrophe—famine and political disintegration—the Rapanui, at this point, might not have reconstituted their society in a new equilibrium with their degraded land and with each other.
At the behest of the Spaniards, the affable Rapanui carried three large wooden crosses—singing and dancing as they went—to be planted on hilltops with much fanfare. Afterwards, the Spaniards produced a document, which some of the Rapanui men “signed or attested by marking upon it certain characters in their own form of script.” Fully persuaded the Rapanui had gladly donated their island to the Spanish king, the Spaniards happily departed.
But four years later, Captain Cook5 painted a different picture. After stopping on the island for four days, Cook came away with the impression that the island was impoverished for food, saying,
“No Nation will ever contend for the honour of the discovery of Easter Island as there is hardly an Island in this sea which affords less refreshments.… Nature has hardly provided it with any thing fit for man to eat or drink, and as the Natives are but few and may be supposed to plant no more than sufficient for themselves, they cannot have much to spare to new comers. The produce is Potatoes, Yams, Taro or the Edoy root, Plantains and Sugar Cane, all excellent in its kind, the Potatoes are the best of the sort I ever tasted… but not much….”
Cook makes no comment on the stature and health of the islanders, but he too was startled at how few women he saw.6 His was the first report of a skeleton seen lying among the stones of a partially dismantled ahu. His men, who explored much more of the island, said several of the mysterious stone colossi had been toppled and broken. All of this filled the men with a sense of dread and they were soon eager to be off to “some more happy spot.”
We don’t know exactly what happened in the years between these European visitations, nor whose logs comprise the more astute observations of the people and land. The Spaniards had estimated the island’s population between eight-hundred and a thousand; Cook guessed six or seven hundred. Any of them may well have been wrong about the numbers, even by a factor or two or three, but not likely by an order of magnitude. Cook’s tally might reflect surprise at the dearth of inhabitants on an island of such size, since he was familiar with other, thriving Polynesian islands and recognized the Rapanui as a branch of the same, based on their language and aesthetic. It’s possible that by the time of Cook’s visit in 1774, a second shock such as drought, storm, or disease brought by the previous European visitors had sent the Rapanui into another phase of catastrophe. It’s also possible the ongoing breakdown of Rapanui society and its population decline had been proceeding unabated for two centuries, unseen by the various Europeans during their limited forays.
What is clear from reading the accounts is that the Europeans didn’t understand much of what was really going on among the Rapanui any more than the Rapanui understood the motives and intentions of the Europeans. But the descriptions they provided also leave little room to doubt that by the time Roggeveen arrived, Rapa Nui was no longer ruled by a sacred dynasty; their sharply hierarchical civilization had substantially flattened. Before Gonzalez’s visit (and likely before Roggeveen’s), the Rapanui population had already crashed—archaeology suggests by as much as seventy percent from its peak. Large plantations had been abandoned and Rapanui society was remade upon an economic base of subsistence horticulture. Wars were being fought, with people taking refuge in caves, and survivors were experiencing a demographic crisis, with too few women and children to sustain their population. Only modest degrees of social differentiation remained among them, yet there were still priests and others who continued to protect and worship the moai through these centuries of tribulation; almost certainly, however, the meanings of the moai were contested long before people undertook the great effort required to push them over, beginning sometime after 1770. The last moai was toppled around 1840.
The rapid decline of population and the discontinuities fracturing the Rapanui social world during the 17th and 18th Centuries is reasonably considered a societal collapse. Yet it’s worth noting that even as their civilization and ecosystem were breaking down, the Rapanui remained engaged in many of the normalcies of everyday life. They were still gardening productively and ingeniously. They were holding festivals and competing in sports tournaments. The descendants of those who’d survived the famines were again eating well. They were developing new forms of art, adorning themselves with pigments, jewelry, bodily modifications, and finely dyed barkcloth. They were worshipping old and newly ascendant divinities, telling old and new stories. Despite having suffered periods of horrific warfare and even episodes of cannibalism, they never greeted foreigners with violence—not even after having been fired upon with muskets. They never stopped innovating and adapting. But their great civilization—certainly approaching its zenith—was plainly unsustainable. Their pursuit of human power or “greatness,” manifested in a pyramid of social tiers maintained by excesses of production and increasing extraction, had taken them into ecological overshoot: they had degraded their ecosystem, stealing its future productivity for immediate surpluses, until collapse was inevitable.
More ships visited Rapa Nui after Cook’s, bringing a series of documented plagues and chronology of violence, including raiders who abducted and sold most of the islanders into slavery in Peruvian mines. Missionaries took up residence on the island in 1864 and by 1872 only one-hundred and eleven Rapanui people remained. The following decade, Chile claimed the island and fenced the dwindling survivors onto a small reservation, from where the men could be called upon to labor on the sheep farms and mines their captors installed on their island. Only after nearly a hundred years of living thus in detention, were the Rapanui granted Chilean citizenship. Today, a few thousand islanders proudly claim Rapanui ancestry while several hundred still speak their Indigenous language.
Degrowth as Development
What does this mean for us, who have pursued our own image of greatness into ecological overshoot on a global scale? Part of the answer must lie in questioning what it even means to be a great civilization. I’m not persuaded that a truly great civilization is one that’s reconciled with destitution and institutional systems of exploitation in its midst, nor one that’s in the business of wholesale destruction of life on the planet. In fact, I would question everything we imagine we know about the salutary way to go forward. We must peer beyond the bubble of our short-term, historical “success” that blinds us to the limits of our paradigm of civilization.
The Rapanui exploited their land faster than it could regenerate their needed resources. Our predicament is more advanced: Globally, we’ve already seen the number of living wild animals decline by almost sixty percent in just fifty years, largely due to massive habitat destruction and encroachment. But we’re also disastrously disrupting the planet’s biological and geochemical cycles by generating pollution—ecologically destabilizing substances, including excess carbon dioxide and methane as well as phosphorous, nitrogen, plastics and more—much faster than Earth can absorb or neutralize it. All of this is not only accelerating the ongoing global mass extinction of animal and plant life across the globe, but also causing Earth’s temperature to rise at an alarming rate. This global warming will be catastrophic for agriculture, as climate zones shift and rains become unreliable, and it will be disastrous for urban life, as cities are more frequently flooded by rising seas and torrential downpours—consequences that are ruinous to our form of civilization.
Just as among the Rapanui, more of the same economic activities cannot save us from the destruction of which they are the cause.
Instead, we must think smaller, more locally, less materialistically about what we need, less narrowly about what constitutes civilized life. We must shrink the overall scale of the human enterprise. We who are high on consumption must dial it down. Deploying modes of renewable energy harvesting, regenerative farming, and plastic reduction are only a beginning. We must develop alternate modes of human relatedness, achievement, and subsistence. The only viable road to cushion our fall from overshoot is voluntary and collective restraint in overall energy and resource use and material production—the opposite of economic growth.
One modern economist who was early to recognize the danger of our present growthist thralldom was Ernst F Schumacher (1911–1977). Schumacher was concerned about how current economic models fail to account for the true costs of producing goods by dismissing the environmental costs. He regarded it a grievous error that stocks of natural resources get accounted as income rather than capital. And he considered it folly to privilege the priorities of modern economics as a guide to direct the development of societies, as though the discipline were built upon scientific or objectively sensible principles rather than a particular, historically mediated worldview. Perhaps not unlike the voices of doubters and heretics who were disregarded or silenced on Rapa Nui, five-hundred years ago, Schumacher’s observations of half a century ago resound as more than prescient today:
“An industrial system which uses forty percent of the world’s primary resources to supply less than six percent of the world’s population could be called efficient only if it obtained strikingly successful results in terms of human happiness, wellbeing, culture, peace, and harmony. I do not need to dwell on the fact that the American system fails to do this, or that there are not the slightest prospects that it could do so if only it achieved a higher rate of growth of production, associated, as it must be, with an even greater call upon the world’s finite resources…. But if the United States’ economy cannot conceivably be successful without further rapid growth, and if that growth depends on being able to draw ever-increasing resources from the rest of the world, what about the other 94.4 percent of mankind which are so far ‘behind’ America? If a high-growth economy is needed to fight the battle against pollution, which itself appears to be the result of high growth, what hope is there of ever breaking out of this extraordinary circle?”7
[Part 18: This Is Not the Zombie Apocalypse]
Notes:
1 Most details about the life, land, and history of the Rapanui are gleaned from The Land of Hotu A Matu’a: Rapa Nui, an Archaeology of the Impossible by Jose Miguel Ramirez-Aliaga and from Collapse: How Societies Choose To Succeed or Fail by Jared Diamond.
2 Surviving samples of their ideographic script, Rongo Rongo, remain undeciphered. The last persons who’d been trained to read it had all passed away by the middle of the nineteenth century. A few individuals, who yet remembered the oral tradition, were able to provide an understanding of what the writing said, though they couldn’t actually read it.
3 Each complete moai is, in fact, a full-body sculpture, with exaggerated dimensions for its head.
4 All accounts from the early European encounters with Rapa Nui (except those of Captain Cook) are gleaned from The Voyage of Captain Don Felipe Gonzalez to Easter Island 1770–1 : Preceded by an Extract from the Official Log of Mynheer Jacob Roggeveen in 1722 transcribed, edited, and translated by Bolton Glanvill Corney; Cambridge University Press, 1903.
5 The observations of Captain Cook and his crewmen are gathered from the webpages of The Captain Cook Society.
6 One of Cook’s shipmates reported that women came at night to partake of the sailors’ company; one woman boldly went out to their ship and spent time with several of the men. Fifty-two years earlier, Behrens had claimed that in their outpouring of grief following the massacre of their people, the islanders “made tender of their womenkind… asking whether we could accompany them to their huts”. Four years before Cook, Gonzalez’s officer wrote that women were only accompanied by elder Rapanui men, who were encouraging when “the women go to the length of offering with inviting demonstrations all the homage that an impassioned man can desire.” Having observed that the Rapanui share everything, the Spaniards surmised that they share women too. Of course, pre-Christian Polynesian cultures are well known for their liberal sexual mores. But reading this, I wondered whether these women of a vanishing people (and limited gene pool) weren’t just desperately trying to get pregnant.
7 Pages 125–126, Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered by Ernst F Schumacher. Blond & Briggs, 1973.
Earlier Essays in this Series
1 What We Talk About When We Talk About The Weather
10 On Progress as Human Destiny
11 Of Gods and Men and Human Destiny
12 Musings on the Anthropocene
13 Stories of Wealth and Distribution
14 Toward a Polyphony of Stories
Images
1. A moai on Rapa Nui. This one has been resurrected and its coral eyes restored by anthropologist William Mullo. Similar red "hats," such as worn by this one, were made from a different type of volcanic stone than the rest of the body and originally crowned several of the moai; it remains a mystery how the ancient Rapanui hoisted these atop the heads of the moai. Photo by Pavel Spindler, 2008. Creative commons.
2. Fifteen resurrected moai standing atop an ahu on Rapa Nui. Photo by Bjørn Christian Tørrissen, 2013. Creative Commons.
3. The only kneeling moai on Rapa Nui. Photo by Brocken Inaglory, 1998. Creative commons.
4. Cartoon, Fossil Fuel Solutionism. Image source.
5. Giant "heads" on the barren slopes of Rapa Nui. Photo by Aurbina, 2004. Creative commons.
6. Rapanui people taking part in their traditional dance. Creative commons.
7. Cartoon, our civilizational bubble.
[The sixteenth in a series of essays, On Climate Truth and Fiction, in which I raise questions about environmental distress, the human experience, and storytelling. It first appeared on 3 Quarks Daily. The previous part is here.]
Was it inevitable, this ongoing anthropogenic, global mass-extinction? Do mass destruction, carelessness, and hubris characterize the only way human societies know how to be in the world? It may seem true today but we know that it wasn’t always so. Early human societies in Africa—and many later ones around the world—lived without destroying their environments for long millennia. We tend to write off the vast period before modern humans left Africa as a time when “nothing much was happening” in the human story. But a great deal was actually happening: people explored, discovered, invented, and made decisions about how to live, what to eat, how to relate to each other; they observed and learned from the intricate and changing life around them. From this they fashioned sense and meaning, creative mythologies, art and humor, social institutions and traditions, tools and systems of knowledge. Yet it’s almost as though, if people aren’t busily depleting or destroying their local environments, we regard them as doing nothing.
Of course, it is a normal dynamic of evolution that one species occasionally will outcompete another and drive it toward extinction. But for most of their time on Earth, human beings were not having an outsized, annihilating effect on the life around them, rather than co-evolving with it. That evolution was at least as much cultural as it was a matter of flesh. What people consumed, how they obtained it, and how quickly they used it up has always played a role in the stability and evolution of any ecosystem of which humans were a part. How fast human populations grew, how they sheltered, what they trampled and destroyed or nourished and promoted—all of this affected their environment. Naturally, their interactions with the environment were always driven by what they wanted. And what people want is intimately driven by what they believe, as in the stories they tell themselves. One thing we can safely presume: those who understood their own social continuity as contingent upon that of their environment weren’t telling the same stories we tell today.
Humans began to have a more devastating effect on their local environments when they finally spilled out of Africa and began spreading across the globe. To begin with, those who left Africa also left behind most of the disease pathogens and parasites that had co-evolved with them,[1] which surely aided their own survival rates. Humans were also elite predators, who hunted and foraged like no other animals elsewhere. Population growth and colonization are animal drives that must be met by contravening forces of predation, disease, or resource scarcity to maintain balance within an ecosystem, but outside their native range humans could overwhelm many of these factors. And the new worlds they encountered at every step surely changed their stories—and their societies—in profound ways. Indeed, one might conjecture that our destiny to conquer the Earth was fully sealed by the time our anatomically modern ancestors marched into the cold, dry mid-latitudes of Pleistocene Australia, where their presence hastened the demise of the continent’s unique megafauna. What stories did those pioneers tell of outsmarting the towering marsupial, diprotodon? Of overpowering the massive lizard, megalania? Of sharing such tremendous feasts?
But that wouldn’t be the whole story. For the drive toward social cohesion and continuity is surely at least as strong among humans as the drive toward novelty and domination. Collective survival mattered to foraging societies, and the lessons of successful ecological balance—failures of which could lead to famine and community dispersal—were as old as time. So as those astounding animals disappeared from the Australian landscape, what stories were inspired by their loss?[2] We don’t know the effect local extinctions had on individual societies tens of thousands of years ago, but witnessing the dramatic demise of megafauna, forests, grasslands, or any other features on which they depended must have made a deep impression—if not caused outright disruption. Even as various groups struggled, innovated, and experimented to find new balance in new landscapes and climates across the planet—even as recently as mid-Holocene times—such profound lessons were certainly not lost on everyone. And they need not be lost upon us now.
Crucibles of Experimentation
It might be instructive in this regard to look at stories from the peopling of the Pacific, which provides countless illustrations of how different societies managed social cohesion and continuity. Or didn’t. Small, remote islands are unforgiving crucibles for human social and material experimentation: Through trial and error, the exercise of wisdom, and the guidance of ancient lore, a colonizing people, especially those encountering a true terra nullius, must fashion a way of life that brings them into sustainable balance with their narrowly circumscribed ecosystem. Failing this, they’ll eventually be forced to abandon their island—or perish entirely. These are the only possible outcomes. And all three fates were known to befall different groups who braved this vast, watery span of the planet.
The peopling of the Pacific might be said to have begun about five-thousand years ago, when the first families set off in canoes from Formosa Island (modern-day Taiwan) along with their dogs, chickens, pigs, rice, and other crops: the core of their subsistence economy. Hailing from various parts of the island, they spoke a variety of different Austronesian languages. And as they went, they mixed and mingled with many other peoples: the indigenes of Luzon and other Philippine islands, the Southeast Asian mainland, the Indonesian islands, as well as New Guinea and other Melanesian islands. Their descendants then carried onward the indigenous horticultural knowledge and foods from these tropical regions—including coconuts, taro, and bananas—alongside their ever-diversifying Austronesian languages. Over generations, these seafarers also perfected their ocean-going craft and learned to read the waves, winds, and stars with breathtaking acuity. Fewer than five-thousand years after departing Formosa, Austronesian-speaking families had sailed and settled as far west as Madagascar; eastward, they had dispersed among the tiny, North Pacific atolls of Micronesia and the scattered volcanic and coral islands dotting the breadth of the Pacific Ocean, from Hawaii to Rapa Nui (Easter Island) to Aotearoa (New Zealand)—the Polynesian Triangle.[3] And thus nearly every last, far-flung sandy shore of the Pacific received its first human footfall before Europe had even begun its own Age of Exploration.
Each island was of course unique and those who remained to colonize it had to adapt in order to thrive. Over the millennia, many of these Austronesian colonies endured periods of extreme hardship as they faced droughts and hurricanes, as they made war, were infested by rats, or despoiled their delimited and ecologically fragile landscapes. Sometimes they failed to overcome these trials and found no sustainable balance. But often, they succeeded. Their ancestors had long proven themselves masters of adaptation and invention, and most of these new island societies thrived, evolving unique and complex civilizations, social systems, and inter-island relationships, many of which persist up to the present day. In light of how incapable we often presume people are of achieving it, I find it especially humbling to think about those who mastered continuity.
Fortune, Misfortune, and Adaptation
Two of the astonishing Polynesian success stories come from the islands of Tikopia and Anuta. Tikopia is one of the smallest and most remote inhabited specks of the Solomons archipelago. With a footprint of less than two square miles, the island is crowned by emerald peaks ruggedly splayed above a large crater lake. The nearest larger island—Vanua Lava, still rather small at one-hundred and twenty square miles—is a week’s journey by canoe, so the Tikopia have maintained only infrequent and sporadic contact with the outside world, even up to the present day. Nevertheless, their jungle-draped spot of land has been continuously inhabited by the descendants of various Polynesian and Melanesian groups who independently arrived from many different islands, beginning at least three-thousand years ago. While the migrants’ early encounters with one another might not have been entirely peaceful, they eventually blended into a single society, jointly governed by the leaders (ariki) of its four clans, whose clansfolk are distributed in mixed and freely intermarrying settlements across the lowlands.[4]
Even smaller and more remote than Tikopia, Anuta lies seventy miles further to the southeast, with a footprint just shy of half a square mile. The first people to settle on Anuta, some two-thousand years ago, abandoned it within a few generations, after a devastating hurricane storm surge inundated the land. Over a thousand years passed before new colonists would try again. These were the ancestors of Anuta’s present inhabitants, who arrived at least six-hundred years ago, in a unique yet broadly parallel story to Tikopia. These two microcosms, Tikopia and Anuta, have kept friendly relations for centuries although, remaining yet so remote from one another, they’ve each had to maintain material self-sufficiency. Some decades ago, both were incorporated into the Solomon Islands nation, though this has had little material bearing on the everyday lives of their people. While the culture and history of Tikopia is better documented, both cultures are organized along similar principles and have managed centuries of continuity within limited resources.
Tikopia society is definitively patriarchal, albeit not of the more extreme variety. Patrilineages are ranked, though far less so than in many other Polynesian societies, with the ariki of each clan assigned through male primogeniture. Among the Tikopia, an ariki is awarded great formal respect but commands no coercive power to enforce behaviors on others. Rights to particular parcels of land for building houses and growing food gardens, as well as to access certain lake-fishing spots, are inherited and held by the patriarchs of each family. Highly ranked families often have more or better land holdings, so they may be “wealthier” than others. Everyone—even an ariki—works in the gardens and catches fish for their household, women walking along the reef with hand-nets and men in the deep from canoes. Everyone takes part in cooking. Everyone participates in childcare. While there is an expectation that each family is self-sufficient in its food production, networks of relationship and obligation ensure that no one is ever without food, shelter, or any basic necessities—an arrangement they refer to as aropa—so differences in landholdings do not imply want or competition for subsistence, and thus don’t systematically enable control over others through enforced scarcity, as we see in capitalist systems. Tikopia has no army or police force, courthouse or jailhouse. One ariki describes his job as governing the people on the island to “see they have no quarreling about the land. They must all share.”
Though small, both Tikopia and Anuta islands are blessed with freshwater springs, volcanic soils, flocks of birds, and encircling reefs. However, they do experience periodic drought and lie in a very active hurricane zone—Tikopia has historically been struck by hurricanes about once a decade (it now happens every other year). Hurricanes and droughts present existential hardship, as trees and houses are sheared away by winds, gardens wither or get washed away, water sources are contaminated or run low. The island’s geography and ecology, too, have undergone changes over the last three-thousand years, some due to human activity and some for reasons beyond human effects. For instance, the large crater lake of Tikopia, rich with fish and supplying suitable habitats for growing sago palm and other foods, has only been a freshwater lake for the past four hundred years; prior to that, it was a saltwater bay.[5] These are the sorts of changes, challenges, and occasional opportunities to which the Tikopia have steadily adjusted. And over the millennia, their lifestyle choices have changed a great deal. For instance, the Tikopia once had a pottery tradition. But after almost a thousand years of living on the island, they stopped making their own pottery and began to import it from other islands; a few generations later, they altogether abandoned the use of pottery on their island. Archaeology also attests that the islanders once regularly consumed fruit bats and eels, but they later stopped including these in their diet. It’s unknown what drove these changes. Perhaps they ran out of suitable clay to make pots. Maybe they noticed their gardens grew stunted when decimated bat populations dropped less of that wondrous fertilizer, guano. Or they discovered some other troubling change on their island correlated with those older practices. But the culture adapted. About four hundred years ago, the Tikopia decided to enjoy their last meals of pork—an ancient food staple among nearly all Austronesian cultures—and thereafter to banish pigs from their island, because the pigs were damaging their gardens. While pigs must always have damaged their gardens, one wonders whether around 1600 CE the human population had grown too high or depleted the island to the point that competing with pigs for food was no longer tenable. What’s interesting is their solution: rather than competing for increasingly rare pork, or allowing only a few to have it, they decided instead to jointly bear the cost of sacrificing pork and gain the benefit of more productive gardening.
Overall, the islanders’ consumption of animals declined over the millennia; meanwhile they were continually adopting new plant foods from other islands, such as Canarium nuts and manioc and new varieties of bananas and coconuts, learning how to incorporate them into their island’s thriving jungle. The Tikopia identify over one-hundred and fifty plant species on their island, nearly all of which they have a use for, including bamboo, pandanus, and red turmeric used for material or ritual purposes. They build their houses with low roofs to better withstand hurricanes; they preserve food underground that can be called upon in an emergency, even after years; they maintain and repair rare or resource-intensive tools, like canoes, so they might even last for decades.[6] Such adaptations were shaped by a close awareness of their cultural and natural constraints.
Continuity and Cooperative Restraint
Notably, the Tikopia also consciously decided that some technologies used elsewhere in the world weren’t well suited to the preservation of their island or way of life. Each novel technology was evaluated on its own merits and risks. For instance, when passing whalers in the eighteenth century introduced them to metal knives and axes, they readily mastered their use and care. On the other hand, they long resisted more intensive farming methods, concrete buildings, and participation in commercial activities, which they reckoned might pose a danger to their ultimate wellbeing.
Perhaps the most difficult adaptation, however, was population control. At some point, the Tikopia figured out that their island could only reliably sustain just over a thousand people. On Anuta, the carrying capacity was adjudged closer to a couple hundred. Exceeding these limits by too much endangered everyone, especially in hurricane or drought conditions; unchecked growth ultimately worked against social cohesion and continuity. So population growth on the island was historically stalled by various means. As is typical in non-industrial societies, Tikopia’s child mortality due to illness or accident was also high. But when the population faced severe food stress in times of drought or hurricane, men were known to sacrifice themselves, setting out on rafts to face a quick death at sea rather than a slow death by starvation. The Tikopia also recall two wars in which a portion of the population was forcibly expelled from the island. But the most regular form of population control was the everyday practice of coitus interruptus.
While some people had three or four children, others had none of their own. Some remained childless by choice. Others were pressured into abstaining from reproduction, with the entreaties falling most heavily upon a patriarch’s younger brothers, whose marriages would divide family landholdings.[7] On Tikopia, unmarried individuals had always been free to enjoy sex amongst themselves, so long as their escapades didn’t result in pregnancy. But should a couple decide to have a child, they were expected to marry;[8] conversely, children were never to be born out of wedlock. In practice, this generally meant that one didn’t marry unless she or he intended to have a child, which not everyone could do. One’s family wealth and birth order played a substantial role in enabling an individual to choose to procreate. A woman finding herself with an unwanted pregnancy might attempt to induce abortion by pressing hot rocks against her abdomen but, even when this crude method did actually work, it sometimes resulted in her own death as well. Safer and more reliable was infanticide at birth. For a married woman, the decision and the act were left to her husband’s discretion: if he felt he didn’t have the means to feed the child—usually because the couple already had three or four children—he stated as much and immediately placed the newborn face-down on their mat, causing it to quickly asphyxiate.
As Christianity eventually took hold among the island’s populace, these practices were slowly phased out of the Tikopia way of life. Anglican missionaries had persistently pursued the souls of Tikopia for decades before their efforts found purchase in the early twentieth century; some decades after that, their religion was finally accepted by all the islanders. Engaged there to teach, rather than to learn, the missionaries neither appreciated the natural limits of the island’s resources nor could abide the Tikopia practices of sex without marriage and birth control. The missionaries and, later, Tikopia’s own converts to Christianity, put increasing pressure on the islanders to amend these ways. Over the past century, the Tikopia population has swelled. Today most Tikopia live on other islands within the Solomons, while the population on their home island remains just below thirteen-hundred souls. As those living in the capital, Honiara, are more subject to the economic pressures and opportunities of the globalizing world, their close ties with their home island introduce more foreign materials and ideas at an increasing rate today.
The traditional population control measures of Tikopia were harsh. But not, I think, more so than the fate of other Pacific islanders who did not succeed in finding a sustainable balance with their ecosystem, who suffered societal disintegration, starvation, and measures most extreme (to be addressed in my next essay). What’s striking about the Tikopia isn’t only that they created a civilization that has persisted for three-thousand years, but how they managed it. Their story tells of unceasing innovations and adjustments to changing conditions. They faced limits to their growth and the consequences of their material exploitation, as we do today. But rather than calling for deeper extraction and resource use, their innovations involved cultural adaptations that required embracing prudent limits—of consumption, production, reproduction. Rather than forcing their environment to produce more or innovating ways to temporarily hide the damages caused by their extraction or consumption, the Tikopia adjusted their expectations and practices instead. At some point, they concluded that they could do without pottery, inventing less resource-intensive modes of cooking and carrying. Likewise, they determined that bats and eels had special powers and must not be eaten. They figured out that they could not compete with pigs, so pork was struck from the menu. They changed their stories, their needs, their culture. Social cohesion and continuity were apparently more important to them than the limitless fulfillment of individual desires.
It can hardly escape our notice, too, that Tikopia society is built on broad cooperation, rather than competition; they essentially avoid the classic “tragedy of the commons” by sharing the wealth and the costs of its production, so there’s no individual incentive to overexploit and hoard the benefits. Tikopia social rankings are also relatively flat and lack strong institutional structures granting one individual or group coercive power over others. In fact, these features are common to many societies with deep continuity, including Indigenous peoples in Australia as well as in Central and South Africa, societies that systematically elude what political scientist William Ophuls has called the “immoderate greatness” to which so many nations feel entitled or compelled. Of course, those who avoid such “greatness” surely wouldn’t see that as their goal; they might simply want to preserve their high levels of individual autonomy and maintain the resources that sustain them. All of these cultural characteristics as well as the manner of Tikopia responses to environmental change stand in stark contrast to our own stories of growth and dominion over Nature, and our obsession with individual wealth, which we seem loathe to abandon.
Enough Is Enough
Such human stories make me doubt that the ongoing mass extinction caused by human ecological overshoot was an inevitable consequence of human nature. What we know about human diversity and ingenuity, sensitivity and survival sense, suggests we could have chosen to stop it—each group at least in its own locale—as some, like the Tikopia and Anuta, did manage to do. Different societies have all along made different choices in how to structure their social and material worlds, how to care for one another, and how to adapt to the changing land, leading to vastly different outcomes. The Tikopia and Anuta may be a small populations, but they reveal the possibility of making collective choices that promote cooperation and continuity in balance with one’s local ecosystem.
Long-term social and cultural continuity does not happen by accident. Nor is it conjured by the Invisible Hand of the Market. Achieving it requires consciousness and cooperative cultural restraint. It requires stories that put us in a different relationship to our world and to each other, such that we rediscover meaning as socially and materially embedded creatures on a finite planet, and remember the sense of enough. Enough stuff. Enough power. Enough material desire and empty satiation. It means accepting that the Second Law of Thermodynamics appertains to us all, even the wealthiest and most technologically “advanced.” People, societies, do have the capacity to understand and undertake such choices. While our global civilization does not today elevate the stories that enable this way of constructing civil society—indeed, our common ideas of what civilization even means frankly excludes this possibility—it seems important to remember that these outcomes do lie well within the scope of ordinary human potential, maybe the hope of a future version of civilization. For our present experiment with civilization is likely not the last.
[Part 17: Stories of Collapse]
Notes:
1 Over many millennia, most of those ancient diseases (e.g., malaria, schistosomiasis) would eventually follow human migrations out of Africa. At the same time, new ones (e.g., Hansen’s disease (leprosy), Chagas disease) would also evolve to infect human hosts in their new environments. When people began living in dense, settled communities, particularly in close proximity with domesticated animals, more new pathogens (e.g., bubonic plague, smallpox, avian flu) would explode across the human landscape, as microbes found plenty of opportunity and fleshly fuel to jump species’ barriers and rapidly spread. And so it goes on.
2 The diprotodon may still be remembered in the contemporary stories of the Adnyamathanha and Ngarrindjeri people of Australia. According to Jacinta Koolmatrie, an archaeologist belonging to this Aboriginal heritage, her people speak of a beast they call Yamuti, which could be based upon a memory of the diprotodons that went extinct forty-thousand years ago.
3 Polynesian seafarers and their chickens are known to have reached the coast of South America, in modern-day Chile, by the late first millennium CE. From here, some traveled back to the Polynesian islands bearing the sweet potato, which then diffused as a common crop (kumala) through large regions of the Pacific. Whatever colony those first Austronesian-South Americans settled along this coast was eventually assimilated into other South American groups, notably the Mapuche.
4 Most ethnographic details on the Tikopia are gleaned from We, the Tikopia: A Sociological Study of Kinship in Primitive Polynesia, by Raymond Firth, 1936. Firth’s was the first ethnography ever published on Tikopia society, based on his year-long residence among the islanders during 1928–29, before they had fully accepted Christianity. Most of the details based on archaeology are gleaned from Collapse: How Societies Choose To Succeed or Fail by Jared Diamond.
5 Hurricane Zoe hit Tikopia in 2002. One of the strongest hurricanes ever known up until that time, it eroded the thin bank that separated the freshwater lake from the sea, turning the lake water brackish again and affecting its fish. In 2006, the bank was rebuilt in a project funded by international well-wishers—yachties who’d become fondly acquainted with the islanders during their own Pacific adventures over the decades—a substantial sign of growing interactions between the Tikopia and the West as well as the Tikopia’s increasing acceptance of foreign materials and practices.
6 A canoe documented on Anuta in 2014 was reported to have been built in the late nineteenth century. It was well preserved, seaworthy, and still in use. The Anuta said when they build a canoe, it’s considered a part of the family and they care for it as such.
7 The Tikopia had a saying that brothers never fish together. Alone on a canoe, each brother might be tempted to murder the other in order to inherit the full rights to the family land. A man preferred to fish with his brother-in-law.
8 Couples were free to divorce, though divorce was in practice quite rare. In the event of a divorce, initiated by either party, a woman was welcome to return to her natal home and either partner was free to marry someone else. Children of a divorced couple remained in contact with both parents. A woman who was widowed while her children were still young, however, was expected to remain celibate at least until the children were grown; there was no corresponding expectation for widowed men. There were also rare cases of men marrying two women, typically sisters.
Earlier Essays in this Series
1 What We Talk About When We Talk About The Weather
10 On Progress as Human Destiny
11 Of Gods and Men and Human Destiny
12 Musings on the Anthropocene
13 Stories of Wealth and Distribution
14 Toward a Polyphony of Stories
Images
1. Gwion Gwion rock paintings, formerly known as the Bradshaw rock paintings, from the Kimberly region in Australia. Creative Commons.
2. A map showing the dispersal routes of Austronesian peoples. Tracking Austronesian expansion into the Pacific via the paper mulberry plant by Elizabeth A. Matisoo-Smith.
3. An image from the top of a hill on Anuta island. Screenshot from The Forgotten Tribe Of Anuta | 1000 Days For The Planet | Real Wild. 2014. Fair use.
4. A canoe built on Anuta island over a century ago, preserved in seaworthy condition, was still in use at least until 2014. Screenshot from The Forgotten Tribe Of Anuta | 1000 Days For The Planet | Real Wild. 2014. Fair use.
5. Scene from a village gathering on Tikopia island. Screenshot from Message in a Bottle. 2003. Fair use.
6. Scene from a village on Tikopia island. Screenshot from Message in a Bottle. 2003. Fair use.
[The fifteenth in a series of essays, On Climate Truth and Fiction, in which I raise questions about environmental distress, the human experience, and storytelling. It first appeared on 3 Quarks Daily. The previous part is here.]
I began writing this series eighteen months ago to explore the human experience and human potential in the face of climate change, through the stories we tell. It’s been a remarkable journey for me as I followed trails of questions through new fields of ideas along entirely unexpected paths of enquiry. New vistas revealed themselves, sometimes perilous, always compelling. And so I went. The more I’ve learned, the more I’ve come to realize that our present environmental predicament is actually far worse off—that is to say, more threatening to near-term human wellbeing and civilizational integrity—than most of us recognize. This journey is changing me. So when I now look at contemporary works of fiction about climate change—so-called cli-fi, which I’d hoped might provide fresh insights—so much of it strikes me as somewhat underwhelming before the task: narrow, shallow, tepid, unimaginative, or even dishonest.
At the same time, a few conclusions have begun to coalesce in my mind. Some of these may seem controversial, largely because they run contrary to the common narratives that anchor our dominant understanding of how the world works—our stories of human exceptionalism, technological magic, and the tenets of capitalist faith. Indeed, many of my own assumptions and worldviews have been challenged, altered, or broken. In their stead, new ways of thinking have taken root, as I began seeing through at least some of our most cherished cultural fabrications to understand our quandary with a different perspective.
Learning these things has been emotionally taxing, but I don’t believe there’s any way forward without a clear-eyed, big-picture view of our planetary and civilizational plight. And so, for better or worse, I wish to sum up my thoughts here, before ending my explorations through this series, which I next expect to turn toward thoughts on how one might respond to it all: hope, despair, expectation, fear, carrying on, looking ahead, finding new stories. I trust there are others out there, who would also rather reckon with what’s happening than go on pretending we needn’t adjust our expectations for the future… although, I confess, there are certainly days when I envy those who are able to go on pretending. What follows isn’t for the faint of heart:
1.
Our mainstream conversations around climate change are frequently delusional. Even as awareness and discussion about the climate crisis surge to the fore, cultural, institutional, political, emotional, and psychological motives conspire to temper the IPCC reports, which drive much of the mainstream coverage. The reports often err toward understating the threats, while they propagate fantasies about proposed mitigations, such as the possibility of capturing and removing vast quantities of carbon dioxide directly from the atmosphere. It’s the same with much of the commentary that appears on television; since the talking-heads are there to say what both advertisers and viewers prefer to hear, they tend to avoid connecting all the dots for us. Although, I do notice that, as climate disasters have mounted, scientists and activists are now less frequently been accused of being “alarmist” when they do venture more dire predictions, compared to a year ago.
Still, if one reads the science from multiple sources, across multiple disciplines, and listens to what the scientists are actually saying to each other, the picture looks rather different than what even many well-meaning commentators represent on TV or in the pages of mainstream rags like Newsweek. If one avoids resorting to comforting illusions and magical thinking—from the complacent lies of “net zero” and carbon sequestration to ignoring the consequential lacunae in predictive climate models, including a weak representation of climate feedbacks and tipping points, to presuming the past will be a clear guide to the future or ignoring the material and geopolitical changes the end of oil will itself bring upon civilization, alongside other simplifications and layers of denial—it’s clear we’ll need to brace ourselves for more destabilizing consequences than what the most amplified voices are openly conceding. Not just in the weather, but in all human-centric systems. In all the bounty brought by modern civilization and our certainty of its continuity.
2.
Most concerned people presume climate change is our most overwhelming, existential, planetary crisis, but it is not. We focus on climate change, in part, because its consequences are the first to be experienced with threatening regularity, even by those of us who live sequestered from the life of the land, as it directly assaults our civilizational infrastructure—roads, electricity, food production, shipping ports, etc. But we focus on it also because our understanding of it lets us frame it as a technical problem, so we’re able to take comfort in feeling that it’s solvable within the terms of our present paradigms: we can tell ourselves we simply need to apply more or better technology and market incentives, that we can “fix” it, without fundamentally changing the way we live. But this is a fallacy in our way of thinking. As in that old parable about looking for one’s lost keys under the lamp, because that’s where the light is, being able to frame this problem as tractable within our techno-optimist field of vision helps us avoid looking beyond it.
3.
Climate change is merely a symptom of a far more essential pathology within our global civilization. The larger problem is ecological overshoot: human beings are using resources and creating pollution at a much faster rate than the planet can renew itself, exceeding (and degrading) the sustainable carrying capacity of the land. We’ve all heard that if everyone on the planet tried to live like an average American, we’d need four or five Earth-like planets to support all of us today. Obviously, no such thing is possible. Yet most of our discussion around addressing climate change—all our fond words about Green Growth and renewable energy—is built around the fantasy that something resembling the American way of life can (and must!) be continued, even without the use of fossil fuels. However, as Nate Hagens of the Post Carbon Institute reminds us, even renewable energy is harvested and delivered only through rebuildable technologies, which are themselves non-renewable in their resource requirements; neither are energy sources perfectly interchangeable. We choose not to address the reality that shifting our overexploitation from a dependency upon fossil fuels to a dependency upon sand, copper, niobium, and other minerals required for “clean” technology—all the while, carrying on with all the rest of the ecocidal activities that build our way of life—still leads to environmental breakdown and mass extinction, if through a somewhat different pathway than rapid climate change. The present scale of the human enterprise is plainly unsustainable, no matter what we use to power it. We need to vastly reduce our consumption of energy and other resources. We need to slow our rate of pollution in all forms. We need to halt our annihilation of species and ecosystems and allow them to regenerate on their own terms.
4.
The Holocene climate is behind us. No IPCC plan even claims it can be restored and stabilized within human timeframes, even if we could manage to pull off the best-case scenario of climate-change mitigation and atmospheric carbon capture. In any case, we won’t (or can’t) do this, primarily because doing so would completely upend current geopolitics and every presently entrenched power structure on the globe—not to mention that few of us are ready to give up our accustomed privileges of energy gluttony or that some aspects of the plans, like carbon capture at scale, are in any case beyond feasibility. Following the IPCC recommendations will, at best, slow the warming this century to somewhere around 2ºC above the pre-Industrial baseline (what happens after that remains largely unaddressed).
But even +2ºC of warming will prove ethnocidal for the peoples of small islands, due to sea level rise, and to the peoples of some tropical and subtropical regions, due to lethally rising levels of heat and humidity. It will be disastrous for eight (or nine or ten) billion people tightly dependent upon intensive agriculture and marine harvesting, as once-predictable weather patterns like the monsoons grow more erratic and as ocean life collapses. It will be globally calamitous as scarcity and hunger knock on the doors of even relatively wealthy nations, their borders beset by desperate refugees, convulsing national and global politics. Dealing with any one of these challenges would be tough enough for any nation, but when many countries are dealing with multiple such issues, it will shake up the world. Meanwhile, climate change mitigation requires unprecedented international cooperation to slow planetary warming. And this is not happening.
5.
Global civilization, as presently constituted, isn’t resilient to withstand the environmental onslaughts of the coming decades, not even if we could keep burning fossil fuels, which, obviously, we cannot do, if we hope to arrest future warming. (In any case, the rate of new oil discoveries has consistently fallen behind the global rate of oil consumption for the past thirty years, meaning the end of our present, fossil-fueled civilization is unavoidably nigh, no matter what.) As our planet’s average surface temperature climbs, the human impacts we’re experiencing around the globe, from floods to famines to freezes, will intensify non-linearly, with each additional bit of warming proving worse than the last. Given the vulnerabilities we’re now regularly seeing in our built infrastructures and economic dependencies, including crop production, across the globe at +1.1ºC of warming (as per the IPCC AR6), we can hardly expect our human-built world will hold up well at +1.5ºC—the most optimistically imagined case of future warming—leave alone at +2ºC.
Global civilization will ultimately be transformed in ways that most adults alive today never seriously imagined might follow predictably from the world we grew up in. Different localities will be affected in different ways at different times, and each will also respond in its own way. So there’s no knowing exactly how the human story will play out into the future. But we can presume that life as we’ve come to expect it will change dramatically. Every one of us will be challenged in new ways to find and keep hold of our best selves, as we navigate the coming decades. We will do well to keep our hearts and minds open, individually and collectively, doing whatever we can to welcome the migrants, reduce our own overconsumption, hold fascism at bay, learn new modes of cooperation and manners of trust.
6.
The loss of wild plant and animal biomass and biodiversity is probably the most pressing existential threat to humankind, for we cannot survive as a species without a largely intact biosphere; if this calamity proceeds too far, rapid human extinction is inescapable. We have no idea how far is too far, however, only that the harm already done is well advanced. (As economic anthropologist Jason Hickel reminds us, biodiversity loss is but a strange euphemism for the “mass destruction of nonhuman beings.”) Mainstream environmental news tends to reduce biodiversity and wild biomass loss to a symptom of climate change, but it is not that. It is a separate problem that exacerbates, and is exacerbated by, climate change. Both of these disasters are direct consequences of human ecological overshoot, through overexploitation and over-pollution.
The collapse of the biosphere that we’re witnessing is a matter so complex and superficially understood that we can hardly begin to guess where the tipping points are. (Though, one proposed concerns marine acidification: since the 1940s, oceanic pH has dropped from 8.2 to 8.04; it’s projected to reach a potentially critical threshold of 7.95 within three decades, if we don’t mitigate carbon emissions, leading to the cascading collapse of over eighty percent of marine life.) Nor can we predict just how the consequences will play out for human life or modern civilization; there’s no “modeling” the mass extinction crisis as we do the climate (though, people are earnestly trying). Living systems are even more difficult to reduce to mathematical equations and predictions than is the weather—as we’re now witnessing in the twists and turns of the unfolding Covid-19 pandemic.
The lack of models and projections helps us avoid discussing this mass extinction crisis in terms of the threat that it actually is, as it evades our mechanistic paradigms and slips through our language of techno-solutionism. Some still do try to pretend it can be answered with technology; they dream of “de-extincting” species, like wooly mammoths or giant sloths, as though creating elephant-mammoth chimeras might re-animate swathes of biodiversity or preserve the climate-stabilizing ice and tundra of the vanishing Holocene. But this is a transparently shallow answer to a crisis beyond our ken. Restoring a handful of extinct species, cut off from their historically functioning ecosystems and habituated climate, will not begin to save the biosphere. Nothing less than a wholesale reconfiguration of civilization and a reduced global human population—alongside fallowing and rewilding of at least thirty to fifty percent of the planetary surface—will restore balance to the biosphere such that human societies may be able to rediscover sustainable cultures.
7.
The anthropogenic environmental trauma of the Holocene might still be healed before we demolish the biosphere beyond its capacity to support human life. The ongoing damage is the result of human ecological overshoot, driven by the entrenchment of stark socioeconomic hierarchies and enabled by the rise of peculiar cognitive biases and cultural narratives that promote the domination and dismemberment of the non-human world. The damage has been spread and accelerated by the engine of capitalism, powered by a fossil-energy bonanza. If we stop this ecocide, the biosphere might still find a functional stability that supports human flourishing, with some semblance of a managed civilizational revision. But even slowing the present acceleration of biodiversity loss will require a wholesale transfiguration and scaling down of the human enterprise to find a sustainable equilibrium with the non-human world. It will require revamping our local and global economies, politics, and cultural values so that we can pursue economic degrowth and material circularity in place of capitalism. It requires fostering environmental justice and greater social and economic equality; enabling local stewardship of local resources; reconceiving food production to promote regenerative practices and dismantle factory farming of animals; rapidly retiring fossil-fuels; halting all commercial activity from vast areas of the seas, forests, and other wilderness zones to leave them fallow. Allowing the human population—un-coerced—to peak and steadily decline. And abolishing patriarchy, worldwide.
Achieving all this depends upon global human cooperation of unprecedented scale. It requires a new civilizational paradigm to take root rapidly and globally. While it’s hard to imagine this transition taking place as a calmly managed retreat of the human enterprise across the planet, it yet remains possible that all of these requisite changes will be realized, before it’s too late for humanity in absolute terms—for it does seem likely that the future will hold an unpredictable mix of both managed strategies and unmanaged calamities, ultimately resulting in a dramatic revision of global civilization driven by the changing conditions of the climate and biosphere, alongside the end of oil-based material infrastructures and geopolitics.
8.
Forces working in favor of a managed transition, commensurate with the actions listed above in item 6, are already getting underway, in small ways and large. They are gaining momentum, piecemeal and patch-worked across the globe. Some promising transitions will surely take hold within some communities over the coming decades. Forces working against the same are also well underway, everywhere, and have the advantage of great wealth, entrenched power, inertial continuity, and physical and organizational infrastructure behind them. We can only hope that emergent public awareness might rapidly build into something larger and stronger, as the human consequences of ecological overshoot continue to mount. Caught up in an ongoing contest between factions and ideologies, human civilization will follow an unpredictable and conflicted path—fraught with promise, reversals, and contradictions, as always—into the future. Anything could happen. That is as much a statement of hope as it is of fear.
9.
The world is changing rapidly and the rate of change will accelerate. But it is vital we remember that whatever is to come will be a continuation of the same human drama that’s been playing out for hundreds of millennia. Significant though our social losses may be, they’ll not likely amount to a Sudden Death of History or some fabled return to a state of lawless depravity, such as we mythologize in tales like Mad Max or the Zombie Apocalypse. Humans did not live thus before our modern, techno-capitalist civilization overtook the planet, and it’s not the primary possibility awaiting us should this civilization fail. In fact, such Western-centric, capitalist-colonialist framings of human potentialities aren’t helpful; they’re merely the flip-side of the same hubris that brought on this calamity to begin with. No, our looming tragedy will likely play out in a fashion similar to those that so many have met before, when their social worlds were ended through war, colonialism, genocide, mass enslavement, epidemic disease, ecological overshoot, climate change, volcanic eruption, or other events that have sometimes overwhelmed societies throughout our long past, resulting in destabilizing cultural transformation, institutional simplification, and depopulation: collapse. I say this not to minimize what others have suffered, but to expand it, to recognize our plight in theirs, who have lost before us. The main difference is that this time it will happen to us. To you and to me. To every one of us across the globe. We would do well to ask ourselves, How will I meet this changing world? Who do I want to be, in facing it?
A Different Vantage
Meanwhile, in my various forays for information, perspectives, thoughts, and stories, I came across a singular, low-budget documentary film about our climate and sustainability crisis. Many aspects of this film, wryly titled What a Way To Go, resonated strongly with me. The film covers themes similar to those I’ve been addressing in my own writing; it too speaks about stories and paradigm shifts, about agriculture and overconsumption and our grave error in imagining we are meant to dominate the rest of the living world. But the film’s creator, Timothy S Bennett, comes to these ideas from a very different background than myself and he draws the focus more toward the American culture of empire, its role in bringing us to this point, its interior pathologies.
Hailing from America’s “heartland,” Bennett blurbs his work as: “middle-class white guy comes to grips with Peak Oil, Climate Change, Mass Extinction, Population Overshoot and the demise of the American Lifestyle.” The full-length film follows his journey from the anxious innocence of his youth, through his several interviews with scientists and thinkers over recent years. He describes the predicament of our modern global civilization, based on its material foundations and consequences, with his eye upon the artifice of its purported success. The voices he features, from himself, as narrator, to his interviewees, are monochromatically representative of his particular social location, but I found the film no less moving for that reason. Repurposed vintage television clips set the tone of mid-century Americana, in occasionally surprising ways that expose and subvert its culture of empire. The original musical score draws us in with invisible strings, in a manner unavailable through the written word, imbuing the words and images with elegiac sorrow, tenderness, and anxiety. I found it on the whole thoughtful, insightful, softened with a melancholic humor, and occasionally leaning toward a Koyaanisqatsi-esque vibe. Bennett advises viewers at the start of the film, “Just let it wash over you. And let yourself feel it.” I leave it here for your perusal.
[Part 16: Upheaval and Collapse]
Earlier Essays in this Series
1 What We Talk About When We Talk About The Weather
10 On Progress as Human Destiny
11 Of Gods and Men and Human Destiny
12 Musings on the Anthropocene
13 Stories of Wealth and Distribution
14 Toward a Polyphony of Stories
Image Climate Change: 'The Eye of the Storm' by OrganikArts.
[The 14th in a series of essays, On Climate Truth and Fiction, in which I raise questions about environmental distress, the human experience, and storytelling. It first appeared on 3 Quarks Daily. The previous part is here.]
Our human story has never been simple or monotonous. In fact, it has been nothing less than epic. Beginning from relatively small populations in Africa, our ancestors traveled across the globe. As they went, they mastered new environments, even while those environments were continuously changing—sometimes in predictable cycles, sometimes unpredictably, as the planet wobbled in its orbit, the sun flared, a volcano blew, or other geophysical events transpired. Born during the ever-fluctuating conditions of the ice age, early humans soon mastered a great variety of adaptive living strategies. They combined cycles of nomadism and settlement. They fished, trapped, followed game herds, ambushed seasonal mass-kills, or even forbade the consumption of particular species at various times and places. They tended forests and grasslands with controlled fire, spread seeds, shifted cultivation, pruned and grafted trees, fallowed lands, and followed seasonal produce, among other techniques, managing their local environments and recognizing that their own wellbeing was intimately tied up with the health of local ecosystems. Through these practices, each community relied upon diets that included hundreds of species of edible plants and animals, from palm piths to pine needles, sea slugs to centipedes, mosses to mongooses—far beyond the foods we ordinarily think of today—and developed material cultures and pharmacopeias that might have included hundreds more. Such flexibility and breadth of environmental understanding promoted resiliency among what grew into a great diversity of peoples over hundreds of millennia, many of whom managed to steadily inhabit a particular region, maintaining an unbroken cultural continuity over hundreds of generations.
Alongside their diverse subsistence strategies, human societies also practiced an astonishing array of social and political institutions and arrangements—none of them ever amounting to a utopia—many of them difficult for us even to imagine today, with our impoverished templates of human possibility. They included fluid forms of power sharing that shifted ritually, seasonally, or otherwise, between generations, genders, lineages. Sometimes social power was more centralized; other times more distributed or opportunistic; sometimes more closely tied with wealth, but not usually. In matrilineal societies, such as the Haudenosaunee of northeastern North America and the Minangkabau of Sumatra, for instance, women typically governed all immovable property, while men held political leadership titles. In many matrilineal societies, the prevailing women’s institutions selected male political leaders or exercised veto or impeachment power over their tenure; in other such systems, male political leaders were selected by popular consensus or by other men. The Toka Leya of southern Zambia, by contrast, are governed by a brother and sister team of hereditary chiefs: she presides over matters of land and heredity, while he oversees more external affairs, and both live in a manner not very different from that of their subjects. Among various First Nations and Pacific Island peoples, paramount chiefs may be male or female, hereditary or chosen. At the same time, particularly among highly nomadic peoples, steep social hierarchies might form and dissipate in annual cycles, depending upon what kind of communal labor was required, for example, convening in autumn for mass antelope hunts, then dispersing into egalitarian bands, when a different mode of cooperation was required for gardening or resource gathering in spring or summer. Meanwhile, still other leaders arose or counsels coalesced around the practice of particular rituals, with powers restricted to their ritual domains (yet make no mistake: many rituals were tied closely to the land and resource consumption or distribution). Generational cohorts had their own representatives who convened across clans, tribes, or villages, with specific duties and powers. In these ways and others, human societies have practiced arrangements of hierarchy, heterarchy, obligation, cooperation, coercion, and sharing that have worked to maintain human wellbeing and ecological balance, particular to their times and places.
Before the homogenizing force of the modern, statist, capitalist world stretched itself to command the globe, the scope of diversity among living societies would have been astounding. From their sociopolitical arrangements to their material cultures to their economic systems, each was uniquely adapted to its local environmental realities. And each was in communication with its neighbors, exchanging knowledge and goods, engaging in cooperative rituals and intermarriage, certainly influencing one another, sometimes preying upon each other. Yet they co-existed to the degree that the diversity they represented persisted and even expanded, throughout the long span of human prehistory. Few presumed that their way was the only right way by which everyone should live; diversity was normalized.
Yet, after having meandered along, employing and recombining strategies from that expansive slate of possibilities across varied and changing environments for hundreds of millennia, we’ve recently abandoned nearly all of it. The spread of the modern nation-state model, led by a narrow vision of economic growth and a materially aspirational lifestyle, underwritten by massive fossil fuel consumption, has wiped that enormous diversity of cultural forms off the globe, replacing it with a single, all-encompassing narrative that stands in the way of our even remembering, reimagining, formulating, and innovating new possibilities for how to live on our changing planet. The world has been radically diminished in the past few hundred years because humans have embraced only one exceedingly rigid possibility for all environments all of the time.
Even our food sources have been reduced from the several thousands of species of plants and animals once enjoyed as nourishment across the globe to perhaps several dozen. Today, most people on the planet and our livestock get the bulk of our calories from just a handful of crops: maize, rice, wheat, soy, millet—and, oh yes, sugarcane! Add to this some eleven different pulses we commonly eat. Most of our vegetables are cultigens of tomatoes, potatoes, peppers, cabbages, onions, and hardly a dozen others. It’s the same with our common fruits. The animals we eat are primarily limited to cattle, pigs, goats, and chickens. And all of these are usually raised and consumed without regard to what works with local ecologies—we even try to make seasonal produce available year-round. As foods have constricted in variety, so have the lifeways and cultural contexts that surround them. And all of this increasing homogeneity has been regarded as Progress by the dominant paradigms of our emergent world culture, our narrowing notions of what we call civilization.
Among our global civilization’s most widely shared Big Ideas is a particular paradigm of Progress: we tend to imagine societies, individuals, even natural systems ideally advancing from a more chaotic and “primitive” condition toward a “higher” teleological goal. Progress is conceived as a unidirectional striving toward a singular desirable end. This idea pervades all major world religions: they consider societies or individuals to be advancing when they abandon the freewheeling disorder of animism to embrace religious authority, centralized and homogenized by texts and hierarchies; they teach that individual souls find progress either through seeking union with the divine to attain the ideal state of Nirvana/Moksha or through submission to the single, perfect being who created humans in his image. Even in science, when we speak of evolution by natural selection, it’s difficult to get away from the language and bias that certain lifeforms are more advanced or more evolved than others. We speak this way of human societies, too, regarding some as more primitive and others as more developed. In general, we consider those forms of life that are more similar to us humans, and modes of life that more closely resemble the upper-class (and, today, Western) lifestyle to be obviously more advanced and developed; we regard those lifeforms that live separated into single-celled entities, and those societies who live as foragers without centralizing governing institutions, as most primitive.
We use hierarchical language with biological evolution despite knowing that all life has been evolving on Earth from the same source over the same stretch of time, moving from a few incipient forms toward a bourgeoning diversity of forms, each with its own array of senses and abilities. When we consider that some lifeforms can harvest sunlight for food or fix nitrogen from the air or navigate by sensing magnetic fields—that, in fact, the roster of talents among the non-human is endless, each form uniquely suited to its environment, possessing powers that evade us—we might consider alternate framings for assessing what it means to be more evolved or advanced. One might say, in fact, that lifeforms who’ve had the most time to optimize their particular game, refine their slate of strategies, and remain agile in their adaptability are every bit as highly developed as human beings. Take, for example, the startlingly proactive slime molds, those shape-shifting, single-celled beings who’ve inhabited Earthly soils for some six-hundred million years now; they’ve persisted so long by mastering the tricks of survival, of both competition and cooperation. Meanwhile, latecomers, like upright primates, are the newbies on the block, relatively untested, slower to adapt, and vulnerably dependent upon the stability of the rest of the biome to survive. We can safely presume that the slime molds will remain long after hominins go extinct.
A similar principle might apply to human societies as well. Some Indigenous communities in Melanesia, Polynesia, Australia, the Arctic, and the Americas, for example, retain practical cultural continuities—subsistence practices, sociopolitical institutions, knowledge systems, economic values—that surely pre-date those of our global, industrial civilization by at least several millennia. They’ve managed to thrive in the same territory, living in a manner that would be still generally recognizable to their ancestors, avoiding dramatic cycles of population boom and bust with their institutional and material infrastructures reasonably intact (at least until the time of European colonial invasion), and actively drawing upon knowledge systems and living traditions reaching back many millennia—in some cases, to pre-Holocene times, as has been documented among Aboriginal Australians. Such societies must be considered every bit as developed as the so-called “developed” nations. After generations of trial and error, they would’ve worked out many of the kinks in their systems, learned to recognize potential pitfalls and traps, and mastered strategies for resilience when disaster strikes. Whereas, the technologically prolific, capitalist nation-states that began to overtake the globe hardly five hundred years ago are newcomers, already revealing their existential vulnerability to myriad unforeseen issues and errors of their own making.
Yet, in fact, most of us “moderns” struggle mightily with this perspective. Because our unexamined notions of Progress insinuate a particular direction in which Nature undertakes to proceed, we habitually tend to imagine the Western, White, upper-class human male as representing its pinnacle or ideal. The ahistorical judgements we’ve long made about primitivity versus advancement or development reveal our teleological presumption that life and living systems strive toward a common goal, a single, perfect form that subsumes all others, as though homogeneity, centralization, and efficient domination are the most advanced state for living systems.
However, the study of living systems suggests that a more meaningful marker of advanced evolution or development may not be homogeneity or centralization of power, but rather systemic resilience. And resilience is generally underwritten by diversity. Living diversity is a kind of decentralized intelligence, if you will, allowing the different parts of a whole, flourishing system to optimize local solutions to local challenges, without threatening the whole. Diversity of forms, diversity of strategies, diversity of environments, diversity of responses—diversity drives evolution and the staggering, incomprehensible complexity we find in living systems, from individual organisms to ecosystems to the whole of the biosphere. Diversity is not efficient, from the perspective of any subset of actors attempting to reduce their own investment for an outcome that predictably advances their own narrow interests or garners profit for their benefit. But in decentralized or headless systems that result from diversity, there is no singular entity assuming the rising costs of trying to achieve its mono-maniacal ends.
Obviously, the diversity within a functioning and cohesive system cannot be so extreme that its parts are attempting to annihilate one another, falling into unrelenting competition or catabolism. Yet, alongside mutualism and harmony, some sustainable degree of conflict and competition must be expected, resulting in a dynamic tension: balance. And neither should diversity be confused with redundancy: merely repeating or cloning identical strengths and vulnerabilities. The different elements within a resilient system must operate differently enough—relying, for example, on different living strategies or sets of resources—to function separately, while also being able to function cooperatively as parts within a larger whole. The organizing principle is the balanced functioning of the whole, since the health of the system requires the health of its parts. For ecosystems, resilience is gained through increasing diversity among species who participate within the ecosystem, none of them achieving extreme or stable domination. For individual species, resilience is gained by maintaining diversity within their populations.
Could it be that for the human species, resilience was analogously higher when there was greater diversity among societies? We know that losing diversity across the breadth of species destabilizes the entire web of life, and losing diversity even within a single population reduces its resilience too, leaving it more vulnerable to shocks that might lead to extirpation. What if, in the quest for domination, efficiency, and profit, human cultures have been homogenized, thereby destabilizing what used to be a more resilient web of human societies?
Over the millennia since Adam and Eve were cast out into the dust of their agricultural fields, their cultural progeny have spread themselves across the globe by casting out countless others in turn—both human and non-human—from their own respective Edens, forcing other peoples to take up their curse of agricultural toil, and then industrial toil, too. Entitled by the paradigms of Progress they inherited, they’ve unleashed their desires across the planet to consume anything they want and destroy everything they don’t, diverting waterways, drying up wetlands, and draining aquifers; spreading copious quantities of chemical fertilizers, weed killers, and insecticides; artificially mixing up species through transplantation and now genetic engineering; dredging and mining away entire mountains and forests and coastlines; annihilating ocean life; and on and on through the litany of ecological and biospheric depredations. The spread of Progress has reduced Earth’s seething abundance to tamed homogeneity, with a commensurately catastrophic loss of wild biodiversity.
Yet this—what we like to call civilization: literate, state societies—is actually a new social, economic, and political form. Since their earliest days, state societies have followed a broadly similar monarchical or oligarchical setup, defined by rigid and extreme disparities in wealth and power supported by narrowly focused, intensively extractive agriculture. This was certainly true of the Mesopotamian states—beginning some five thousand years ago in that very limited area of the globe—whose peculiar, human-centric worldview and practices would dramatically evolve to inform modern notions of human exceptionalism and centralizing patterns of extractivist domination.
It’s been around two hundred and forty generations since the earliest agricultural city-states came to dominate the Fertile Crescent; it’s been hardly one hundred and sixty generations, since a handful of other regions—from the Nile River to the Indus Valley to the Yellow River to the Yucatan Peninsula, the Amazon Basin, the Andes Mountains—also adopted or reinvented agriculture and statism.[1] If we count individual iterations of the statist model that have continuously and cohesively persisted for say, even five hundred years (some twenty generations) without intermittent breakdown of some sort—depopulation, destruction, “dark age”—else relying upon continual warfare or colonization to appropriate new lands, resources, and laborers, they number but a handful out of unknown hundreds. And Mayan cities may have sustained relative longevity not by pulling all their subject peoples into homogeneity but, at least in part, by continuing to rely on decentralized networks of satellite villages that maintained flexible, ecologically embedded subsistence strategies mixing various modes of foraging and cultivation. This strategy may have buffered their grand cities, their seats of centralized power, from even faster ecological overshoot or adverse events. Some urban centers of the Indus Valley—the first in South Asia—were also unusually long-lived. The site of Dholavira, for example, was continuously inhabited for seven hundred years. Sociopolitical organization across the Indus Valley appears to have been surprisingly egalitarian and their cultures unusually non-militaristic. All of these features make their cities highly atypical; however, so much about them remains a mystery, it’s difficult to extrapolate from their case toward general principles of sustainability.
And yet, despite the agricultural-states’ propensity to collapse, five thousand years after its first, faltering attempts in Mesopotamia, today, nearly everyone in the world has been drafted into it or been made dependent upon it. The Mesopotamian experiment in its modern instantiation still fundamentally relies upon maximizing agriculture, minimizing Nature, and producing a growing material surplus to support the expanding tiers of a (now global) class system, rooted in oligarchical and colonial patterns of extraction. All of this at the tremendous expense of the churning diversity lost—reams of ecologically situated, experiential knowledges that previously existed and which clearly haven’t been adequately reconstituted within our prevailing modern knowledge system that has guided us further away from sustainability and nearer to catastrophe. In our globalized, homogenizing world, systemic risk is ever more contagious—as we’ve seen in the spread of disease pathogens, mass influxes of refugees, global economic crises, periodic constrictions in oil and other supply-chain breakdowns—ultimately making all groups vulnerable to shocks arising elsewhere in the world.
The opening bell of capitalist civilization is often considered to have been rung in Europe around 1600 CE (though, George Monbiot argues for 1420 CE on the island of Madeira), coincident with the spread of European colonialism and its nation-state model of political organization, which, at the time, encompassed only a minority of people on the planet. Largely through their efforts, alongside the already longstanding mercantilism of small Indian Ocean states (particularly the seaside sultanates commanding bustling transoceanic trade routes) also grown more extractive and aggressive over the preceding millennium, nascent capitalist states and colonies more rapidly began to enclose vastly more peoples across the planet and then, a couple of centuries later, bind them together with fossil fuel infrastructures. It’s been fewer than two centuries since nearly everyone on Earth has been linked into a rigidly interconnected system, tightly dependent upon fossil energy and materials: this is our present experiment. We are perhaps five or seven generations into it.
Meanwhile, the Covid-19 pandemic, the rise of fascism in its many guises, internal political rebellions based on shifting identities, the splintering of consensus around ordinary facts within the body politic of every technocratic state, banking-sector failures that produce global economic shocks, the proliferation of nuclear warheads, institutions and dependencies that are now “too big to fail”—such developments that have kept up a steady beat since the mid-20th Century—are a stark reminder of the fragility of our homogenizing, centralizing civilizational model, of its vulnerability to the unstoppable spread of all manner of social and biological pathologies. The long-term success of our present geopolitical system of at least nominally democratic nation-states, itself, seems far from assured. And considering its novelty as a way of life, it becomes only too painfully clear that our contemporary notions of what is “normal” or predetermined or divinely ordained—let alone what constitute sensible and just constructs, economies, and institutions within human societies—are not merely ahistorical and biased, but are actually naive, based on little human experience of any meaningful timeframe at all. Indeed, our modern society, so oversaturated with information, has somehow simultaneously been increasingly prone to forget and discount the knowledges of the past than were those ancient societies, who relied entirely upon oral histories. Our commonplace ideas of what social forms humans can devise for salutary flourishing tend to be equally ahistorical and constrained in imagination, blinkered by the dominant narratives of the present and drowning out the voices bearing alternative stories—of Indigenous peoples and humane visionaries—now heard only from the margins, if we know to listen.
We have turned a blind eye to the self-limiting consequences of what we call Progress, held in thrall by the star beneficiaries of the program’s short-term largesse; we pointedly look away from the hideous destruction, ignore the onrushing catastrophes, and remain committed to supporting a pantheon of capitalist elites. But if we take away those delusions of infinite growth and the anti-egalitarian priorities of the privileged, destroying the biosphere to produce greater immediate surplus for overconsumption by a minority reveals itself as an insane and malignant goal. And considering that the Haudenosaunee, following their ancient injunction to consider the consequences of every decision unto the seventh generation, plainly recognized the dangers of the progress trap, while our modern paradigms have stubbornly refused to acknowledge any practical limits to human power—to our great peril—it becomes laughable to imagine that our capitalist nation-states could teach these First Nations peoples anything meaningful about development.
It’s already time to reimagine: What if our notion of civilization weren’t predicated on competition and consumption-led growth? What if, instead, it were conceived to produce and distribute enough for individual and social thriving, in a manner that also prioritizes the flourishing of a healthy biome? What if most people had access to what they most need—food, shelter, healthcare, knowledge, work, leisure, dignity? What if social value was placed on social participation and support, cooperation and sharing, rather than the competitive hoarding of wealth? And what if technological innovation served society, rather than being primarily incentivized by the hope of disproportionate profits accruing to a small league of investors, as is normal today?
Such societies are humanly possible. Indeed, these are the values and notions and priorities to which all enduring, pre-state societies once hewed far more closely than does our present iteration of civilization, undergird their staggering variety of societal forms. Just as our present sociocultural value on the hoarding of wealth informs and motivates individual choices, creating a world of inhumane economic disparities and competition, so valuing participation, cooperation, and social cohesion has likewise informed and motivated individual choices differently to create worlds of greater human connection and equity. Until very recently in the human story, material technologies were developed without being incentivized by personal enrichment or reward but, rather, knowledge was widely shared in what we might call an “open source” model; perhaps as a result of this, for the most part, technologies were developed in response to real needs. Material innovation was slower than today, sure; but ever since it became a race, we have been racing toward catastrophe, with wildly disproportionate benefits accruing to a minority of people.
And what about other forms of innovation? If we dropped our fixation on gadgetry—status-signaling appliances, vehicles, and entertainments—as the most relevant technology, we might instead put effort into technologies that enlarge social gains; we might pursue the discovery of better practices and institutions that actually improve human cooperation, mutual understanding, ecological stewardship, and other forms of widespread improvements to human and planetary wellbeing, including universal healthcare, more responsive social and legal institutions, local stewardship of resources, education that enlarges civic sense and ecological sensibility, and so much more that once was normal. If our goal were to promote the sustainable thriving of humans and all other living beings, rather than pursue limitless growth for our own kind, then the innovations of industrial extraction reveal themselves as worse than useless. We might identify saner, less malignant goals, if we relearned a conception of ourselves as part of a larger system of living things.
Indeed, among Indigenous cultures that retain a cultural continuity with their pre-statist past, people do still actively appreciate the interdependencies of creation. The representatives of Indigenous peoples and organizations who convened at the World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth in Bolivia in 2010 assert that “Mother Earth is a living being.” In their proposed universal declaration, Rights of Mother Earth, and the accompanying People’s Agreement, largely developed in response to the failed 2009 CoP15 talks in Copenhagen, they posit full rights to all creatures, affirming, among other things, “Mother Earth and all beings are entitled to all the inherent rights recognized in this Declaration without distinction of any kind, such as may be made between organic and inorganic beings, species, origin, use to human beings, or any other status.”[2] Their Declarations reflect a worldview in which humans are understood as but one among myriad, co-equal forms of creation, rather than rulers entitled to dominate or heedlessly exploit the Earth or each other. And all of us subject to the integrity and wellbeing of the whole Earth system.
What if Indigenous cultures were restored control over their ancestral lands, so that no one could ruin what they had been sustainably stewarding for innumerable generations? This is an idea already promoted by the IPCC to combat environmental destruction, and by farmers promoting regenerative agricultural by also integrating ancient principles of cultivation. What if, instead of stealing from Indigenous peoples, we learned from those who know how not to follow any version of the Mesopotamian model of domination and growth but instead promote models of how to live more sustainably? One need not romanticize the distant past or Indigenous cultures to appreciate that they might know things the rest of us have forgotten. Many of them have understood something essential about human flourishing that we have lost in our narrower quest for environmental control and inequitable distributions of grand wealth, in our attempts to homogenize the human story.
Of course, in a world of nearly eight billion humans, commercial agriculture is likely to remain a primary mode of subsistence for the foreseeable future; this is but one intractable facet of our present human predicament[3]. Yet we must at least try to mitigate its worst harms through a rediscovery of more sustainable practices[4]. And rather than lament the slowing of human population growth and trying to reverse it—which could take us back generations in hard-won liberties for women—we ought to welcome a voluntary population decline. This alone won’t be enough to promote sustainability for our species, however. We must also build a new imaginary within our constraints—new visions made vivid through new stories. It’s time to dismantle the narratives that have led us down this maladaptive road to ecological—and ultimately, civilizational—ruin, beginning with the fables of Homo Deus, Manifest Destiny, the Invisible Hand of the Market, and Limitless Growth. Shifting to new paradigms is a Herculean task, and I do not make light of it. Such cultural shifts usually take generations, and so it might for a next civilizational transition to fully take hold across the globe. Of course, our challenge is that time is of the essence, so we must prepare ourselves, break ourselves open to confront the task.
In our talk about global warming and other ecological crises—or what I’d rather call our sustainability crisis—it’s well and good to talk about new energy technologies and carbon credits, endangered species lists and nature preserves, as partial measures to manage the inevitable civilizational transition. But it won’t make a jot of difference to the planetary outcome if these merely result in solutions that are shaped by the same old narratives. For the same stories will only guide us toward the same ends, doom us to rebuilding the same thing all over again, just like all the serial re-builders of the lost Holocene civilizations who came before us, reliant upon the same failed model of concentrated wealth and power, heedless extraction and exploitation. Only this time, collapse won’t be local, affecting individual states or regions, nor overcome by renewed domination of larger tracts and more dispersed resources; it will be planet-wide and affecting the whole of the biosphere. And while we aren’t likely to recreate the cultural diversity that supported human flourishing on our once robustly biodiverse icehouse planet, now forever altered, we might at least discern the fundamental principles that worked; they are our best guides—our only tested guides—to sustainable survival.
So it is also useful to ask, What if meaningful human progress lies not at all in our technology, but in our social innovations? In forging mutualistic relationships, expanding our social understanding of one another, fostering peace and sustainability? What if our real progress has always lain in our ability to nurture the life around us, to flexibly adapt ourselves to changing environments, to live and let live, appreciating the salutary role of diversity within and between societies? To the extent we’ve been able to foster peace in diversity, we, as a species, have progressed; to the degree we have failed in this, exploited, killed, and homogenized one another, we have not. Accepting diversity is of course fraught with challenges and tradeoffs, similar to the challenges of pluralism; as ever, it requires us to seek balance. But the principle of progress as nurturance of living diversity ultimately leads away from customs, norms, and ideals that pursue boundless extraction and growth or that systematically homogenize culture and reinforce rigid hierarchies, oppressing diversity or exploiting the bodies and labor of some individuals for the benefit of others. For such conventions inevitably sow the seeds of their own destruction; they are untenable.
The good news is that stories that support our rediscovery of sustainable thriving on Earth are already out there, even if they more often get damped and silenced when competing with the dominant narratives. We can train ourselves to listen for them, to amplify them, and to build forth from them. Some people have been telling them for years. Many of those storytellers have been shouted down as cranks, fools, primitives, anti-social elements. A few are now gaining more positive attention, including the purveyors of ecological economics; activists, especially Indigenous leaders, building communities of resilience based on sustainable knowledge systems or cooperative socioeconomic enterprises; engaged youths and other leaders and activists calling conventional powerbrokers and institutions to account. Many people hold pieces of an evolving vision for a renewed future, even if each of us struggles with blind spots and obstacles and limits to our imagination, too. But if we dare to ask the right questions, if we listen to the polyphony of answers, we may begin to discover new modes of mutuality, co-existence, and resilience.
***
“We are at a time where the problems of the world just can’t be answered by the prevailing imaginary. We are at a time of breakdown.” —Philosopher Sylvia Earle, University of East Anglia, as quoted in The Future Earth, by Eric Holthaus
***
“[The] climate and ecological crisis cannot be solved within today’s systems. There are no tools, no laws nor regulations that keep us from destroying the living conditions for life on this planet as we know it. In order to solve this crisis we need a whole new way of thinking.” —Greta Thunberg, December 2020
[Part 15: What a Way To Go]
Notes:
1 Scott, James C.. Against the Grain (p. 86). Yale University Press. Kindle Edition.
2 World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth. Cochabamba, Bolivia, 2010. https://pwccc.wordpress.com/programa/
3 According to ecologist Dr. William Rees, “Agriculture is the single most damaging technology ever developed by human beings—particularly fossil-fueled agriculture.”
4 A film that delightfully documents how one family is creating a viable farm based in principles of ecological diversity is The Biggest Little Farm. The story encapsulates their years-long struggle and satisfaction of discovering balance on the land. The cinematography, too, is gorgeous.
Earlier Essays in this Series
1 What We Talk About When We Talk About The Weather
10 On Progress as Human Destiny
11 Of Gods and Men and Human Destiny
12 Musings on the Anthropocene
13 Stories of Wealth and Distribution
Images
1. Possible immigration routes taken by early modern humans expanding out of Africa, beginning as early as 130k years ago, during the Eemian Interglacial. From Human Dispersal Out of Africa: A Lasting Debate, Saioa López, Lucy van Dorp, and Garrett Hellenthal. Evol Bioinform Online. 2015; 11(Suppl 2): 57–68. Published online 2016 Apr 21. doi: 10.4137/EBO.S33489. Creative Commons.
2. A common schematic illustrating human evolution by natural selection. Image by M. Garde. Creative Commons.
3. French ships in battle, during the age of European Colonialist expansion. Detail of Battle of Grand Port: From left to right: French frigate Bellone, French frigate Minerve, Victor (background) and Ceylon. Creative Commons.
4. A map showing early Indian Ocean trade routes, which helped accelerate the spread of mercantilism, capitalism, and statism over the past five hundred years. From "Austronesian Shipping in the Indian Ocean: From Outrigger Boats to Trading Ships" in (2016) Early Exchange between Africa and the Wider Indian Ocean World, Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 51−76 ISBN: 9783319338224. Creative Commons.
Scroll commissioned my friend and fellow writer, Abdullah Khan, to interview me over email. I enjoyed responding to his excellent questions. Read it here, or read it on Scroll.in where it was first published with the title below.
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‘No one person gets to limit what it means to be Indian’: Namit Arora, author of ‘Indians’
To write his book, Arora travelled to the seats of the different civilisations of India
An interview by Abdullah Khan
An alumnus of IIT, Kharagpur, Namit Arora spent almost two decades in Silicon Valley as an Internet technology professional. In 2013, he quit his job and returned to India and, almost for two years, he volunteered with the Delhi government to find innovative solutions to civic problems; he led the drafting of Delhi’s solar energy policy and a task force on air pollution. In between, he published two books, The Lottery of Birth: On Inherited Social Inequalities, a non-fiction, and Love and Loathing in Silicon Valley, a novel set in Silicon Valley.
Arora’s third book is about Indian civilization, titled Indians: A Brief History of a Civilization. He spoke to Scroll.in about his journey from tech professional to author, his latest book, and how he looks at the idea of Indianness. Excerpts from the interview:
I was herded into the “safe” engineering profession by the great forces of the Indian middle-class. Not that I desired something else in my teens. It was actually good for me in many ways. It took me from IIT Kharagpur to California. Earnings from my career funded my wanderlust and evening education in the humanities. But I did see it mostly as a day job that paid the bills.
In the early years, as with most aspiring writers, I too faced my share of rejections in the publishing world, but I lived and learned, and built a nest egg. In due course, I quit the job, returned to India, and persevered until, fortunately, things worked out. Ironically, it was my unloved tech career that financed my new life of full-time reading, writing, travelling and the sporadic volunteer project like drafting the solar energy policy for Delhi – not to mention my labour of love, Indians.
My interest in history really began after leaving India, when life in the US raised for me various questions of culture and identity. In my mid-twenties, backpacking through Mexico in the early 1990s, I was blown away by the ruins of the Mayan and Aztec civilisations. That got me hooked on “lost cities”, or historical sites that were entirely lost to living memory and were dug out by archaeologists. I’ve since visited scores of lost cities around the world.
In the mid-2000s, my partner and I took a break from work to travel in India for two years. That was an amazing experience. We visited over a hundred sites in 20 states, including all of the lost cities I write about in Indians. Each of them raised new questions for me whose answers I could not easily find.
For instance, I wondered what life was like in the city of Dholavira, and what of the Harappan ethos is still with us. What urban milieu produced a great thinker like Nagarjuna? What was a day in the life of a student at Nalanda? What religious worldview promoted erotica on Khajuraho’s temple walls, and why did it disappear? How did the city of Vijayanagar become so rich? Can scoundrels also gain moksha after death in Varanasi? Questions like these.
So I started digging for answers, from which emerged the idea for a book like Indians. I read early travellers and literary-philosophical works, academic histories and monographs, Bahujan and feminist scholars, and Hindu nationalists. I visited site museums and read archaeologists’ reports. I wrote book reviews, essays and travelogues. As I connected the dots, the scope of the project evolved.
What was the transition to the history of Indian civilisation after writing a novel, Love and Loathing in Silicon Valley?
It wasn’t difficult. Though the novel and the history book were published within eighteen months of each other, both books had gestated for over a decade. They proceeded in parallel and became two different modes through which I explored questions of culture and identity, with the hope of gaining a better understanding of my world and my place in it.
The dust jacket of your new book says ‘Indian civilisation is an idea, a reality, an enigma.’ Can you elaborate on this statement?
I think the statement tries to capture the varied, mutating quality of Indian civilisation. Its reality is, of course, borne out by any academic definition of “civilisation”, even as its form and content have never been stagnant or singular. Indeed, Indian civilisation has been a journey of profound and continuous change – from the Harappans who built the first cities with indoor toilets and the most egalitarian civilisation of the ancient world, through the dramatic reshaping of the subcontinent’s culture by the Aryan migrants with new languages, religious ideas and the varna system, the rise and fall of Buddhism and Tantrism, the advent of feudalism and Bhakti, and the Turko-Persians bringing Islam and giving rise to a new syncretic culture, to India’s momentous encounter with European colonialism and western modernity.
Not surprisingly, then, Indian civilisation has been different things to different people. For instance, there is no historical evidence that Brahmins and outcastes, or urbanites and Adivasis, or priests and Carvakas, or sultans and peasants, or Tamils and Mizos, took pride in a common idea of Indian civilisation – and is there a good reason to privilege one over the other? Can it not contain many such ideas? With so many coexisting social realities, Indian civilisation is also an enigma that has produced various, often conflicting, appraisals of its central features and qualities. People joke that India frequently confounds academic social science. To adapt Whitman, Indian civilisation is large, it contains multitudes. So it’s all of these at once: idea, reality, enigma.
Different sets of people describe and define ‘Indianness’ in different ways. How do you look at the idea of Indian identity? What according to you are the basic qualifications for being an Indian?
As I see it, anyone who considers herself an Indian is Indian. Period. There should be no further litmus tests, no additional qualifications. “Indianness”, or “Indian identity”, which transcends the citizenship of the modern state, ought to be expansive enough to accommodate all those who consider themselves Indian in whatever ways they see fit, wherever they live. No one person or group gets to limit what it means to be Indian, at least not without a fight. As the poet Rahat Indori memorably said, “Kisi Ke Baap Ka Hindustan Thodi Hai”.
Many books have been written about the history of Indian civilisation by Indians as well as foreigners. How is your book different from them?
I think each reader will see my book as different (or not) in her own way. That said, let me offer a few provisional thoughts of my own. I’d say that Indians is rare in combining narrative history with archaeological travel writing. It’s a non-traditional history. It aims for an engaging, human portrait of our lost cities, in which the traveller (me) is part of the narrative.
It also draws new insights from early travellers’ accounts that speak to our 21st century concerns and sensibilities. In short, it tries to bring alive our forgotten pasts in rich and evocative detail, combining quirky stories with the big picture of Indian civilisation and its evolution. It strives to include non-elite perspectives – the view from below – rare in histories written by non-Indians and upper-caste Indians. Nor do I shrink from controversial topics or avoid calling a spade a spade. It also incorporates significant new research from archaeology and genetics.
According to American historian Hayden White, ‘history is no less a form of fiction than the novel is a form of historical representation’. How do you interpret this statement?
What I hear White saying is that, as narrative forms, history and fiction have more in common than meets the eye. This is a compelling view, though it can be easily misunderstood. I mean, one might object and point out that the historical narrative is built on facts and verifiable events, while the fictional narrative requires nothing more than subjective human experience and imagination, and so these are two very different kinds of endeavours.
But facts are one thing, their interpretation another. Facts alone do not necessarily make the narrative of history more truthful than the narrative of fiction. Indeed, fiction can often reveal our past and present more truthfully and vividly than what facts alone can convey. This is because both types of narratives must also employ significant interpretation – ie, subjective moral and aesthetic choices and judgments – which is what makes them similar forms.
A corollary is that a great historian has much in common with a literary master. Both must attempt to enter the society they reference, to see the world as its members saw it, and understand, to the extent possible, what it was like to live in it. Both require ample sensitivity, imagination, depth of perception, the right distance, and the ability to synthesise vast bits of social knowledge. Both must examine the psychology, morals, aspirations, and assumptions of ordinary people. Neither can claim to be an impartial or omniscient narrator, and so both history and fiction are subjective, value-laden enterprises sharing a family resemblance.
You present insights in your book from the accounts of the Persian traveller, Alberuni, and the French traveller, François Bernier. Both spent more than a decade in India and wrote extensively about their experiences. How do you compare their views about India?
Alberuni visited India between 1017 and 1030, when Mahmud of Ghazni was raiding wealthy temples. Bernier stayed from 1658-69, during Aurangzeb’s first decade as emperor in Delhi. They are two of the most fascinating and perceptive observers of medieval north Indian society. Both espoused a scientific temper and a humanistic ethos. Both admired many things Indian but also criticised other things. They each wrote near the eve of a major incursion from outside the subcontinent – Turko-Persian and European, respectively. Like any observer, they too had their biases and blind spots (which I discuss), but they’re still very informative about two different moments in Indian society.
Alberuni, a veritable polymath, had emerged from a great flowering of science and cosmopolitan culture centred in Persia. He despised Mahmud and condemned his raids. He learned Sanskrit in India, studied the major Indian religious, philosophical and scientific texts, translated some into Arabic, and sought out learned Brahmins to clarify his doubts. He praised earlier Indian achievements in mathematics and science, but noted the dismal state of science in contemporary India (for instance, unlike Aryabhata half a millennium earlier, leading Indian astronomers now held that the earth did not rotate on its axis but was at rest).
Caste made a powerful impression on Alberuni. He saw that such birth-based inequalities and segregated living, sustained by both religious scriptures and temporal laws, prevented social solidarity and a sense of common cause. He called it the chief difference between Indians and his own people. He hated the caste mindset of the elites. It bothered him that learned Indians did not mingle with foreigners like him – refusing to sit, eat, and drink with him – for fear of being “polluted”. He saw this as a kind of “fanaticism”, and called them more “narrow-minded” than their ancestors.
Alberuni’s extensive account confirms that on the eve of the Turko-Persian invasions, Indian society wasn’t exactly the picture of intellectual and moral vigour that many now fondly imagine it to have been. India’s intellectual culture had declined in the preceding centuries; it had fallen behind in science. Buddhism and Tantrism were in terminal decline, Bhakti and Brahminical orthodoxy were ascendant. Indians had grown more insular, conservative, superstitious, caste-bound, puritanical and patriarchal (I explore this change and its causes in the book).
Such “is the state of things in India”, Alberuni lamented, that Brahmins attempt to combine [their] ideas of purity and pollution with the pursuit of science. He also described and analysed Indian texts, marital and funerary customs, taxation and inheritance, laws and punishments, etc – which frequently differed based on one’s varna status. His portrait of north India is so thoughtful and persuasive that he deserves to be called the “first Indologist”.
As for Bernier, he was a physician-philosopher who identified with the emerging Enlightenment thought in Europe. He greatly admired the fine architecture of Delhi and Agra. Employed by one of Aurangzeb’s noblemen, he observed the pomp and glitter of the Mughal court, “the base and disgusting adulation which is invariably witnessed there” and “the vice of flattery [that] pervades all ranks”.
He derided harmful superstitions, the practice of Sati fuelled by “merciless Brahmens” but discouraged by Mughal governors, and noted the primitive state of Indian medicine. Indians “understand nothing of anatomy,” he wrote. “They never open the body either of man or beast,” so do not know of the circulation of blood (working with bodily fluids was “polluting”). According to Bernier, Hindu scholastic education in its customary guru-shishya format, which he observed in Varanasi, was limited to mostly Brahmin men of “an indolent disposition”. He proclaimed that ‘”profound and universal ignorance is the natural consequence of such a state of society”.
Bernier’s account reveals a powerful, extractive bureaucracy concentrating riches at the top, funding a huge army and the luxuries of Indian aristocrats and the seraglio. This malady went beyond the Mughal realm. He reports extreme disparities and that “most towns in Hindoustan are made up of earth, mud, and other wretched materials”, and are poorer “than those of many other parts of the globe” (then too, India’s per capita GDP was below the global average).
Bernier analysed the causes of the dismal economic state of common folk in pre-colonial India – worse than in Europe, and a far cry from popular history’s boosterish metaphor, sone ki chidiya. As in Alberuni’s time, Bernier’s account shows Indians, especially Hindus, as creatively weak, ritualistic, mired in regressive cultural habits – and, in hindsight, entirely ill-equipped to resist the next big incursion too: a European imperialism powered by modernity, joint-stock mercantilism, the nation-state, science and scholarship (which would also lead them to discover, through the coloniser’s eyes, their own forgotten antiquity).
In his recent book, Early Indians, Tony Joseph, whose work you also quote in your book, argues, ‘We are all migrants. We are all mixed.’ What is your take on this statement?
Tony’s claim is spot on, not only in terms of physical migration and the mixing of genes; it’s also true with the migration and mixing of culture. Whatever the means, cultural diffusion across regions, ethnicities, languages, religions, traders, etc has been a prominent feature of Indian life. Think of what the Aryans from Central Asia added to Indian languages, the Greeks to art, the Persians to architecture, the Sufis to music, the British to politics, and so on.
The Hindu pantheon grew out of extreme cultural appropriation and assimilation of non-Vedic folk deities. Look at how mixed our art, architecture, literature, philosophy, music, dance, cuisine, sports, dress, painting, and crafts are today. And Indians gave much to others too. The depth and complexity of such mixing becomes even more vivid in the long view of history that I take in my book.
Can you talk to us about your visits to Dholavira? How has it contributed to the understanding of Harappan civilisation?
Dholavira (2600-1900 BCE) is the best excavated Harappan city in India. It is a lovely site to wander through, with gateways, streets and homes laid out on a grid-like plan. Astonishingly, one can still find on the ground shards of their painted pottery, bits of stone bangles, and semi-precious stones used to make jewellery. One can see greenish copper slag from the smelting process for purifying the ore, as well as the tiny bones of some of the animals Dholavirans ate: cows, buffaloes, goats, sheep, wild pigs, wild asses, deer, fish, rabbit and chicken.
The onsite museum has evocative game boards carved on stone, children’s toys, figurines, seals, pottery, and more. The village of Dholavira, after which the Harappan city is named, is a short walk away, and the landscape around the island is starkly picturesque.
All Harappan sites have much in common but they spanned a large geography and are also diverse. Unlike the four larger Harappan cities we know of, riverine and rain-blessed, Dholavira was on an arid island in the Arabian Sea (it’s now amidst a salt marsh, the Great Rann of Kutch). Because of this, its inhabitants focused a lot more on capturing water.
They built amazing water harvesting systems, city-wide storm-water drains, and sixteen giant reservoirs, one of which is nine times larger than an Olympic sized swimming pool and a hundred times larger than the Great Bath of Mohenjo-Daro. They surrounded the city centre with reservoirs, which must have made a visually appealing sight.
Most of Dholavira’s structures were built not in mud-brick, the Harappan norm, but in stone, including beautiful multihued stones from a nearby quarry that I visited. Dholavira has turned up what may be the world’s first stadium, with a stand of three rows. Its trade and material culture were more maritime than riverine, and it was likely a leader in Harappan seafaring innovations. Its funerary structures also differ from other Harappan cities in largely being cenotaphs, devoid of human remains, suggesting different cultural beliefs.
Dholavirans had other distinctive cultural attributes, but their major legacy seems to me their incredible creativity, resolve and engineering acumen, through which they managed their scarce water resources for many centuries. They waged an epic struggle against the elements. Will we, their descendants, be inspired by them and rouse ourselves to tackle climate change?
Are you planning a follow-up to Indians?
No concrete plans yet. I’m just making my way through a pile of books that had built up while I was working on Indians. I also lost my father to Covid this year during the second wave, which has been very unsettling. Perhaps a new book project, for which I have at least a couple of candidates, will emerge in due course.
Abdullah Khan is a Mumbai-based novelist, screenwriter, literary critic and banker. His debut novel Patna Blues has been translated into eight languages. He can be reached at abdullah71@gmail.com.
[The thirteenth in a series of essays, On Climate Truth and Fiction, in which I raise questions about environmental distress, the human experience, and storytelling. It first appeared on 3 Quarks Daily. The previous part is here.]
In the world of Star Trek, no one ever goes hungry or lacks access to healthcare. No one wants for housing, education, social inclusion or any other basic need. In fact, no citizen of the United Federation of Planets is ever seen to pay for everyday goods or services, only for gambling or special entertainments. The Federation suffers no scarcity of any kind. All waste is presumably fed into the replicators and turned into fresh food or new clothes or whatever is needed. Yet despite ample social safety nets, there’s no end to internecine politicking, human foibles and failures, corruption and vanity, charisma and venality. The world of Star Trek appeals so widely, I think, because it presents us with something colorfully short of a utopia, a flawed human attempt toward a just, caring, and individually enabling social order. It imagines a society based on a shared set of human values—fairness, cooperation, political and economic egalitarianism—where basic human needs are equitably answered so that no one has to compete for basic subsistence and wellbeing. As the venerable Captain Picard has put it, “We’ve overcome hunger and greed, and we’re no longer interested in the accumulation of things.” Some Libertarian Trekkies have been scandalized to realize that Star Trek actually depicts a post-capitalist vision of society.
But Star Trek’s world is premised upon the existence of a cheap, concentrated, and non-polluting source of effectively infinite energy. Obviously, no such energy source has ever been discovered (solar-paneled dreamscapes notwithstanding). And the replicator, which eliminates both material waste and scarcity, is a magical technology. The Star Trek vision is also a picture of human chauvinism and hubris, presuming H. Sapiens as the only relevant form of Earthly life. So it falls short of a vivid and plausible imagining of an ecologically sustainable, technologically advanced, and egalitarian human civilization.
It is, of course, too much to expect the creators of Star Trek, by themselves, to fully and flawlessly reimagine our global human society. Indeed, it’s become an aphorism of our age that it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism. Yet, though this might sound like a joke, at this point the matter is all too serious, and reimagining human civilization is a project we all must engage with, to whatever extent we’re able.
Expanding our imaginary of possible economies, social structures, value systems, and more is an urgent matter as our present way of life is driving the catastrophic collapse of the biosphere, potentially precipitating the demise of humankind. In this context, we have everything to gain by risking new courses, which might offer a better chance for ecological balance and survival. And as our suicidally extractive, fossil-fueled civilization comes to an end, we must finally answer the question: What will we build in its place? Can we build a world more caring, more just, more sustainable?
To manifest any desired outcome, one must first imagine it: a real and vivid world—not a utopia, but a human world—in which fairness, generosity, cooperation, and care are the animating values that guide collective human behavior and social institutions. We know such a vision is possible—without the simplification and sanitization of Star Trek—because these values really did guide some of the most ancient social orders that actually existed, including those that predated the rise of city-states and promoted human flourishing for the greater part of our time on Earth. Indeed, rather than starting from science fiction, we might recognize our past might point the way, with real-world principles—or at least inspiration—for imagining alternate economies and social structures that can further enable human flourishing through the challenges of climate instability, which has so long shaped the human story.
Value Games
We say “money makes the world go round,” but the world was not still before money was invented, only a few millennia ago. We’re now obsessed with amassing money almost as an end in itself, or as a means to purchase an ever-expanding array of consumer goods. I remember when, as a child, a snow-globe depicting an exotic scene, like the New York City skyline, was a wonder and a small treasure. The snow-globe’s moment of glory didn’t last long though; such trinkets soon became overly ubiquitous and lost their charm. Soon, there was too much of everything. Over the last half-century, most of the petrochemical-derived novelties we once briefly prized have become so cheap and ordinary that they no longer hold any value at all. They pile up as rubbish, unloved, disposable. Particularly in the United States, where acquisition has become something of a social disease, people want bigger houses and garages and storage spaces only to mount their piles of junk, much of which they don’t use or even look at for years. Increasingly, it seems we identify wealth with our rate of consumption of what’s ordinary and replaceable. We buy the latest clothes and gadgets and appliances, disposing of what’s no longer current or amusing or cool, creating a steady pipeline from production to waste. We could well say that a good indicator of a nation’s wealth is the waste it generates, that rubbish makes the world go round.
But human societies have subscribed to many other conceptions of value. Looking at other value systems might just shake us out of our capitalist stupor and help us remember that alternatives are not only possible but very much normal. Indeed, prior to the rise of monetary economies, the world spun on a different principle altogether, when all peoples primarily practiced some form of a gift economy. Though these ancient economies may have also incorporated market systems, including barter and exchanges mediated through items that share features in common with money, it was gift-giving that made their world go round. Gift economies operate according to logics that may seem bewildering to us, constrained as we are by our capitalistic imaginations, so that we find them bizarre and obtuse. But this is as much a reflection of our limitations as outsiders to alternative systems as it is a testament to the astonishing breadth of human possibility. More than anything, however, the variety, ubiquity, and prevalence of gift economies among human societies remind us that our conventional narrative of economic systems as rational systems of goods-exchange, in which capitalism is seen as the efficient culmination of inevitable human propensities, is almost as simplistic as the economic vision of Star Trek.
Consider, for example, one well-documented example of a gift economy, known as the kula ring. This elaborate system of exchange drives the economy of the Trobriand Islands, a ring of tiny islands in the Solomon Sea. At its center are kula objects, necklaces and armbands, made from decorated seashells, which are competitively gifted in events of great ceremony, tradition, and ritual that take place a few times a year. Kula objects are almost never worn nor are they valued for their utility. Rather, analogous to the way, say, the Hope Diamond or an original sketch by Michelangelo are highly treasured in our society, despite having no practical use, so it is with these kula objects: each object derives its individual value in part from its particular beauty, but also largely from historical sentiment, its unique story of creation or association with something noteworthy in the past, like prestige or magic or death. But beyond that, the system takes on more peculiar aspects: The gift of an armband must be answered with a return gift of a necklace, after a socially appropriate span of time. Armbands may only be given to individuals on islands located in a counterclockwise position from one’s own, along the ring of islands, and necklaces can only be given in a clockwise direction. Individuals who exchange kula gifts are wedded into a lifelong relationship of gift-giving, with no socially sanctioned exit. It’s mostly men who “play” kula, though much of their wealth is derived through the auspices of the women in their families, who may be politically and economically powerful in their own right. The number of trading partners a man has is a matter of great social significance, with some having as few as two or three partners and a chief or headman having potentially hundreds.
In the subsistence economy of Trobriand society, food and other utilitarian items are regularly distributed through gift-giving within one’s own family, lineage, clan, or village, based on prescribed social obligations. For instance, a man is required to give his taro crop to his wife’s brother; this expectation is enmeshed in a tangled web of obligations that ensure the giver will himself never want for taro—or anything else he needs. However, peace, security, and mutuality between clans, villages, tribes, and islands are regulated by the kula ring economy: Throughout the year, labor is arranged for building canoes, under the auspices of upcoming kula expeditions. Gifts of food—pigs, taro, bananas, coconuts, sugar cane, and other relatively storable consumables—as well as occasional tools and utensils are given to those with whom one is bonded in a kula relationship or help support one’s kula obligations and aspirations. Food is collected, enticingly displayed, and shared, given away, or bartered at various stages of the game, up to and including the culminating ceremonies. Feasts and giveaways redistribute food and goods to the laborers and expert consultants involved in canoe building, as well as to those who help with provisioning, harvesting, and transporting of food stocks. While any of these activities could be carried out without anything to do with the coveted kula objects, in the minds of the Trobriand participants, it’s the kula gifting that regulates social power across the islands, giving sense, meaning, fairness, and legitimacy to the rest, as much as any economic ideology or system of laws. Attainment of the most valuable kula objects is an achievement of merit and sociopolitical power. Meanwhile, the overwhelmingly complex subsidiary exchanges that support the kula ring are but everyday activities that habitually conform to its logic and meanings.
The kula ring makes the Trobriand world go round, ensuring peace, stability, and regulatory patterns for inter-island, inter-village, inter-clan exchange, carried out through multiple subsidiary and parallel gifting and bartering transactions, including access to rarer resources that are uniquely found within the domains of particular tribes, such as certain shells or animals. While the belief system around the kula plays a role in the organization of certain forms of labor and regulates the provisioning and transport of food and other utilities, Malinowski, the anthropologist who first documented the kula ring, tells us the participants in the system don’t themselves think in top-down terms of the greater “kula ring economy,” the abstract parameters of which he deduced from his highly detailed observations of everyday life, any more than we think about supply and demand or production efficiencies and international trade alliances when we buy a box of cereal from a chain supermarket. Nor is the clockwise/counterclockwise, necklace-for-armband ring of exchange a slate of laws or a conceptual design, but rather a kind of emergent phenomenon, arising from the participants’ everyday activities and beliefs about appropriate behaviors and their personal goals. The islanders don’t worry themselves about the causal link between their daily and yearly cycles of giving and receiving gifts, barter, social and economic power and how these create the kula ring; they’re just doing their best to perform within their own social contexts.
The complex rules of the exchange—who is entitled to exchange with whom, and precisely what those exchanges convey in terms of status, prestige, and mutual obligation—will be opaque to us, who are unfamiliar with its particular system of values and meanings and underlying magical beliefs. But kula is their story, as much as the Invisible Hand of the Market is ours. Malinowski emphasized that, like us, Trobriand Islanders are also enamored of great wealth, which for them takes the form of high-quality produce, fine pigs, and kula objects. But an essential difference between their society and ours is that their signaling of wealth comes neither through hoarding nor the rapid and ostentatious consumption of it, but rather in the ostentatious gifting of it, giving it away or sharing it. To this end, islanders expend their energies with a zeal, commitment, and competitive spirit similar to that with which we’re urged to work for our corporate boards and shareholders.
The kula ring economy is practiced by settled peoples inhabiting small Pacific islands, among which some, though not all, of the tribes submit to a narrow degree of political stratification; yet even among tribes with fixed hierarchies between their clans or lineages, disparities in subsistence levels don’t exist to any degree remotely approaching what’s regularly seen in capitalist systems. The kula ring economy is a demonstration that economic systems—from what we perceive as wealth to the dynamics of its circulation and even how its value is manifest, whether as coin or rubbish or formal obligations and privileges—like all other human social constructs, are built more from the rationales of shared stories than from rational assessments of the utility of the items being exchanged. And gift economies have been far more common throughout the human story than hoarding economies, which only overtook the world not five centuries ago.
We might contrast market and gift economies by noting that in market economies, once an item is sold for a price deemed fair by the Market, all rights to the item revert to the owner and the seller relinquishes all claims. The commodity itself is understood to be separate from the seller, absolutely alienable not only in terms of its economic value, but also in terms of its communal value. Thus, individuals are perfectly free to sell, hoard, financially profit from, or waste whatever resources they own in a system of largely unfettered autonomy. One can even buy a treasured sketch by Michelangelo and burn it. And whatever we do with our wealth, it is detached from the needs of our neighbors.
By contrast, any of these prerogatives may or may not be available, to varying degrees, in the various exchanges that occur within different gift economies. Gift economies are generally characterized by webs of social relationships, rights, and obligations. Gifts are not viewed as mere commodities, but as signifiers of meaning and sometimes as vehicles of various prescribed entitlements and responsibilities. There may be rules about what can or must be given to whom, and when. When an item is given, the giver may retain certain claims to it, so that the notion of “property rights” is not whole and absolute, but may be divisible along layers of meaning. In the kula ring, aspects of social rank, prestige, and kinship solidarity are implied in every exchange. And while each player seeks to possess the most valuable necklaces and armbands available to him, gaining possession of a prized item doesn’t necessarily mean he owns it.
In gift economies, durable items of value are expected to keep actively circulating, changing possession within whatever is considered a socially appropriate timeframe in a given system. For example, no kula object can be kept out of the gifting circuit for more than a year or two without its keeper suffering socially injurious recriminations; to not re-gift it is damaging to the economy. In other gifting systems, any possession of yours that another person openly admires must be given to them; it’s unthinkable that you would refuse to make a gift of your treasures—of course, the expectation goes both ways. Hoarding or accruing items of value is generally proscribed or at least made exceedingly difficult by the rules of the game. There are implied reciprocities contained in every exchange. But whether these are specific or a more generic expectation of a communal or individual “return gift” of unspecified value to be given at an unknown future date, exchanges can’t be reduced to mere financial equivalence; instead, they invoke degrees of social indebtedness and ritual or practical meaning. The bonds inherent in gift-giving often extend even to the non-human world, so that, for example, when a salmon is seen to give its life or a strawberry share its fruit for your sustenance, you understand yourself meaningfully connected and reciprocally indebted to it, perhaps obligated to propagate its progeny or provision its kin. In a gift economy, nothing given is rubbish, nor is it free. The only profit to be made is social. And nothing belongs quite entirely to any individual, at least not in perpetuity.
Needless to say, gift economies have not created utopian societies any more than anything else of human devising. It takes little to imagine the various politics of resentment that heavy yokes of social obligation might engender in some individuals or circumstances. In some cases, gift-giving has even been known to evolve into excessive wealth redistributions resulting in wastage, as has been seen in certain potlatch ceremonies. The potlatch is an economic form once common among Indigenous communities along the northwestern coastal region of North America, in which the leaders of local kinship groups collected wealth—typically in the form of fresh and preserved food, canoes, copper, animal skins, other such goods, and sometimes even slaves—for the purpose of giving it all away. Potlatch giveaways typically take place on the occasion of a great feast, like at the birth of a child, or in affirmation of changing relationships or spiritual connections. The host who is able to amass—through politicking, persuasion, and gift-giving/indebting others to himself—and then redistribute the greatest amount of wealth, enjoys enormous social stature. In some instances, the gift-giving became excessively inflated, until the potlatch featured such an amount of goods that the successful host proudly destroyed the excess; it’s never to be kept for personal use. In some communities, potlatch giveaways were hosted only by the leaders of the highest status lineages, competing amongst themselves to rack up and defend their considerable social capital. This concentrated social power in particular kin groups, while excluding certain others from effectively competing, thus entrenching a degree of social stratification. Yet even in such cases, this resulted in far less economic disparity than what we regularly see in capitalist economies. Nor did all forms of the potlatch system even lead to such heady extremes. And other mass giveaway economies, like the moka of Papua New Guinea, lead neither to such wastage nor entrenched hierarchies.
Gift economies have been documented in mind-boggling variety. Another type, altogether, is found among very egalitarian societies, in which essential resources are broadly shared; non-consumable valuables regularly change hands; and rights to immovable property or long-term productive resources (for example, fishing access to a particular lake) are held in some form of cooperative or joint tenancy. But what gift economies seem to have in common is that they aren’t driven by the motive to accrue personal financial profit but rather, by the desire to gain wholly different social rewards. And they are frequently guided by values of social cohesion, care, generosity, and fairness. Of course, as in any other human economy, some participants are corrupt; some cheat. But on the whole, gift economies glorify cooperation over competition. They provide adequately for everyone in the community, leaving no one in a state of want and no one with far more than they need. And, at least until the time they encountered the spread of mercantilism and statism, gift economies were bounded by local ecological limits, the carrying capacity of the land. The continuous redistribution or sharing of local wealth, disallowing any hoarding of great surpluses, meant the system would have remained closely tied to the land, allowing little scope for overshooting its limits. Even a social hierarchy that was growing heavier on the back of inflationary giveaway feasts could only develop and persist up to a point, as the intensity of resource extraction it required approached the limit beyond which its participants could no longer reliably produce and supply goods into the system. One can imagine that some inflationary societies did occasionally approach or even hit the local ecological limits, such that their existing class or caste systems fell away to be replaced by a new slate of aspirants.
Market (monetary or barter) and gift economic systems might be seen to exist on a continuum, perhaps multi-dimensional, so that no society purely participates in only one type of economy or the other, and neither can every exchange be classified purely as a gift versus a trade or sale. It seems likely there’s some optimum blend of gifting and market exchanges that best serve members of any given society, individually and collectively, which surely depends upon the particular needs of the people in their particular environment and the mix of locally available goods and services. But today, though the kula ring, the moka, the potlatch, and other gift economies still function in Indigenous communities across the world, all of them have been eroded or corrupted by the introduction of fiat money and foreign goods through expanding market economies, usually associated with widening socioeconomic disparities and ecological degradation.
Of course, not many of us are ready to jettison the world we know in order to embrace social and economic systems based on values and meanings entirely alien to us. Enamored as we are of efficiency, growth, and nearly absolute individual autonomy, we fear systems that we might perceive as more encumbered. In any case, there is no possibility of recreating any specific systems of the past, even should we wish it. That world is gone: geophysically, geochemically, biologically, ecologically defunct and changing. But knowledge of what our ancestors have already experienced, understanding and considering the principles by which alternate systems have worked may best expand our imaginary as we explore new possibilities for a sustainable and more just future civilization. It is vital to remind ourselves that capitalism is not a natural law of human affairs; there were systems that predate it and there are systems that will follow it. Fortunately, there are a handful of thinkers and doers today who are attempting to build at least pockets of such societies by trying to envision new modes of social and economic functioning based in our modern knowledge systems and material realities.
The Profit of Not Profiting
The Catalan Integral Cooperative (CIC) is a post-capitalist social network that’s been functioning throughout Catalan, Spain since 2010. Structured as a decentralized web of dozens of autonomous collectives, societies, and committees engaged in technical work, creative pursuits, legal and social services, farming and food production, and more, it includes many of the activities that keep a modern society humming. The members of this integrated network of cooperatives share a vision for social transformation, and the CIC coordinates the provision and exchange of their various goods, services, and knowledge transfers. Their financial transactions are funded through Euros, “eco” (their own “social currency”), cryptocurrency, and possibly barter. Anyone can participate in the activities of the CIC or an associated cooperative, as a worker or a consumer.
Spurred into existence by the pro-Catalan (anti-Spain), activist sensibilities of the Catalan people in the wake of the socioeconomic austerities foisted upon them by the Spanish government during the 2008 global economic crisis, by 2010 the CIC already employed hundreds of people and engaged upwards of twenty-five hundred participants, who make use of its networks (current data about its activities and results is, unfortunately, difficult to find). Its goal isn’t only to support the wellbeing of its members and participants, but to bring about the “‘creative destruction’ of the capitalist system” (1), according to political scientist George Dafermos. In keeping with this, all of their knowledge production is open-source—not just software, but including any tools or machines its members invent, for example, those meant to help small farmers or artisans. Through its capitalist-subversive practices, the CIC aims at nothing less than social transformation, based on principles in line with egalitarianism and justice, mutual support and sharing, degrowth and ecological sustainability. Though ensconced within the capitalist entity of the Spanish state, the CIC nevertheless strives toward degrees of economic autonomy to the extent possible.
Though the Catalans haven’t created a utopia, that needn’t be the measure of their success; after all, our techno-capitalist reality continuously fails by that yardstick too. And while it is silly to expect any sociopolitical or economic arrangement to live up to an inhuman ideal, it is not silly to aim for sustainable human flourishing, nor to build a society more resilient to shocks like those arising from climate change.
The CIC is an example of a functioning collective that’s imagining alternate sociopolitical modes, which might even prove more resilient and sustainable on our changing planet. In maintaining decentralization of resources, local autonomy, bottom-up governance, and bio-regionally sensitive extractive practices, it appears to align with several principles also found in sustainable gift economies (2). It might just represent an imaginative step toward the kind of distributive economy that economist Kate Raworth prescribes as one aspect of a sustainable system, one in which wealth and production are decentralized not merely through taxes and wealth redistribution, but systemically, by design (3) (gift economies share this feature, though they may additionally redistribute wealth). Its activities may also allow for not-for-profit business models, such as have been gaining presence within the larger capitalist economy, in which profit is sought not as its own reward, but only as a means to funding a larger goal for a whole community (4)—sharing a company’s accumulated largesse, an echo of mass giveaway traditions.
What these visions, ideas, and models may have in common is that they tend to promote reduced consumption, compared to the presently unsustainable indulgence of the world’s wealthiest ten percent (which includes the global “upper-middle class” and most inhabitants of Western nations). They shift the goals of technological innovation by funding projects that address the needs of the collective and benefit more or most people within their community, while defunding projects that primarily benefit a minority at the expense of others (privileging notions of liberty for a few, while ignoring wage slavery and worse for the rest) or that spoil the commons in the long-term. They demand fewer hours of impersonal work and produce slower, community-oriented patterns of life with no easy avenues for mass wealth accumulation and much flatter hierarchies of social and political power, compared to our modern global society. They’re fundamentally built upon values of equitability, cooperation, and care. Taken together, these visions of transitional or post-capitalist economies echo pre-capitalist social and ecological values, bearing traits of gift economies, if not consciously or completely.
And none of these consequences seem terribly disagreeable, in terms of quality of life. Yet, because reducing consumption and working hours will reduce GDP, leading to economic de-growth rather than growth, they strike fear in the hearts of those constrained by capitalist narratives and wedded to present power structures, who don’t wish to imagine the end of capitalism. However, among those investigating the present ecological overshoot of the human enterprise, degrowth is commonly understood as necessary. There’s no honest framing of our present ecological condition that allows for expansion or even the steady state of the present size of the human enterprise; whatever fears degrowth inspires, its consequences will be far less adverse than the alternative. Having already overshot several of the planetary boundaries for maintaining a healthy biosphere, degrowth is inevitable, whether it’s more managed or catastrophic, whether it’s voluntary or disastrously thrust upon us by our future circumstances.
According to economic anthropologist, Jason Hickel, when intentionally undertaken and managed, a program of degrowth is “a planned reduction of aggregate resource and energy use in high-income nations designed to bring the economy back into balance with the living world in a safe, just and equitable way” (5). Growth in the Global North, he explains, relies upon massive extractions of materials and energy from the Global South, moving billions of dollars of wealth toward the wealthy, in contemporary relationships that recreate patterns of colonial exploitation. But those resources are justly required to meet the needs of the Global South.
Economic degrowth would perforce result in substantial lifestyle changes, commensurate with the exclusion of fossil fuels and petrochemicals from our patterns of material consumption. It would cause value systems and social institutions to shift and reconfigure. It requires a recalibration of geopolitical power dynamics and social justice. Degrowth isn’t amenable to capitalism nor can it be reduced to 20th-century anti-capitalist responses, such as communism or socialism, which also rely upon growthist paradigms (differing mainly in who owns the means of production). But neither is degrowth a program of enforced scarcity. Rather, it’s a just distribution of resources and an intentional reduction of material use by over-consumers that arises from an altogether different paradigm of understanding, one that places humanity in balance with the non-human world.
Mainstream criticisms of degrowth tend to fixate on GDP, as though it were a measure of human wellbeing, though everyone knows it isn’t. Or they push the dream that economic growth can be strongly de-coupled from resourceextraction and pollution, because it has recently shown a weak decoupling in some nations. But there’s no charted path to significantly increase decoupling. Critics may wave their hands and suggest increasing efficiency of resource use might do the trick, though Jevon’s (so-called) paradox shows that this tends to increase resource use in a capitalist system. Grasping at such ecologically disconnected fantasies only makes such critics appear afraid to admit the loss of privilege to hoard resources in the Global North, over-consume among the wealthiest ten percent, and maintain the present, capitalist status quo. Yet even the staunchly conservative IPCC is coming to acknowledge the degree to which any meaningful answer to our present ecological crisis requires a radical shift from where we are now to alternate economies and social modes; in fact, a leaked version of their upcoming report accedes that the capitalist model of economic development is “unsustainable”.
The perversions of capitalism, its glorification of competition and hoarding, have already brought our system to a state that encourages what economist Herman Daly called uneconomic growth, in which the costs of technical innovation outweigh the gains, because the dynamics driving it favor benefits to individual wealth for a handful of players with absolute disregard for the broadly shared social and environmental costs. Several writers have already diagnosed our condition as having entered a phase of disaster capitalism, in which capitalists profit from public fear and misfortune, sometimes caused or exacerbated by the profiteering class, themselves—for example, through the sale of vaccines during a pandemic; or aid, when climate change fuels fires and floods and wars; or security services, as crime rates rise with poverty. But, in fact, if capitalism isn’t abandoned, it’s likely to enter a stage that political scientist Craig Collins calls catabolic capitalism, eating whatever social gains have until now generally been attributed to capitalism, as our planet’s ecological systems further degrade. When capitalism turns catabolic, disaster capitalism extends itself and joins anti-social entrepreneurship—like dealing in slaves, arms, and drugs—to become the central pillars of economic growth.
How can we choose this for the human future, when we could choose an alternative? The ordinary economic systems of the past offer promise that more egalitarian and cooperative social and economic modes can arise, given the chance. Indeed, if economies based on glorification of sharing and cooperation (versus hoarding and competition) functioned at scale, resulting in new conceptions of value, where social good and personal prestige became the form of profit that replaced monetary profit, it’s easy to imagine new economies emerging, far different from what we today believe as the default, imbuing at least some transactions with the flavors of a gift economy. And if this notion was again extended to the non-human world, as it once had been, this shift could be a balm that helps heal the presently ailing human relationship to the rest of the biosphere. Are such systems beyond rediscovery today? Or could a society based on timeless, essential human values, coupled with modern knowledges, be reimagined to produce a civilization more viable than this one?
Of course, at present, none of these pre/post-capitalist ideas or enterprises are fully functioning even at the scale of a small nation. Given the political resistance and ongoing failures of imagination, nor do I claim to see nations voluntarily moving from where we are now to full implementation. But the strongest hope I have for the human future is that we’ll manage the decline and transition of our present civilization in a way that ultimately promotes greater equality and sustainability. As we are forced to imagine the end of the world, people are struggling to imagine the end of capitalism. Organized groups are attempting to re-envision sustainable enterprises rooted in knowledge sharing, a more egalitarian ethos, and active opposition to the hoarding of wealth and socioeconomic hierarchies, bearing echoes of functioning systems from our long human past. Particularly in South and Central America, several Indigenous movements are well underway to restore local sustainability and equitability.
For now, these conceptions remain only as seeds and sprouts, the beginnings of a new imaginary that is yet to be fleshed out by practice and circumstance, as the world changes. But while mainstream capitalist culture tells us that its own social dynamics are inevitable or hard-wired into human nature, we might heed the existence and appeal and promise of emerging post-capitalist visions, alongside ample evidence from prehistory and the living narratives of many Indigenous peoples, which remind us that this is simply not so. It’s here that I find hope.
[Part 14: Toward a Polyphony of Stories]
Notes:
1 George Dafermos, The Catalan Integral Cooperative: an organizational study of a post-capitalist cooperative, 2017.
2 Several of these principles are outlined in architect Joe Brewer’s recent work, The Design Pathway, though he doesn’t speak about them explicitly in terms of gift economies. Brewer works with Indigenous peoples in Colombia to help create bio-regionally sustainable societies.
3 These are described in analytical detail in How on Earth: Flourishing in a Not-for-Profit World by 2050, by scholars Jennifer Hinton and Donnie Maclurcan.
4 Hickel, J., & Hallegatte, S. (2021). Can we live within environmental limits and still reduce poverty? Degrowth or decoupling? Development Policy Review, 00, 1– 24. https://doi.org/10.1111/dpr.12584.
5 For more on this, one possible introduction is The New Possible: Visions of Our World beyond Crisis, edited by Philip Clayton. 2021 Cascade Books, an Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers.
Earlier Essays in this Series
1 What We Talk About When We Talk About The Weather
10 On Progress as Human Destiny
11 Of Gods and Men and Human Destiny
12 Musings on the Anthropocene
Images
1. Captain Picard, Dr. Pulaski, and Commander Riker enjoy an array of interplanetary delicacies produced by a replicator in the Ten Forward lounge of the USS Enterprise. Screenshot from Star Trek: The Next Generation. Fair use.
2. A kula gathering on a Beach of Sinaketa. On this day, over eighty canoes arrived for the event, parked along a half-mile stretch of the beach. The crowd of participants and spectators numbered some two-thousand people from at least five separate tribes. Photo by Bronislaw Malinowski, prior to 1922. Published in Argonauts of the Western Pacific. George Routledge & Sons, Ltd. 1922. Public domain.
3. A set of mwali, or "armbands," used in the kula ring economy of the Trobriand Islands. Photo by Bronislaw Malinowski, prior to 1922. Published in Argonauts of the Western Pacific. George Routledge & Sons, Ltd. 1922. Public domain.
4. Kwakwaka'wakw dancers, of today's British Columbia in Canada, performing at a potlatch ceremony, circa 1900 CE. Photo by Edward S Curtis. Public domain.
5. A modern-day veigun or soulava, or "necklace," used in the kula gift exchange, circa 2000 CE. This one features glass or plastic beads, which would not be a local item of production, demonstrating the intrusion of foreign goods and markets into the kula economy that operates today, and how it has drifted from its local, ecologically-moored origins. Photo by Brocken Inaglory. Creative Commons.
I greatly enjoyed my conversation with Abdullah Khan, friend, fellow writer, and author of the novel Patna Blues (the screen grab below shows the introducer). It was hosted by the Kalinga Literary Festival (1 hr).
[The twelfth in a series of essays, On Climate Truth and Fiction, in which I raise questions about environmental distress, the human experience, and storytelling. It first appeared on 3 Quarks Daily. The previous part is here.]
In the late 1960s and early 70s, Pocatello, Idaho, was one of the fastest growing towns in the United States. It was, and still is, a bland little place in the arid montane region of the American West. I don’t know why it mushroomed then; it has since stagnated and even shrunk. Nevertheless, the summer I turned four, my family was one among many who moved to reside there. Our little red brick house, still unfinished on the day we moved in, was the last house at the end of a newly laid street, still half-empty of houses. Our street stretched like a solitary finger into a kind of wilderness, an austere, high-desert landscape that surrounded our foundling residential colony. From my vantage as a child, preoccupied with the flowers, spiders, and thistles that stuck to my socks, I would see this place transformed.
Little did I know that this landscape was, in fact, already overgrazed and degraded, that some of the plants, which so quickly became familiars—like the Russian Thistle, aka tumbleweed—were actually invasive species. Despite that, it thrived. The undulating hillsides were coarsely matted with hard grasses and sedges, sagebrush, gnarled juniper, all hues of dusty green and wood. Here and there, yellow flares of prickly pear blossoms. Blood red Indian paintbrush splashed across the pale dirt. A sprinkling of white sego lilies.
All the new, single-story homes along our street were encircled by large, grassy yards, where the neighborhood kids played for hours into the lingering, northerly summer sunsets. Next to our house, a dusty trackway wound down the hillside toward a rustic, little ranch below. A brook that passed by the ranch could be made out by the vibrant streak it traced through the pale grasses and shrubs, an incongruous density of ferns and spindly, deciduous trees that grew up from its steep banks. A set of fences out beyond the dirt road sometimes corralled a few horses or cows. Alongside them, a scratch of a trail led further up into the open hills.
I never thought of this landscape as beautiful, but spare and stark, almost frightening. At the same time, I somehow understood it to be connected to me and everything else, something absolutely real, essential and alive, in a way that was apparent even to a child. In the early years, my sister, my best friend, and I went through a phase of bowing in gratitude to the trees, speaking to them almost as our elders, though no one had taught us to do this. We used to wander for hours on foot and found our first taste of adventure in spotting shy foxes or bounding hares or golden eagles. My whole childhood smelled like sagebrush and juniper and dust, with occasional wafts of cowshit from the nearby corrals. At night, the melancholy howls of coyotes in the nearby hills pierced the darkness, as did the hoots of trains passing through the city’s downtown depot. That the wilderness represented something far greater than us was plainly obvious when we were young; but our awareness was somehow turned away from this knowledge as we grew.
By the time I was in junior high school, the tumbleweeds and Indian paintbrush and fox dens were gone. The dust paved over. The brambly creek buried. The coyotes silenced. The hillsides covered with houses under construction, now two stories high. The prickly pears exchanged for clipped lawns and tulip beds. All of this made me ineffably sad and anxious. My family moved to a bigger house, far beyond the expanding edge of town. The new road we lived on remained rural, but also tripled from two to six houses (including ours), by the time I graduated high school. And the town proper continued to sprawl, its population more than tripling since the time of my family’s arrival, to harbor some sixty-five thousand souls.
Years later, I would notice how blithely people presume that whatever humans do has at most a minuscule effect upon the state of the planet and its living systems; but even though I didn’t yet have the language or data to explain why or how, I already knew this wasn’t true. I’d seen how much space human beings take up in this world, how absolutely everything else gets swept aside, without consideration, to make place for whatever we build. I witnessed how quickly our ordinary desires and actions can amount to something that overwhelms the wellbeing of the non-human world, how much is displaced by what we take up, that there really is a kind of zero-sum game of life. Even this seemed fine, up to a point, so long as some kind of balance was maintained. But it was clear that there was no balance between the human and non-human worlds: one of these was resolutely displacing the other.
I remember learning in the fifth grade that the world’s population had doubled since just a few years before I was born, and it was set to double again, even faster. Knowing this worried me. Whenever I brought it up with others over the years, they were always quick to assure me that people would always be able to produce enough food to eat, as if that were the only thing that mattered. And while even that didn’t quite seem like a sensible presumption to me, it wasn’t my primary concern. If there were going to be more and more people, I wondered, what will be left for the non-human world? Indeed, while the human population has exploded, the populations of wild animals and plants have commensurately been crashing. Today, human bodies make up thirty-six percent of the mammalian biomass on the planet; our livestock and pets make up another sixty percent. This means that all the wild mammals on Earth constitute a minuscule four percent. Though we are only one among some sixty-five hundred extant mammalian species and one among thirty-five thousand terrestrial vertebrate species, between 1970 and 2018, we’ve been directly responsible for twenty-eight percent of the deaths among wild animals with whom we share the land; that proportion goes up, perhaps incalculably, if you include deaths by habitat destruction, let alone if you include domesticated animals. Each year, humans directly or indirectly (through our domesticated animals), consume, co-opt, or destroy almost forty percent of the planet’s annual net primary productivity (the amount of sunshine that annually falls to Earth and gets converted by plants into the carbon bonds that provide all the energy used by the rest of the biosphere). That’s to say: our single species appropriates an egregiously outsized portion of the energy available to fuel the entire biosphere, a situation that’s clearly wildly out of balance and unsustainable. It’s ludicrous to maintain the politically correct pretense that there is no such thing as human overpopulation, no matter how you slice up our consumption patterns among countries or classes.
And worse: In addition to this direct energy gluttony, humans also annually consume hundreds of years’ worth of ancient net primary productivity, available to us in the form of fossil fuels. Such an imbalance in the use of planetary resources and such a profound reshaping of energy flows for the purpose of maintaining the expanding lifestyle of a single species is bound to warp the Earth system in multiple ways, including the very ways we’re presently witnessing, from mass extinction to pollution to climate change. The decline of non-human species is of such a magnitude and speed that an event of this kind has occurred only five times previously in planetary history; only the fall of the meteor that ended the dinosaurs has precipitated a faster rate of extinctions.
Human Blight or Human Plight?
There has been, of late, a growing sensibility regarding the environmental damage that the human enterprise continues to wreak upon the Earth. This is mostly a narrow awareness about climate change and the way planetary heating will affect the functioning of our modern global civilization. Some concern has also surrounded the extinction of a few celebrity species, like whales, lions, elephants, and rhinos. Talk of conserving species primarily centers on the animals of Africa, a place that many of us who grew up outside of wish to remain wild, even as the rest of us go on destroying our own wild spaces to pave new roads and build new residential colonies and shopping complexes for our own convenience and enjoyment.
At the same time, it’s also true that this growing concern about the non-human world—what we like to call Nature—has led some of us to believe that human beings are inevitably bad for the planet, something like a cancer upon this Earth. We’re destroying god’s creation, some lament; we’ve not been the stewards of Nature that god expected us to be. Even most who eschew such Abrahamic terms in regretting our modern ecocide still take it for granted that the human clash with Nature is somehow an inescapable quality of being human. In response to this, perhaps, one idea gaining traction is the notion that the only way for our species to stop destroying our world may be to transcend being human, altogether, by integrating ourselves into our technology, which, by some fantastical rationale, is presumed to be a more perfect and resource-independent state of being—imagined as more godlike perhaps because it’s un-Natural, or supra-Natural.
But all of this reasoning begins with at least one fundamental flaw: it rests upon forgetting that human beings are, in fact, a part and product of the Natural world, every bit as much as pond scum and chipmunks and coral reefs and combustible fossils. We aren’t, in fact, in any way separate in our source, creation, maintenance, or ultimate trajectory from the rest of Nature. We may think ourselves a particularly clever species, but we are still subject to the same laws, limitations, potentialities, and mysteries as everything else. The Earth produced us, and we belong to it every bit as much as all the other life forms with whom we cohabit this planet. All the evolution that preceded us played a part in creating us by producing the world we were born into—all of the unique and astonishing creatures and landforms and chemical cycles that facilitated our arrival and support our continued existence as human beings, by forming the complex and flexible niche to which we adapted. And we also play a part, like every other lifeform, exerting a presence that shapes the planet and the biosphere, co-creating the world that all other creatures are born into.
Humans have been altering our environments for a very long time. We are, like all other creatures, active participants in the web of life, a web defined not merely by who eats whom, but how organisms and communities interact in multiple ways. The integrity of the web of life is a matter of balance and reciprocity, along uncountable avenues in constant flux—including many we are not yet, and may never become, aware of. Indeed, there is very little about life, as a force or element or aspect of the cosmos, that we do understand. But one evident law of life, seemingly incontrovertible, is that nothing lasts forever; everything changes. Every living species that has ever come into existence has gone, or will go, out of existence, either at an evolutionary dead end or by evolving into another sort of creature. We can be no exception to this law of life. So win, lose, or draw, we will only play our part in setting the stage for whatever comes after us.
And yet, if the web of life depends upon balance, something is certainly off-kilter in the world under human influence. No species can “win” this zero-sum game of life, as we are trying to do. In this way, there’s really something different about the way our planet is changing, during our present age of human planetary dominance, compared to any other time in at least the past few billion years: it might be the first time in epochs that a single lifeform has had such a tremendously transformational effect over the entire Earth. Our species, alone, is responsible for changes that reach so deeply into the networked processes of our Earth system that they are already resulting in a system-wide rewrite of environmental conditions. We are blithely and repeatedly tapping the Delete button across the biosphere. And oops—there’s no Undo!
But we’re not the first species ever to have done this; it happened at least once before, in the earliest epoch of life on our planet around four billion years ago. There were far fewer forms of life at that time, all of them single-celled organisms floating in the anoxic stew of Earth’s watery surface. As they mutated, proliferating in brand new forms, evolving to take advantage of the open niches—as yet undiscovered ways of life—one of them was born who pooped out oxygen as a metabolic waste product. This creature, cyanobacteria, did very well, much to the aggravation of its neighbors, who preferred the anoxic environment they were adapted to. Still, it was fine at first: the buildup of free oxygen was geologically slow, and mostly clung to the rocks, turning Earth’s newborn iron rust-red, maybe giving the world ocean a lurid cast. But over billions of years, as oxygen-polluting cells multiplied, atmospheric oxygen eventually accumulated, in what we now call the Great Oxygenation Event. The oxygenated atmosphere caused the extinction of many anaerobic forms of life, by around two and a half billion years ago, making the world an entirely different place. The stage was now set for the takeover by other cells, who had been quietly expanding through the ruddy waters, evolving to take advantage of plentiful free oxygen, rather than die in it. What followed was the rise of all the lineages of living things that thrive under a blue sky: life as we know it.
Needless to say, for a single type of organism to play such an outsized role in refashioning the world environment is a rare and dangerous game. The Great Oxygenation Event was a catastrophic turn for most of life on Earth at the time. I don’t know that any other life form ever had an effect quite like that again—perhaps not until now, with our mass burning of fossil fuels, planetary scale habitat destruction, and petrochemical farming. But it does not follow from these examples that environmental changes caused by living things are necessarily detrimental to the biosphere, or that they always create massive disruptions through which even local ecosystems cannot persist. As with most things, it is always a matter of form and degree. And while it’s true that in recent centuries human beings have been pushing the environment too far, it wasn’t always so, and it needn’t continue so.
Human beings and cyanobacteria aren’t the only beings to alter their environments. Consider the beaver or the elephant, both of whom refashion the land, actively shaping the niches in which they live. Beavers famously do this by cutting down trees, pruning the forests, damming and diverting flows of water. Elephants, too, knock over trees, causing nearby river waters to meander in constantly shifting flows. Beavers and elephants have been doing this for millions of years. Gophers, moles, and other animals dig expansive tunnels underground; termites build sturdy mounds. Corals build monumental reefs. All of these things become features of the landscape for years or even decades—in the case of corals, for up to hundreds of thousands of years. And for each of these animal-built features, a host of other organisms co-evolve to take advantage of the conditions that this niche-engineering provides.
Indeed, it must be true that every animal does this at least in small ways that may strike us less obviously. Consider the bee. Does its pollination of flowers not lead to an increase of its most favored/visited kinds of flowers in its nearby environs? Consider the by now well-known case of the wolves in Yellowstone National Park. Decades after wolves had been annihilated in the park, they were reintroduced between 1995–97 and their presence drastically enriched the landscape within three decades, affecting fauna, flora, and the very terrain—the patterns of erosion and meanders of the rivers. The direct effects of bees, wolves, elephants and most other animals are subject to cycles, constantly undone and renewed, intertwined with the cycles of other organisms in their vicinity, moving around a zone of balance. The built works of most animals that erect constructions, like beavers and termites, are transient on geological timescales, not enduring even for centuries. The corals are exceptional in this way, but the reefs they build themselves become foundational structures that anchor entire ecosystems, supporting some twenty-five percent of marine life today. For the most part, animal activities and constructions generally don’t destroy whole communities of life, wipe out entire species by the handful, nor impoverish their local ecosystem in such a way that their surge of disruption endures on geological timescales. In this way, what humans have been doing and building over the past few millennia is fundamentally different from what other animals—and even earlier humans—have done and built.
Transient Niche-Engineering
Since Africa is where humans originally came from, the African wilderness is the first place where humans had an environmental impact. Possibly beginning a million or more years ago, controlling fire may have been the first way humans—or our latter-day hominin ancestors, Homo erectus—tried to shape their environment to their purposes at larger scales, in the manner of elephants. Erectus could direct fires to drive game for a hunt. They could employ it to renew growth or expand grasslands, promoting the availability of more tubers and other preferred plant foods, as well as enticing grazing animals to venture nearby for easier hunting. They could use it to keep warm, thus expanding their range into colder territories. They could use it to cook, thus broadening their menus and their palettes, which then also changed what items they harvested from their local environment, and every choice, made at habitual scale, would have cascading effects throughout the local environment.
Even in more recent millennia, fire is well attested as a tool for landscape management among Indigenous peoples from Africa to Australia to the Americas. Some plant species have even come to take advantage of fire for their own propagation—grasses and shrubs that thrive on newly burned ground or trees that use fire to release their seeds. In some parts of Australia, where controlled burning has been regularly practiced for unfathomable millennia, the cessation of traditional burning practices by the modern authorities has left forests vulnerable to devastating wildfires, suggesting that entire forest ecosystems may have come to be dependent on human activity as a natural part of their own wellbeing and preservation. In using fire to optimize our environments, humans, in turn, also became dependent upon fire: Our digestive systems and dentition and skulls are optimized to take advantage of cooked foods. Eating cooked food also enabled the enlargement of our brains. Without fire to cook our food today, we would find little we could eat and properly digest.
Another way humans learned to engineer their niches, near the beginning of the Holocene, was to practice transhumant pastoralism. Some human bands had long been following goats or reindeer or other ungulates as they migrated along their seasonal grazing routes. They may even have actively cared for the herd, protecting them from other predators, offering aid to the injured, perhaps forming relationships with individual animals. But beginning in the early Holocene, some peoples further intensified this practice, selecting favored animals for breeding, selecting for docility, among other traits. Over hundreds of generations, the animals become more dependent upon humans, too, thriving best under benevolent human care, in a kind of symbiosis we call domestication, even though eventually they would be chosen for slaughter. These early pastoralists remained transhumant—that is, they migrated back and forth between their herds’ native grazing grounds—thus disrupting the local ecosystems far less than if they’d kept the animals penned, concentrated in one area and unable to exert the influence of their seasonal grazing, treading the soil, and manuring, diffused across the wider landscape.
Around the same time, people were also learning to actively propagate their favorite plants. First, this was done in situ, in “the wild,” where gatherers made mental note of what flourished best under which conditions, how quickly harvests were regenerated, what happened when one species became overly dominant in an area, and other useful data that enabled them to promote certain species without collapsing an entire ecosystem. Later on, in some locales, this was done slightly more intensively with swidden horticulture: burning down a small stand of forest and then planting several crops in the ashen patch of ground. Such a garden could be productive for up to a few years, and this might encourage village settlement. Once the garden was exhausted, it was left fallow to be overtaken by the jungle. Swidden gardens were kept small enough that the forest wasn’t effectively fragmented and could readily reclaim the garden space, once it was abandoned. The villagers might then burn a new patch of ground nearby to plant a new garden. Villages created around such systems of shifting horticulture would themselves be abandoned after a couple of years or a couple of decades or perhaps, at most, a couple of generations. Everything built in the village was locally sourced and biodegradable and would return to fertilize the soil from which it came, the forest regenerating over the remains of the old village site, while the people relocated to a fresh site to start over, leaving no permanent damage. Meanwhile, as women selected seeds for their gardening, these too grew adapted to the human touch, some of them eventually requiring human intervention to grow well at all.
There are several other similarly low-intensity environmental engineering practices. One might expand a small backwater along the flow of a river, for instance, where some species of fish and other animals or plants prefer to congregate, which provides better fishing and gathering for the people who maintain the area. Or one might take the stones strewn across a hillside and pile them into low walls to slow the wash of heavy rainshowers, thus reducing erosion, raising the local water table, and greening the hillside with plants you can make use of. As with other animals, all these modes of niche-engineering would ultimately have been transient in nature, subject to the shifts and cycles and behaviors of the weather and the other beings that occupied the same land, some who might even periodically overtake it or revise it according to their own lifecycle agendas. And all of these strategies required practitioners to be flexible in their approach to life, to understand that each community of living things has its seasons and its limits; that they should never take more from the land than they require or the land can sustainably offer; that a balance of life must be maintained; that maintaining the wellbeing of their place in turn promotes their own wellbeing. Like other animals, humans who practiced low-intensity niche-engineering generally enriched their local ecosystems, rather than diminished them in the long term. For thousands of generations, humans lived within the natural limits of the world, shaping it and being shaped by it, like any other creature. Our numbers across the globe were slowly growing, but for ages our consumption and destruction did not overwhelm the biosphere.
Timing and Tumors
Given that we humans have been substantially influencing our environments for such a very long time, there’s much debate about when we really entered a time we can call the Anthropocene, which denotes the point at which human activity becomes the dominant force shaping the planet, altering it in ways that will leave measurable traces across millennia. Some would argue that the Anthropocene must begin with the human use of fire to affect the growth of forests and grasslands, at least a million years ago. Or it might begin with the spread of modern humans across the globe, which precipitated a megafaunal mass extinction, dead-ending a variety of animals who might (or might not) have evolved into new forms, when they were challenged by the end of the last glaciation and the warming into the Holocene. Or maybe it should start with the earliest domestication of plants and animals, which altered the future trajectory of many species and landscapes. Others argue that it should begin with fixed-field agriculture and the rise of city-states, such as those which arose in the Fertile Crescent during the mid-Holocene; at this time, the rate of species extinction picked up pace and carbon dioxide began to accumulate in the atmosphere to the point that it likely played a part in stabilizing the Holocene climate. But geologists, who are tasked with declaring a formal definition, seem partial to the 1950s, when the Western powers were zealously testing nuclear devices, blanketing the Earth in a thin film of radiation that will persist as a line in the soil strata and the remains of living things for millennia to come. At this same time, the fossil record also begins to change, showing far fewer non-human animals, in kind and in total, and far more human animals, as well as sudden and profound changes to the skeletons of certain species, like chickens and dogs and cattle, under the escalating force of artificial selection. Prodigious masses of concrete and newly invented plastic begin to accumulate on the surface of the planet. Mountainous quantities of lead, iron, copper, gold, and other metals are stripped from Earth’s interior and deposited upon its exterior. And the atmosphere is rapidly flooded with hundreds of millions of gigatons of carbon that had previously been locked away in the bowels of the Earth for hundreds of millions of years. Some call these developments the Great Acceleration, which rings similar to the Great Oxygenation Event.
Whatever the geologists decide about the formal definition, it is useful to think about the start of the Anthropocene. It is useful to focus a question on what so fundamentally changed in human behavior that we went from being just one creature among many, to a becoming a dangerous entity on a scale unlike any other life form in billions of years, drastically upsetting the balance of life on our planet with such force that it’s crashing the biosphere. When did our species cross that threshold? If we can understand what changed in our ways of being, then we might be able to figure out what can be set right and how we might restore human societies to their useful place within the living world. Returning to the popular metaphor of humans as a cancer, what if we instead liken the human community to an organ that—just like every other community of life—plays a part in the regulation of the Earth as an organism, imagined as Gaia? It might then be fair to say that something in our tissues, or social fabric, has become diseased. This is to say human beings are not a disease; rather, human societies are infected by disease. If that metaphor holds, then our societies can also be restored to health. With proper diagnosis and treatment, why couldn’t we return to our salutary functioning in Earth’s web of life?
Readers of this series will know that I’ve come to think the present disease was caused by an idea—a meme, if you prefer—contracted by societies in the Fertile Crescent during the early to mid-Holocene, an idea that humans are essentially different from all other living creatures and are entitled to destroy or co-opt other lives without regard in the service of human paramountcy. Early Mesopotamian societies at least provide the first textual evidence in which people were beginning to compare themselves favorably with their gods, to imagine themselves as supra-Natural beings, entitled to possess and dominate what would increasingly come to be identified as Nature, separate from humanity. Once on this path, ordinary human greed and lust for power—with their own propulsive logic and rationalization—found new purchase, so that individuals and societies began to take more than they needed and to maintain a hierarchy through which they could dominate other people, animals, plants, and ecosystems in a manner and to a degree that had never before been done. Rather than being mindful of natural cycles and seasons for all living communities, respecting the web of life, the earliest agriculturalists began trying to separate their lands, their plants, and their animals from Nature’s web to build a human-centric one. In so doing, they obstructed the wellbeing of most of the people and animals under their control and also undertook to destroy those communities of living things that they did not favor. As they adopted increasingly chauvinistic values that vaunted their own domination over co-existence with other forms of living things and in discordance with the terms of biospheric integrity, they advanced their own growth. Their ideas spread, by force and by numbers, across the planet, until nearly all of us are overtaken by it, infected with it. When fossil fuels entered the veins of this uncontrolled overgrowth, it had the effect of a poison that favored the disease over healthy tissue—an inverse chemo-therapy. Fossil fuels have enabled the rise of technological innovations of the last century that—while amazing, creative, and transformational in so many ways—have further fueled the delusion that there are no ecological limits to salutary growth, that we can outpace all challenges through technological wizardry. The transient wealth fossil fuels have produced has buffered us from the long-term consequences of our ecological impact, thereby enabling extreme ecological overshoot. And the material excess they’ve helped to create has effectively normalized a disastrous, consumption-led, aspirational lifestyle around the world.
It seems increasingly clear that curing the condition requires us not only to leave fossil fuels in the ground, but also to expunge the corrupting meme, in all its variants of concern. But what is the healthy way to do this? What systems do we share, as humans, that enable us to ward off our grave cultural sickness? Maybe there are none. Maybe I just don’t know where to look. Maybe these are the wrong questions. But even if our predicament is caused by more than the suspicious Mesopotamian meme, finding the primary causes of the shift in our relationship with the rest of the biosphere seems integral to finding the cure to our civilizational ills—to discovering the antidote, which can restore health to the human presence in our world. Fortunately, there are those who are actively attempting to rediscover the principles of sustainable human societies.
[Part 13: Stories of Wealth and Distribution]
Earlier Essays in this Series
1 What We Talk About When We Talk About The Weather
10 On Progress as Human Destiny
11 Of Gods and Men and Human Destiny
Images
1. The landscape of southeastern Idaho, near Pocatello. The land around the street where I grew up was quite similar. 75centralphotography
2. A rock showing bands of oxidized iron that were formed as it precipitated from the ocean during the Great Oxygenation Event, during the Precambrian Age. Photo by Graeme Churchard. Creative Commons.
3. Painting of Australian Aboriginal people burning grassland to hunt kangaroos in New South Wales. Painted by Joseph Lycett, 1817. National Library of Australia.
4. The mushroom cloud formed during a nuclear test on Bikini Atoll in 1954. Public Domain.
[The eleventh in a series of essays, On Climate Truth and Fiction, in which I raise questions about environmental distress, the human experience, and storytelling. It first appeared on 3 Quarks Daily. The previous part is here.]
In the beginning, the god of the Biblical creation myths makes the Earth and sky. Over the next several days, he makes the sun, moon, and stars, grasses and fruit trees, most of the animals, and rain. Then, scooping up a bit of fresh mud, he molds a being who looks much like himself, a man, and into this homunculus he breathes life. As a dwelling place for this newborn Adam, he plants a lavishly abundant garden, filling it with beautiful and delicious plants. The creator tells Adam, “Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat. But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it, for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.” Then, realizing that Adam might feel lonely, the deity gives him cattle, fowl, and all the “beasts of the field.” Yet none of these quite seems a suitable companion, so from one of Adam’s ribs, god fashions a woman.
Quite pleased with his handiwork, the divinity instructs his new humans on how to live. He tells them they must increase their population. They must also replenish the Earth, and in doing so, subdue it and exercise dominion over all its living things. The almighty then leaves the newlyweds alone to get on with their business of eating, procreating, replenishing, and dominating, which they apparently take to just fine. Indeed, neither of the pair has any memorable comment on their situation, until the day Serpent piques Eve’s curiosity, telling her that if she and Adam were to eat from the one forbidden tree, rather than die, “your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.” Now Eve takes new notice of this tree, understanding that it could make her “wise.” Enticed, she picks a fruit and munches it. Whatever she discovers then—new knowledge or wisdom or just fine flavor—is simply too good not to share with her husband and, despite their creator’s clear injunction to him, Adam follows his wife’s lead. Yet soon the hapless couple realize that this new state they find themselves in—their eyes having been opened—is indeed problematic. They seem to have transgressed some cosmic order and find themselves possessed now of a discomfiting self-awareness, of moral judgments and political motives, just like the god who made them—and distinctly unlike the beasts they lived among.
When their creator finds out what they’ve done, he is homicidally enraged. He remarks (to his fellow gods…?), “Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil.” For Serpent’s part in this transgression, the creator curses him to be forevermore the enemy of Eve and her progeny. He then condemns Eve, saying, “I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee.” To Adam, he says, “Cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life. Thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee; and thou shalt eat the herb of the field. In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground.” With that, he drives them out of the provident garden he’d originally made for them, forever barring their return, condemning them to a life of tilling and toiling for their subsistence. This was now our human destiny.
Many aspects of the Genesis story are striking, not least its seeming contradictions, large and small; these may be partly due to its having been an amalgam of older oral histories (as myths tend to be), in this case possibly inherited from the diverse peoples who were absorbed into the expanding agricultural civilization that was coming to dominate the Eastern Mediterranean region during the mid-Holocene. I find the story intriguing also because it seems to recall, however dimly, that there was a time before the advent of agriculture. In that before-time, it hints, all manner of delightsome foods had been abundant, freely available for the taking; the inhabitants of this divinely resplendent garden had only to command and nurture it and raise their kids. But by the time this story is being recounted by the presumed descendants of Adam and Eve, those idyllic days have tragically ended: the garden of Eden is beyond reach; the ground is cursed; food can now be procured only by tilling fields of grain for their bread, through sweat and hardship. It seems surprising, from our modern vantage, that in this myth-memory the livelihood of agriculture comes as a punishment, as the retraction of god’s gift of abundance and a sharpening of patriarchal norms.
Today, we generally recall this same cultural milestone as the Agricultural Revolution: the moment our species moved on from our presumedly uncivilized, nomadic lives to begin our story of Human Progress. But it would seem that in the ancient Levant, from whence this story hails, what we see as Progress was clearly imagined as a diminishment from a more privileged and comfortable condition. And though theologians still often refer to “man’s fall from grace” as defining our human condition, the plain meaning of the words no longer truly resonates with our dominant narratives and cultural expectations of the human story as one of steady advancement from benighted beginnings.
Myths and legends always rework older, established narratives, motifs, and themes, tapping into what’s perceived as timeless wisdom or knowledge. They can be inspired or inflected by ideas and events reaching back many millennia, even as they reflect and edify or legitimate changing priorities, practices, power structures, and beliefs. Much as several elements in the Biblical Flood story long predate the Old Testament, it’s possible that the Genesis creation story also contains fragments and strands of cultural inheritance that figured large in the lives of the peoples who had inhabited the forests and shifting riverine grasslands of the Eastern Mediterranean region during the earlier millennia of the Holocene, a time when nomadic livelihoods were transitioning toward increasing sedentism, at first in strategic and flexible stops and starts, but ultimately culminating in complete dependence upon fixed-field agriculture supporting urban centers. Did that generous and unspoiled garden that fed Adam and Eve invoke for its earliest storytellers a misty, hagiographic cultural recollection of the relative freedom and effortlessness of pre-agricultural life? Did it represent an inherited nostalgia for what were to them already ancient times, during which their foraging ancestors were accumulating, by slow degrees, the paradigm-shifting, dangerous knowledge that nudged them away from ease and plenitude, toward the heavy yoke of agriculture? As they experimented with their first simple settlements of stone and then, millennia later, of brick; as they intentionally broadcast another handful of wild seeds and then, millennia later, plowed their first fields, had their understanding of themselves and their place in the world been shifting—were their eyes being opened? Was this newfound self-regard the Original Sin that led to the death of Eden? Was this story a foggy recognition by those ancient tellers of what they had lost in giving up their intimate knowledge of the non-human world—especially, their sense of humankind as belonging to a reciprocal web of life, beholden to the Earth-system as they understood it—in order to adopt a new sense of themselves as being different from and above all other life, singular and godlike?
From Foragers to Peasants and Slaves: The Fall of Man?
Foragers, it must be stressed, generally know what they are doing. Their use of resources is by necessity flexible, balanced, resilient, and demanding of forethought, intention, and a sophisticated and intimate knowledge of a broad range of environments, ecosystem dependencies, and animal behaviors. They strategically shape the land to benefit themselves, but they strive to remain within its sustainable limits. Foragers know that if they overtax their lands, without investing in compensatory and regenerative practices, the land will ultimately bring forth less of everything to support them. This isn’t to suggest that they have always succeeded at sustainability at every moment. Especially when entering new ecosystems or encountering unfamiliar species, they surely faltered and even failed. We know of failed forager colonies and practices, and there are doubtlessly more we don’t know of, buried under ancient sands and swamps. But the many societies that managed to flourish for thousands of years did so only because they figured out a workable balance. As they experimented with new subsistence techniques and cultural practices, successful societies took heed of the feedback they got from the land. Unless they encountered extraordinary conditions (like wildly fecund bottomlands and a warm, stable climate) or discovered “game-changing” technologies (like petrochemical fertilizers and pesticides) that delay the consequences of overexploitation by many generations or even centuries, foragers could learn and respond to unintended consequences before they were locked into irreversible dependency on any particular unsustainable practices.
So long as their population densities remained very low, compared to the carrying capacity of the land, it may have made little difference how much foragers took from their environments. But they may have discovered the land’s limits if their populations began to swell—which can happen during a prolonged period of sedentism, for instance—or when the climate suddenly and drastically fluctuated, even for just one or two years, as in the event of a major volcanic explosion. Newly sedentary forager-farmers would’ve understood how precarious their situation was, how great a gamble it was to lose their resilience by depending too heavily upon their few cultivated plants or animals. They would notice, too, that too much planting or grazing displaces other plants and animals, leaving their own crop more vulnerable to pests and reducing the availability of other needed resources. For example, cutting or burning back forests too far, to expand grasslands for planting or grazing, may reduce access to nut trees, honeybee hives, medicinal plants, firewood, and other forest products; likewise, overgrazing a grassland increases erosion and turns it to dust, leaving it unproductive for further grazing, planting, or foraging. And when signs of such overexploitation appeared, foraging villagers who retained their knowledge of a broader spectrum of subsistence strategies across other environments, might disperse and rely on some greater degree of nomadism, eventually moving their village elsewhere as conditions allowed, as they or their elders had done before, adjusting their behaviors and patterns to fit the circumstances and leaving the strained environment to regenerate in its own time. That is to say: they actively adjusted to the changing environment, rather than forcing the environment to conform steadfastly to their needs.
But the foraging villagers occupying the alluvial delta of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, in southern Mesopotamia, found their environment so rich and regenerative, their population had plenty of room to grow. To feed a few more bellies, they could broadcast a few more grass seeds onto the seasonally deposited silt flats, then gather more grain and graze another sheep the following summer. Even if they did outgrow their immediate environs, or if a pestilence drove them out—an increasingly common risk as villagers and livestock proliferated—rather than disperse, some or all of them could simply inaugurate another village in the same bottomlands and continue their same way of life. Having been able to follow this way of life for some four thousand years, their villages spread throughout the delta, each one sheltering several thousand souls, and slowly growing. By the middle of the fourth century, BCE, it may be that this deltaic region was supporting a higher permanent population density than had previously ever been amassed anywhere (with the possible rival of a similarly rich, seasonally renewed region along the Yellow River of China, which also hosted sedentary foragers, who were spreading grain).
Something else was happening too: it seems they were losing their broader knowledge of ecosystems, alongside the flexible subsistence strategies and belief systems of their distant ancestors. Without that knowledge and understanding, their subsistence options became constrained. And even the richest bottomlands have their limits. At some point, the resource requirements of the people climbed beyond the regenerative capacity of the environment, especially as these permanent settlements required great amounts of wood for building, for firing kilns and forges, much more than their immediate environs could sustainably supply (and far more than their nomadic ancestors had required). As they increasingly deforested the riverbanks all along their courses, this began to trigger new patterns of erosion and siltation across the delta, increasing flood risks and hindering their simple system for propagating grain. As their foraging range was being overtaxed and damaged, they must have noticed this, much as we witness cherished environments degrade.
What’s more, the stories they now told themselves—about the right way to live, what was important, how to address their troubles—no longer recognized the ancient, tried and true strategy of nomadism. As their gods were moving away from being abstractions of natural elements toward becoming projections of the things that humans make and do—like Ninurta, formerly a god of thunder and rain, now of farming and the plough; or Dimuzid, earlier a god of the force that causes sap to rise in plants and of the end of the dry season, now of milk (a seasonal food in ancient Sumer, the sap of goats) and shepherds—they were learning to invest their faith in urban social models and agriculture, to search for remedies within these realms of what they considered superior knowledge, discounting other, half-forgotten knowledge systems and alternate framings for their problems. (A situation, I would argue, very akin to our present one.)
For them, any form of nomadism—requiring different yet no less sophisticated knowledge, deep environmental awareness, alternate cultural institutions and value systems—had become an irretrievable, almost incomprehensible, way of life. Its detailed specificity had been lost, remembered only as suggestive, mythic tales of a richer, easier time. Relying more heavily on their new knowledge, they planted more on the seasonally rejuvenated flood-plains and beyond. They traded surplus grain and finished products, like cloth or pottery, for the everyday items they’d once gathered, including wood, honey, stone and metal, now sourced only from afar, brought downriver or across valleys by those foreigners who remained as nomads. Production of surplus grain and growth of trade encouraged greater craft specialization—maybe also even ritual specialization—and possibly greater economic disparities than had ever existed before.
Separated from their once deep knowledge and experience of the wider living world, they now focused on understanding a handful of crops and livestock. Having abandoned their broader strategies of ecosystem stewardship, they now strategized ways to narrowly maximize near-term gain for their large populations, even as floods and pests regularly threatened their fields and multiplied their experience of hunger. One mechanism they discovered to augment agricultural production involved more strenuously controlling the lives within their own communities—particularly the lives of women, arrogating their labor as well as their reproductive capacity to produce more laborers needed for agriculture. It’s easy to imagine this beginning as cultural value, becoming a positive social pressure, eventually solidifying as an institution, in which cultural and economic forces allowed most women little leeway beyond a life dedicated to grinding grain, attending to their husbands and households, bearing and raising children, while devaluing their capacities for other social contributions. Another strategy was to more strenuously control the lives of animals, dominating larger herds and drafting them into heavy labor. They also drained wetlands—where once their ancestors had gathered, hunted, trapped, and fished—instead to plow fields, plant mono-crops, and channel rivers for irrigation. Only in the sweat of their brows did they eat bread from their fields.
Even with such steep investments in their localities, they still were forced to periodically abandon and re-establish their farms and towns, whenever irrigation irredeemably salinated their fields or epidemic disease broke out among the populace, their animals, or their crops—a growing menace of the dense way they lived. For a thousand years, during the mid-Holocene, their agricultural towns serially rose and fell, here and there, in different incarnations over the centuries. In rebuilding ever more complex and rigid societies, increasingly enclosed by walls, they advanced their knowledge of selectively promoting or diminishing other living communities in service to their own survival above all, which was readily becoming a commitment to human paramountcy and male supremacy. Recounting the mythic memories of their ancestors’ more richly abundant world and more leisurely lives, they may have been vaguely aware that they were caught in a “progress trap,” though their word for it might have been “curse.”
The agriculturalists’ societies were contorting into previously unimagined hierarchies and, sometime around 3500 BCE, a monarchy was established at Uruk, generally regarded the world’s first city-state and probably the world’s largest settlement of the time, housing between twenty-five to fifty thousand inhabitants. Most of these toiled ceaselessly, suffered chronic injuries from heavy and repetitive labor, and died young. Famine, malnutrition, bondage, plague, and tyranny—calamities only intermittently known to their foraging ancestors—had become regular features of their condition. Women found themselves triply constricted: their conception multiplied; their economic independence eroded away; their vigor sapped by unprecedented degrees of debilitating iron deficiency. Life in Sumerian city-states was killingly hard. Ecological destruction was multiplied to produce a greater surplus in order to support comfortably provisioned elite classes of priests and bureaucrats.
Keeping this urban enterprise running was highly leveraged, burdensome, and precarious. And the only way to sustain it, as the lands were used up and the city dwellers were now dying almost as quickly as they could be birthed, was to expand it: to take over new lands, new resources, new populations of laborers. Sometimes they sacked—or were sacked by—armies from nearby polities much like themselves; sometimes they set upon—or were set upon by—companies of inscrutable nomads. Edicts were passed to control subjects and slaves from trying to flee beyond the city walls. Agriculture, statism, and expansion became the only way forward. Despite its difficulties and sorrows, many saw it as their destiny, which they continually worked to improve upon, largely by doing more of the same with ever greater intensity.
Contests Over Human Destiny
As they multiplied and entrenched themselves throughout Mesopotamia, agricultural city-states were inventing bureaucracy and record keeping, new political modes and strategies for cooperation and coercion, trade and taxation. Their stories, too, were changing to normalize their new lifeways and experiences. We may still detect contesting sentiments within the swirling churn of their transforming and renewing value systems. Some appear in The Epic of Gilgamesh, a collection of Sumerian legends and myths etched into clay tablets, fragments of which lay buried among the Early Bronze Age ruins of southern Mesopotamia. Within these texts, about life and death and kingship, an even more ancient cosmic order is hinted at, a pre-agricultural “olden time” when the Anunnaki gods—a pantheon of elemental deities—were paramount. The Anunnaki gods created the Earth and sky and human beings (though the specifics differ greatly from the creative work of the Biblical god). During their reign, remembered as a time of easy abundance, the (semi-nomadic, foraging) ancestors of the Sumerians had mastered the baking of bread and learned to ferment beer. They were already beginning to understand themselves as something apart from the other creatures of the wild. And they suffered an overwhelming tragedy, which only a handful of them survived, when the Anunnaki gods finally brought forth a devastating flood because they found the noise of the growing human population aggravating.
Long after all these epic events, by the time scribes were setting down praises of King Gilgamesh of Uruk, the primacy of the Anunnaki gods had waned, most of them supplanted by a new generation of fully anthropomorphized Sumerian gods befitting their post-diluvian civilization. But the persistence of the Anunnaki stories suggests that the memory of the “olden times” yet retained some degree of cultural relevance, perhaps a fading nostalgia. Maybe other stories of the Anunnaki gods also continued to circulate within the oral traditions of neighboring communities who remained as nomadic foragers alongside the expanding city-states, until all of them were eventually subsumed or expelled by the agriculturalists, over scores of generations.
The Sumerians considered it their duty to labor for the gods of their cities. They organized their polities accordingly, from the king down through the various layers of society: those who minister to the local deity in her or his temple, who support or provision the temple work, who plough the fields and tend the flocks, all of which belonged to the local deity. Their legendary heroes battled the outlying nomadic peoples (the “fools, who know no bread”). Nomads and others who lost in battle were abducted into slavery, their children likely assimilated into the lower rungs of Sumerian society. Sumerians also knew nomadic peoples through trade. Given such intermixing and the brutal reality of life in Sumer, it isn’t entirely surprising that a faint jangle of ambivalence about this life—its harms, its desirability, its precariousness—echoes through their most epic tale. For on one level, The Epic of Gilgamesh reads like a declaration of statist life as human progress, as though this idea remained for some yet a new and foundering notion that the elite classes wished to edify. One way this theme comes across is through the story’s secondary character, Enkidu.
Like the much later Adam, Enkidu was formed from clay (though by the hand of a goddess). He begins as a man who lives uncorrupted by the knowledge of the human-built world, “pure,”* innocent, unaware of himself as different from the other animals among whom he lives, but even more so than Adam: rather than wielding dominion over the beasts, Enkidu grazes grass right alongside the gazelles and drinks at their watering holes, just like one of them. Yet, unlike Adam, Enkidu is not the first man. He is a foreigner from the uplands (the unfamiliar realm of nomadic peoples), who has come down to the plains, where he goes around ruining the game traps and releasing the catch from the snares of Uruk’s hunters. Stronger and faster than a city dweller (foragers were markedly taller, healthier, and more robust than their urbanized contemporaries), Enkidu is in every way the singular equal—an alter ego—to the physically extraordinary Gilgamesh, strapping son of a goddess and ruler of Uruk. But while Gilgamesh is a tyrant, Enkidu is possessed of a greater sense of fairness.
In this story too, it is a woman, Shamhat, who leads Enkidu from his state of purity into civilization. As a temple prostitute, Shamhat readily seduces Enkidu away from his gazelle companions. Her coupling with him transforms him, weakening him, physically, yet also bestowing him with “reason” and a “wide understanding.” Catching sight of Enkidu after he lies with Shamhat, the gazelles reject him and flee. Shamhat spends weeks with Enkidu, engaging in discussion and sexual intercourse. She cleans him up, clothes him, teaches him, feeds him bread and beer—the hallmarks of civilization. She tells him:
As I look at you, Enkidu, you are like a god,
why with the beasts do you wander the wild?
Come, I will lead you to Uruk-the-City,
to the sacred temple, the dwelling of Anu!
Enkidu, arise, let me take you
to the temple Eanna, the dwelling of Anu,
where [men] are engaged in labours of skill,
you, too, like a man, will find a place for yourself.
Persuaded by Shamhat’s enthusiasm that he should get a job, Enkidu signs on as a shepherd. But one day, upon hearing that the local king intends to sleep with someone else’s bride, he is enraged; he storms to the marriage house and bars the door against Gilgamesh. The two men come to blows, until their thunderous contest ends in a draw. After this, the two become inseparably devoted companions, probably lovers, and run off to adventure together.
Much later, upon his deathbed, Enkidu curses Shamhat outlandishly for having civilized and weakened him, leading to his premature demise. Gilgamesh, however, persuades Enkidu to recognize civilization as a boon. Despite his own overwhelming grief upon losing his dearest companion, Gilgamesh chides his friend, “O Enkidu, why curse Shamhat the harlot, who fed you bread that was fit for a god, and poured you ale that was fit for a king, who clothed you in a splendid garment, and gave you as companion the handsome Gilgamesh?”
It’s primarily the stories of such agriculturalists that come down to us from Mesopotamia; the stories of those non-literate “fools, who knew no bread” can only be read where they might have been retained as fragments within the stories of the agriculturists who eventually absorbed them, maybe representing a glimpse of a subaltern perspective within the dominant history or perhaps coloring in a faded memory of a pre-agricultural past. But we know from surviving non-agriculturalists in other parts of the world, including forager-farmers and nomadic pastoralists (taken together as foragers), that their myths and legends encompass a wholly different set of worldviews than those already well developed in the Early Bronze Age cities of Mesopotamia. Foragers frequently hold worldviews in which humans are not given to dominate the Earth but to discover how to live within it, in a relationship of balanced reciprocity. Foragers’ stories often feature episodes, for instance, in which particular animals aid, guide, antagonize, or reveal knowledge or wisdom to people; they frequently identify with or pay homage to particular animals, plants, the elements, or natural spaces. Perhaps the early behaviors of Enkidu are a Sumerian caricature of such beliefs and practices. By contrast, animals aren’t centered in the Bronze Age myths of the Fertile Crescent, but for animal-like monsters and, of course, the Serpent, who is cast as an enemy of humankind.
The Sumerians—and later inheritors of their stories—would go on to build ever larger, more socially and economically complex city-states. Their large and growing populations (primarily through raid and capture) produced increasing surpluses of food and labor to be siphoned by classes of elites, as their expansionist way of life displaced or absorbed their neighbors, human and non-human. Some two thousand years after Gilgamesh, when peoples of the Fertile Crescent were telling the story of Adam and Eve and their expulsion from Eden (Eden derives from a Sumerian word meaning plain or steppe), any inherited memory of a pre-agricultural human existence had further atrophied to a barest sketch, merely a beguiling backdrop lacking event, impetus, or any narrative of its own beyond that of its demise: a beautiful time when nothing noteworthy happened, now ended. Eden was already tame, though, and despite their nudity, so were Adam and Eve, presiding above all other creatures. Though their descent to a livelihood of agriculture is characterized as a curse, whatever came before seems merely an empty prelude to the difficult destiny that the tellers of their tale accepted they deserved to live.
Shattering Destiny
The agricultural states of the Fertile Crescent saw their civilizations grow to take over more and more land, displacing or absorbing through conquest other societies and ever larger realms of the non-human world, in a punctuated march that has never stopped. En route, they cut down their forests, salinated their soils, and decimated untold communities of life. Their towns and cities reliably collapsed. And rose anew. And collapsed again. Some to be remembered only in myths and legends; most, wholly forgotten. The soils of the Middle East have never quite recovered from this multi-millennial onslaught of serial exhaustion, which is why when we look at pictures of Iraq and Jordan, southeastern Anatolia, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, and Sinai today, we see dust, dust, and more dust, and it beggars the imagination to think this once held the Fertile Crescent. The process continues to this day, now spread across the planet and intensified as “industrial agriculture” that is extracting and diminishing the lands’ regenerative capacity faster than ever. This process will not be slowed unless and until we can deploy rediscovered and renewed modes of regenerative farming.
The essence of those stories of human destiny first birthed in Mesopotamia are still alive with us. In the manner by which mythologies have always operated and remained relevant, contemporary forces have reached back into those ancient stories, recombining and re-spinning them. Details have been strategically dropped or altered. Our interpretations and concerns have shifted: so much is still made of the curse laid upon Eve, but why no equivalent commentary on the curse flung against Adam? Today, though we may read the story, we’ve forgotten what it meant that natural bounty once surrounded us; we’ve forgotten what it meant that having to rely on food you must grow yourself could be felt as a diminishment of the human condition; we’ve forgotten that our grave error—our Original Sin—which cursed the ground and brought on suffering toil, was to see ourselves as spiritually and essentially different from the rest of creation, to see ourselves as gods.
Indeed, as the cultures who inherited those stories grew ever more powerful, conquering others or otherwise stealing their resources and labor, their worldview of paramountcy and domination would feed into colonialist and capitalist narratives, shaping our modern conceptions of Progress as human destiny. It’s difficult to imagine how we might have arrived at our present condition, had our dominant narratives centered stories that recognize kinship with creation and promoted values of reciprocity and balance within an interdependent web of living and non-living things, even an awareness of the value of human population control, as opposed to upholding injunctions to subdue and take dominion over the world and all of life, even to “go forth and multiply.”
Today we’ve gone far beyond the limits known by Gilgamesh or Adam and Eve—who, for all their special status, remained yet beholden to their gods—to now presume ourselves limitless in our ambition and potential, entitled to colonize and dominate even worlds beyond Earth as our Manifest Destiny; we readily liken ourselves to gods. This is the story we tell over and over again, in various guises across the world today, from our modern myths of superheroesand supervillains, to boardroom bickering over the world as an insensate stock of exploitable commodities, to eager articulations that technology will come to serve every transient human desire, to lunchroom chit-chat about our latest designs on the hoarding of wealth or how we might signal merit. Our modern, neoliberal, capitalist culture, built from the soil of human-centric agriculturalists’ stories—or paradigms, or presumptions, if you prefer—of humans as godlike and entitled to planetary or even cosmic dominion, leaves us beholden to no other gods, no limits in our potentials or our appetites. And it is upon this that we construct our dangerously exploitative notions of what constitutes civilization, development, and progress today.
But what if we questioned these stories at the root? What if we recognized that our belief in ourselves as spiritually separate and existentially different from the rest of life is maladaptive to human thriving in the long run? How might that change our notions of what it means to be civilized, how to pursue development and progress? For all we’ve been schooled to presume that human societies are by nature capitalist, human beings by nature purely competitive, the long run of human pre-history argues vehemently to the contrary. Even after people settled in the first permanent villages, even after they started to rely on gardens or small farms for some part of their subsistence, it still took thousands of years before their relatively egalitarian, narrowly or fluidly stratified societies were twisted into the first deeply, rigidly hierarchical city-states, and thousands more again before the advent of capitalism. Only today, our global, neoliberal, capitalist civilization has reached the apotheosis of relentless competition that, in its presumption of limitless growth, has utterly discarded the very notion of sustainability, which many previous societies had so wisely valued and practiced. Some call this progress, but I don’t believe that’s a considered judgment. Capitalism is not an inevitable aspect of human nature, nor is the fundamentally unsustainable lifestyle it has created for the elites of the Earth. It’s time to question everything that relies upon these ubiquitous presumptions.
[Part 12: Musings on the Anthropocene]
Notes:
* All quotations regarding The Epic of Gilgamesh are sourced from the Penguin Books Ltd. Penguin Classics Kindle Edition.
Earlier Essays in this Series
1 What We Talk About When We Talk About The Weather
10 On Progress as Human Destiny
Images
1. The Garden of Eden with the Creation of Eve, painted by Jan Brueghel the Younger, part of the collection of Musée des Beaux-Arts et d'Archéologie de Besançon. Public domain.
2. Clay sickle used for harvesting grain in Sumer, circa 3,000 BCE, displayed at the Field Museum. Creative Commons.
3. Bill of sale for a male slave and a building in Shuruppak, Sumer, etched in Cuneiform on a clay tablet, circa 2,600 BCE, displayed in the Louvre. Creative Commons.
4. Victory stele depicting prisoners of war in Mesopotamia, circa 2,300 BCE, displayed in the Louvre. Creative Commons.
5. Photograph of the Euphrates River and its banks, 2005, by Sergeant James McCauley. Public domain.
(This essay first appeared in The Globalist)
What explains the disappearance of erotic sculptures from Hindu temples in India?
Among the most captivating and enigmatic features of medieval Indian art is the explicit erotica on the walls of temples like the UNESCO world heritage complex at Khajuraho. However, modern Indian temples have no trace of it. In fact, most Indians today are so prudish that they feel scandalized by this imagery from their past. So what motivated it back then. And why did it disappear so completely?
Some observers presume the erotic friezes to be the artifacts of a liberal age — the age of the Kamasutra — when Indians had few hang-ups about sex and cavorted with the opposite sex easily. However, the Kamasutra, the best-known of the many secular treatises on ars erotica from mid-first millennium CE, was meant for the urban upper crust who pursued erotic pleasure as an end in itself. It advised them on sexual love, courtship and even adultery. Part epicurean, it stresses the importance of grooming, etiquette, diplomacy and even post-coital conversation. It also advocated love marriages over arranged ones. But as a secular treatise, it can at best explain erotic imagery in pleasure palaces and other private spaces. It fails to explain why it was alright to depict graphic sex and genitalia on temple walls, next to the gods. What explains that?
We often forget that early medieval religious culture in India was in fact very different to that today. Because its views are no longer current, it makes these depictions seem alien and scandalous to modern Indians. The key difference has to do with a Tantric religious substrate that thrived in the first millennium, in which sex and spirituality were deeply intertwined pursuits. The prehistoric roots of Tantra were not connected to Hindu texts like the vedas. Rather, they were nurtured by a prominent strand of subaltern folk spirituality that, from early on, valued symbols of fertility as auspicious. Such symbols, at first basic and abstract, began to appear as decorative motifs on temple doorways. Over the centuries, the symbols grew more complex and realistic, evoking the idea of fertility through images of male-female unions. These evolved from coyly amorous pairs to explicit sexual couplings.
Across India, this Tantric belief system, embraced by many sex-positive aristocrats of the age, inspired the erotic art on state-sponsored temples. Because these depictions had come from grassroots beliefs and aesthetics, the public were not shocked or scandalized by them. They saw in the depictions a sense of beauty, divine order, auspiciousness, abundance, fertility and propitiatory power. It is not a stretch to imagine that the depictions were also sources of mirth and delight. For their part, the royals who sponsored these grand temples hoped mainly to communicate a stable, harmonious vision of life — and to acquire merit, renown and legitimacy for their rule.
By late in the first millennium, the Tantric mode of worship was a mainstream part of popular religious culture. In Tantra, properly guided sex had become a path to spiritual progress and eventual liberation. The magical use of sex to propitiate the gods was a shortcut to moksha — or liberation from the cycle of birth and death — the spiritual goal of Hindu practice. The Tantric means of achieving moksha competed directly with the path advocated by orthodox Hindus. The latter required renouncing worldly temptations, cravings and physical desires. Tantra also tended to venerate goddesses, accorded higher dignity to women and opposed practices like the caste system and sati (the practice of burning widows on the funeral pyres of their deceased husbands). Not surprisingly, Tantrism clashed with the conservatism of orthodox or Brahminical Hinduism.
And this clash is also partly why the Tantric substrate waned, a fascinating story in itself. The late-first-millennium CE in India saw the rise of the mystical, self-denying “Bhakti movement,” as well as an orthodox revival led by an influential theologian, Adi Shankaracharya. The combined result was a vast swelling of the ranks of the straight-laced. Henceforth, religiosity in India grew sharply more conservative, devotional, puritanical, hierarchical and patriarchal. It marginalized both Buddhism and the sex-positive Tantric substrate. This profound shift had far-reaching effects that would impair the wider intellectual culture of India.
As Tantra receded to the fringe, where it lingers to this day, depictions of sex on temple walls also declined. Little of this style of art survived in later centuries. The Kamasutra too fell into obscurity. In parallel, the centrality of goddesses declined too — or rather, the goddesses nominally remained, but gradually became sidekicks to male gods. With Tantra’s fall, India’s religious culture changed drastically, eventually producing men like the nationalist leader Mahatma Gandhi, with his guilt-ridden denial of his sexuality and tortured struggles with desire and celibacy. Their prudery would’ve drawn amused laughter from Khajuraho’s religious leaders a thousand years ago.
This conservative turn had emerged from fault-lines and conflicts that long predated the rise of Muslim rule in Delhi, which began around 1200 CE. Of course, the Indo-Muslims and the Victorian English — no less prudish than Brahminical Hindus — helped neither the cause of Tantra, nor fairly assessed its place in the history of religious thought. India’s encounter with its sexually squeamish colonial masters further rejuvenated Hindu conservatism.
Eventually, this led us to today’s reactionary Hindu nationalists. Embodied in the ruling political party, the BJP, they support the ideology of Hindutva, which makes vapid claims about an “eternal” Hindu religion that has always been pure, chaste and sexually austere. Hindutva ideologues now rail against Valentine’s Day, demand sexual modesty from women, and even harass couples indulging in mild expressions of public displays of affection. And they do this, without irony, in the name of preserving Indian tradition! One imagines countless medieval Indians turning in their graves.
For more, see the chapter, 'The Enigma of Khajuraho', in Indians: A Brief History of a Civilization by Namit Arora.
In which Nicholas Gordon, host of the Asian Review of Books podcast, interviews me about ‘Indians’ (~40 minutes).
"We can sometimes forget that “India”—or the idea of a single unified entity—is not a very old concept. Indian history is complicated and convoluted: different societies, polities and cultures rise and fall, ebb and flow, as the political makeup of South Asia changes. Namit Arora, author of Indians: A Brief History of a Civilization, details some of these changing cultures. From the early Harappans, to the Buddhist centers of Nagarjunakonda and Nalanda, and ending at Varanasi, Arora takes his readers on a journey through South Asia’s rich and diverse history. In this interview, Namit and I talk about the many different cultures featured in his book Indians. We share the stories of some of India’s illustrious foreign visitors, and what it was like for Namit to research these lost histories."
[The tenth in a series of essays, On Climate Truth and Fiction, in which I raise questions about environmental distress, the human experience, and storytelling. It first appeared on 3 Quarks Daily. The previous part is here.]
On February 18, 2021, NASA landed Perseverance rover on the surface of Mars. Perseverance is the latest of some twenty probes that NASA has sent to bring back detailed information about our neighboring planet, beginning with the Mariner spacecraft fly-by in 1965, which took the first closeup photograph. Though blurry by today’s standards, those grainy images helped ignite widespread wonder and fantasy about space exploration, not long before Star Trek also debuted on television. By the 1970s, science-fiction storytelling was moving from the margins of pop-culture into the mainstream in film and television—and so followed generations of kids, like myself, who grew up expecting off-world adventurism and alien encounters almost as much as we anticipated the invention of video-phones and pocket computers and household robots, as our conceptual bounds for the human story were pushed ever farther outward.
And so much of our expectation has come true. Smartphones and Zoom calls and Roombas are just the most mundane examples of how our techno-fantasized future has manifested in daily life. There’s promise of even more to come, as cultural forces continuously work to realize not only our imagined technotopia of flying cars and jetpacks, but even to seek out those elusive alien encounters. Perseverance rover is, in fact, a robotic astrobiologist: its purpose on Mars is to seek out direct signs of alien life—microbial fossils, if not living microbes themselves. But even should the Martians disappoint us by their absence, information gathered by Perseverance is still intended to help us make that next “giant leap for mankind”: human colonization of Mars. What was until quite recently still generally regarded an outlandish notion seems now widely accepted as the obvious next chapter in our human Manifest Destiny. Indeed, the more we know about the unsuitability of that cold, airless, radiation-beleaguered rock, the more we seem inspired to conquer it.
Meanwhile, a rich ecosystem of high-tech wonderworks has been created here on Earth, in support of all this space adventurism: vast reservoirs of monetary funds; a steadily flowing pipeline of brilliant scientists and bold adventurers, who share the dream; massive networks of accreted infrastructure, including giant telescopes, prodigious computer resources, cutting-edge research laboratories and suppliers across countless fields of expertise, and I-don’t-even-know-what-all-else. NASA itself, Earth’s most elite astronomical research and engineering institution, is a crown jewel of human achievement, still thriving more than half a century beyond its initial impetus of the “international space race” to enter a world of international cooperation on this new frontier. Fueled by the ingenuity-oriented culture of the wealthiest nation in human history, it’s now accelerated by multi-billionaire, science-fantasist allies, like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos. Humanity appears to be progressing well along what seems our ordained path of discovery and dominion; from our present vantage, the scope of human potential can only leave one awestruck.
On the same day that Perseverance plunged its wheels into the cold Martian dust, in the same proud country that sent it there, millions of people were gripped in a struggle for bare survival. A blast of polar air had plunged southward across much of North America and for several days the temperatures barely broke above freezing. As the southern state of Texas was beset by these Earthly temperature extremes—warmer than any night on Mars—its energy infrastructure failed. Freezing gas lines and a cascade of other failures shut off power and deprived millions of homes of heat and cooking facilities for days. A water treatment plant quit, prompting instructions for people to boil city water before drinking it—though how people without power were to accomplish this went unsaid. In any case, water pipes ruptured in many households, leaving some with no water supply at all, only ice frozen along ceilings, walls, and floors. Shops remained closed or out of stock of essential supplies, as people ran out of food. Hundreds of people died, some directly due to cold exposure, some in car crashes on the icy roads, some as a result of desperate attempts to warm themselves by idling their car engines or lighting kerosene cookstoves without adequate ventilation. The people of the planet’s wealthiest, most technologically innovative society were left without the resources or the know-how to withstand conditions that their ancestors would have considered quite ordinary.
Cold and snow aren’t unheard of in Texas even in living memory; Texans would have faced a cold snap of similar intensity about once a decade, until they reduced in frequency since the 1990s. Perhaps the oddest thing about that spike of frigid weather in Texas is that, on the same winter day, climate change caused by global warming—a direct consequence of our dominant models of prosperity and development, underwritten by the mass burning of fossil fuels—brought colder temperatures to Dallas, Texas than to Anchorage, Alaska, where the temperature was unseasonably warm. And the successful touchdown of Perseverance rover on Mars, as people froze to death in the American southland, threw into sharp relief the meanders and contradictions in our story of Progress.
Most readers of this essay will share in the contemporary narrative of Human Progress. How far we’ve come from those apocryphal days when life was “nasty, brutish, and short.” How certainly we’ve rescued ourselves from Nature’s red tooth and claw. How rationally we’ve devised our shared social contract. And how inevitably all this was achieved by the Divine Spark of our human ingenuity, guided in the modern age by the Invisible Hand of the Market. In retelling this story, the neoliberal optimism industry of today frequently reminds us that life for most people is better now than it’s ever been: Levels of abject poverty have plummeted over the past fifty years. The ranks of middle-income earners have swelled, globally. Life expectancy, literacy, access to clean water, healthcare, security, democratic voice—all have steadily gained ground.
But it bears mentioning that in enumerating all these triumphs of our modern world, the standard for comparison never stretches back more than four or five thousand years, and never looks beyond statist societies. But this frame of reference, from urban centers during the mid-Holocene up through the world of about seventy years ago, was, arguably, the deepest nadir of our collective human experience, when famine, plague, war, bondage, and tyranny—all of which ills are advanced by the conditions created in agriculturalist/industrialist urban societies, and were previously only narrowly known—were at or near their apex, as monarchical/oligarchical models of civilization were advancing across the globe. By these measures, any other chapter of the human story may shine in contrast, but we never look beyond for comparisons of wellbeing. It’s almost as though the vast expanse of human prehistory, through which we flourished for nearly the whole of our time on Earth, just doesn’t count. We presume our pre-urban ancestors were at best miserable, squinting through the fog of their cramped imaginations, tragically having not yet worked out the grandness of our human destiny. We scoff gently at their shortsightedness. How is it that they were so embarrassingly slow to recognize their own potential and get on with the program of more efficiently dominating the environment and pulling it into the service of the human development project? We find it a wonder that it could take some three-hundred thousand years to move on from their brutal, wasted lives spent cowering in caves to finally get on with the right business of corralling commoners into ploughing the land and serving bread to the priests—a mere first step in the long march of Human Progress. Most of us accept this characterization of our benighted prehistoric experience without question, even though, on the face of it, it makes little evolutionary sense.
The standard hagiographies of the present status quo also generally neglect to mention that it was nothing other than the mass burning of fossil fuels and use of their associated petrochemicals that finally raised us up from the socioeconomic nadir of the mid- to late-Holocene urbanites and created the relative ease and plenty that’s increased for most people over the past seventy years, during the Anthropocene. Fossil fuels have provided humanity with an energy surplus that takes on the heaviest burdens of labor across all fields of endeavor, thereby lifting the yoke of bondage and drudgery from billions—from enslaved peoples forced into farmwork to “housewives” grinding grain and pounding laundry. By enabling the mechanization and industrialization of manufacturing and mining, fossil fuels also boosted the extraction and use of all other raw materials. Crude oil itself supplied an entirely new class of chemicals, cheap raw materials from which to generate novel synthetic products—plastics, paints, polyester, asphalt, industrial solvents, lubricants, fillers, dyes… and more—for previously unimagined uses at unthinkable volumes of scale. Petrochemical products have also massively spiked agricultural crop yields through their generous application as fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides—aka, the Green Revolution, or modern industrial farming. Indeed, fossil fuels and their associated materials are the very essence of what we like to call Progress; without them, there would be no Perseverance rover, NASA, giant telescopes, Star Trek television series, or much of anything else we daily encounter in our modern lives.
And so, with similarly conspicuous silence, the cheerleaders of Progress always fail to tally its costs, which have accrued in the form of catastrophic biodiversity loss; global warming; multiple forms of pollution at overwhelming scales in the air, sea, and soil; and the perturbation of planetary carbon, oxygen, and nitrogen cycles leading to the fundamental destabilization of Earth’s only human life-support system. All of these outcomes are every bit as real and significant as the happier statistics we usually hear repeated, and produced by precisely the same engine we call Progress. Yet, despite the shallowness of its narrative, the celebratory story of Progress has only grown more pervasive, circumscribing our field of vision, making it perhaps one of the most seductively powerful stories ever told.
It bears asking what it is we’re actually presuming, when we build our plans and policies and future dreams on the firmament of this heady story. What are we really assessing, when we speak of Progress? In describing it, we typically cite advances in medicine, communications, education, provision of excess food and energy, and the spread of neoliberal economies and political systems. Progress seems to refer to some combination of the invention of new technologies, plus our collective accumulation of material wealth (stuff) and particular forms of knowledge.
However, we conveniently forget its shadows. While many of us revel in technology and consumption (which largely caters to needs and fancies continuously inflated by capitalism to ensure its own survival), in doing so, we also leave most people behind, unable to participate in the same plenty. For the same technologies and consumption also ceaselessly fuel new wants and status anxieties. They have accelerated social change and dislocation, creating new winners and losers across ever-renewing digital and socioeconomic divides, contributing to the perilous fracturing of social cohesion and individual mental health. Hyper-production of material excess and disposable goods have reduced cultural value systems to algorithmic exercises in pandering to the basest human impulses. Hyper-consumption of cheaply pleasing foodstuffs has also led to new forms of malnutrition and lifestyle diseases. And while we enthusiastically direct our ingenuity toward inhabiting alien worlds, we have failed utterly to be competent stewards of the world we belong to. While we invest in inventing complex and expensive technologies to support the most essential needs of human life in off-world contexts—air, water, food, and shielding from cosmic radiation—we’ve not succeeded in adequately maintaining the clean air, water, and food that the Earth system once provided us nearly for free; we’ve even come perilously close to disabling the layer of atmospheric ozone that protects us from radiation. While we glorify our knowledge and ability, commitment and potential, we systematically diminish the plenitude, capacity, and integrity of living systems on Earth. While we exercise greater power over our planetary systems, we demonstrate ever more egregiously that we lack the wisdom to use it prudently.
None of these concomitant and no less relevant aspects of the human story square at all with our celebrated narratives of Progress. Is Progress even meaningfully real? And if it is real, what is—or could be, or should be—its aim?
The Perils of Progress
Could it be that progress actually has a limit, beyond which it becomes self-defeating? (It may sound preposterous to our technotopia-tuned ears, but systems theorists have shown that complexity, itself, may be a self-limiting feature of systems that overexploit their resources. And since, I think, it’s fair to suggest that there’s a strong correlation between technological intensity and social complexity, it’s perhaps reasonable to wonder if this might play a role in our present global predicament.) Might we even be completely wrongheaded about what, in fact, constitutes meaningful progress?
Consider, for example, two emblematic or foundational concepts embedded within our idea of Progress: growth and efficiency. Both of these, as commonly understood, are unquestioningly taken as markers of Progress. And yet both are also known to grease the tracks leading to a breakdown of the biosphere. If the biosphere breaks down, so too will any human system residing within it, meaning that both growth and efficiency have actually proven to be engines of disaster every bit as much as they are what we perceive as Progress.
In our neoliberal world, growth—especially economic growth—is touted as the cure for all ills. And there is a religious blindness surrounding the absurdity of this idea. It has become taboo to remind ourselves of the obvious fact that natural limits do exist for all functioning systems—let alone to point out that humans have, in fact, exceeded the natural limits of ours, along many parameters. Literally nothing grows forever. Nothing can grow or expand forever, least of all living systems, like organisms or populations—including societies and their economies.
Belief in the eternal growth of economies by any means presumes that raw materials are endlessly renewable and that pollution dissipates at least at the rate of economic growth. There are those who, in a remarkable feat of magical thinking, imagine that economic growth can be “decoupled” from resources and waste products, but nothing in the human experience has suggested this is remotely possible. How does a capitalist economy grow, if it’s not by consuming more? And what is to be consumed but resources? “Decoupling” is a fantasy, even if we shouldn’t call it that when it’s discussed in the halls of the academe or at the tables of global power brokers.
It was pointed out more than a century ago that increasing efficiency in the use of a particular resource doesn’t decreaseour dependency upon the resource, but rather increases the demand for it, a phenomenon referred to as Jevon’s Paradox. Although, in a capitalist system, where the whole point and purpose is to extract and consume more and then more and then some more—to perpetually grow—it doesn’t seem to me the least bit paradoxical; it seems to follow quite straightforwardly from the inherent logic of capitalism and its demands for growth.
And then there is the unfortunate phenomenon that technological solutions to perceived problems often generate more problems than they solve. The effects of those follow-on problems are usually delayed by sufficient time-lags, thus offloaded onto later generations, or simply dumped onto poor people, such that the emergent problems might be unforeseen or willfully ignored by those endorsing the new technology. This phenomenon, sometimes called the progress trap, seems to occur very markedly wherever technology is employed as a means to override natural limits on the sustainable extraction of a resource—such as fish we like to eat or the regenerative capacity of a landscape—or wherever technological innovation is pursued primarily in the service of near-term enrichment by a small group of actors and, in any case, without regard to the real costs borne by others, human and non-human, including despoliation of the commons.
Perhaps the most vivid example of attempts to override natural limits is seen in the advent of increasingly intensive farming technologies. All over the world, non-agricultural* peoples, including forager-farmers, had mastered an understanding of their environments and devised how to work sustainably within their cycles of regeneration. Combining various modes of nomadism, rationing, fallowing, intercropping, pruning with fire, composting/manuring, hunting/fishing/gathering proscriptions, human population regulation, and other means of stewardship of their living environment predicated on an understanding of active reciprocity with the land and its plants and animals, many societies had innovated techniques to increase their environment’s capacity to support human flourishing up to its sustainable limits. But wherever people lost their perspective of humanity beholden to a greater Earth system of which they’re a part, wherever they lost their value for the reciprocity inherent in that relationship, they might begin to extract without concern for natural limits or long-term consequences and enter a progress trap. They counted themselves successful as they extracted surpluses and their population swelled. But a growing population meant that last year’s surplus became this year’s want. They found themselves committed to more intensive extraction, decade upon decade, requiring continuously evolving technologies and greater inputs of energy (manual, animal, fossil) to wrest from their exhausted land more than it could naturally produce and sometimes less than what they had put in. If their only answer was to further intensify farming (as we’ve done over the past several thousand years across the planet), they found themselves in a feedback loop spiraling toward devastation.
As for the other road to progress traps, it’s not news that neoliberal capitalist incentives have created a disastrous treadmill of innovation and social and environmental despoliation—creating far larger and more complex problems than the cutting edge technologies can solve—mostly to enrich a global elite. We see it in the fracturing of civic life resulting from the disorienting technological disruptions of recent decades, to the distortion of planetary geochemical cycles resulting from industrial farming. It feels like we’re in a race to the bottom of the well of human anxieties and planetary living conditions. The Bitcoin or NFT-art “gold rush” that heavily contributes to global warming in order to pile a few bucks in the virtual purses of a handful of people is but one outrageous example of warped incentives. Even though the self-regarding captains of industry like to keep reminding us that they’re inspired in their work of innovation to “make the world a better place,” I trust none of us here is still falling for that line. And because all the incentives of capitalism—fundamentally predicated on annexing or despoiling separate parts of the Earth system in order to feed its growth imperative—ultimately work directly against the common wellbeing of humans and Earth’s life-supporting biome, I am not convinced that any “solution” to our current environmental crises that arises through capitalist mechanisms or worldviews will prove to be any long-term solution at all, but merely yet another progress trap—at best a series of stopgap, stepwise measures to be taken until we can no longer escape transformative civilizational transitions. If we’re to believe technical solutions arising from market incentives—electric cars or disposable algal plastics or hydrogen-powered airplanes—are the ultimate vision for a sustainable future, the onus of persuasion is upon the champions of capitalist technological solutionism—such as Bill Gates and Elon Musk—to make the case that their latest pet ideas will surely prove an exception to human history.
But knowing these things hasn’t undermined our faith in the story of Progress, certainly not to the point of discrediting it from the mainstream, nor even to the point of discrediting it in most of the minds of those who can hold all of these ideas at once. That is the power of stories. It takes effort to pierce the substance of a deeply entrenched story and earnestly examine what lies beyond, even when—sometimes, especially when—we already have some inkling what other true stories are lurking out there.
Today we know how the planets move, what the stars are made of, and even something of what exists in between them. From the depths of space to the depths of the oceans to the depths of time, we have delved and discovered the outlines of how we came to be here, human beings on this rocky, blue-green, living planet. We’ve watched the molecular apparatuses of living cells, animated only by life itself, go about the work of creation, molecule-by-molecule, under our microscopic gaze. This knowledge—like all knowledge—can enrich us. It can generate wonder and open new doors of understanding into ourselves, how we might live, how we might create meaning.
But the reality is that for all we’ve learned and all we know, we have literally forgotten the most essential thing of all: we have forgotten how to live on this Earth. I mean this in a literal, existential, and ecological sense. I mean that we have lost precious knowledge and wisdom that once sustained our wellbeing, and without it we are destroying the biome that maintains us, rendering the Earth unsuitable for human thriving. And our destruction of our own home is tied directly to the development, expansion, and acceleration of what we today commonly think of as civilization, development, and progress.
But our story of Human Progress is not the only one we’ve always told ourselves. It was invented, through uncountable, incrementally altered repetitions, beginning in a particular time and place. From there, it took over the world. The good news is it still isn’t the only story we have to tell. And, like all stories, it can be revised with new understandings.
[Part 11, Of Gods and Men and Human Destiny]
Notes:
* Agricultural, throughout, refers to societies that are effectively 100% dependent upon farmed plant and animal foods. This is in contrast to the many societies that have been closer to 50% or less dependent upon farmed foods, with foraged foods making up the bulk of their subsistence; here, such societies are included among foragers, including forager-farmers. It should also be noted that in many instances, foragers actively propagate and nurture their preferred plants and animals in “the wild”—within the plants’ or animals’ default forest or swamp environments, for instance, rather than in artificially prepared fields or pens—which is a form of foraging that arguably crosses into low-intensity gardening and pastoralism, but isn’t farming.
Earlier Essays in this Series
1 What We Talk About When We Talk About The Weather
Images
1. An artist's drawing of the touchdown of Perseverance rover on Mars. NASA, public domain.
2. A chart showing the different fractions of crude oil and some of their uses. The Oil Drum.
3. A chart showing the 9 planetary boundaries that can't be breached to maintain sustainability, according to a 2009 Nature paper by Johan Rockström, updated for 2015. At least 3 of them are known to have been breached, already; where we stand on several others remains under investigation.
I’m the sort who dreads even the thought of appearing on live broadcasts with AMA style audience Qs, but I quite enjoyed my conversation on Indians with Cyrus Broacha, the smart, funny, inimitable host of the podcast Cyrus Says. Do listen! (Apple, Google, Spotify, Adori, etc.)
What is the point of it all, asks Herbert Fingarette, a philosopher, in this moving reflection on life and death. He "once argued that there was no reason to fear death. At 97, his own mortality began to haunt him, and he had to rethink everything." (18 mins)
(I think unfavorable reviews of books are at least of two kinds: (1) Unfavorable for the right reasons, which can be humbling and provide opportunities for reflection to the author; (2) Unfavorable for the wrong reasons, rooted in the reviewer’s misreading, willful ignorance or prejudices. Given how propagandized popular history has become in the age of Hindutva, I expect many reviews of the second kind, which are usually best disregarded. However, a recent mixed review in Biblio includes critiques of the second kind from Harish Trivedi, a scholar of postcolonialism. It bugged me enough to compel the response below, to also appear in the next issue of Biblio.)
As readers, we expect book reviewers to draw out the major arguments in new books. But often, reviewers end up revealing much about themselves, as does Harish Trivedi, a scholar of postcolonialism and translation studies, in his recent review of my book, Indians: A Brief History of a Civilization. Appearing in Biblio (January–March 2021, p. 9), his review reveals troubling intellectual positions and attitudes, manifest in his misreading, falsification and clouding of my arguments. So I feel compelled to respond.
Trivedi complains that ‘Few books which are mainly about pre-Muslim India (for the Great Mughals too are largely absent here) have Hinduism struggling so hard for space and representation as in this one.’ This nearly made me fall out of my chair. How had he failed to notice that besides a chapter on the Harappans, and three mostly about Buddhism, the remaining seven are mostly about Hinduism and Hindus (as these terms are now understood)? I wondered: What lay behind his anxiety about my apparently inadequate coverage of Hinduism?
Some clues soon emerge. Though he sees Indians as ‘mainly about pre-Muslim India’ (untrue; over a third of the book spans the second millennium), he alleges that ‘Arora seems to believe that the Muslims in India could do no wrong.’ This struck me as a surprising, sweeping and unfair charge. Having ignored my animus for folks like Mahmud of Ghazni, Bhaktiar Khilji and Aurangzeb, he attempts to offer some examples to substantiate his reading. Let’s examine them.
First, he writes, ‘Thus, when Ibn Battuta reports that “the Muslims have mutilated” the idols at Khajuraho, [Arora] says that no such mutilation is now “evident”’. That’s head-scratching logic. Just because I cast doubt on a claim of mutilation (as many have done), does that mean I believe that Muslims could do no wrong? Early travelers often erred or recorded hearsay. One wonders why Trivedi is so eager to blindly accept Battuta’s account, without even considering the actual evidence from the temples.
Second, Trivedi distorts my argument to say: ‘[Arora] refuses to credit Robert Sewell’s statement that the empire of Vijayanagar was “a Hindu bulwark against Muslim conquests” (p 207), though it clearly remained for a couple of centuries the only major Hindu kingdom in the Deccan.’ What I’ve ‘refused to credit’ is Sewell’s simplistic view of a Hindu–Muslim equation in the Deccan. Reams of historical sources and current scholarship reject both the colonial and Hindutva characterization of Vijayanagar kings as self-conscious defenders of Hinduism—or ‘saviors of the south’ [Sewell]—against Islam. The Deccan’s shifting alliances, actual wars, composition of the armies, internal dynamics, etc. make it clear that ‘The kings of Vijayanagar were not mainly defending Hinduism against Islam; they were mainly defending their kingdom against other kingdoms, both Muslim and Hindu.’ But Trivedi’s objection suggests that he sees this past primarily in sectarian terms.
Third, Trivedi complains: ‘As for the matter of Aurangzeb’s destruction of Hindu temples in Varanasi, Arora relegates it to his Endnotes.’ This is plainly false. I discuss temple destructions under both Shah Jahan and Aurangzeb (pp. 235–237) and place only the details of specific desecrations in the endnotes, which is what that section is for. He also smells a rat in my placement of the Varanasi chapter at the end. It escapes him that since Varanasi is the only continuously living city I explore, it can be placed anywhere in the book’s timeline, depending on my material.
Fourth, and no less tellingly, Trivedi seems convinced that Muslims caused the demise of Buddhism in India—a position long outside credible scholarship. This is despite all the evidence I provide on how Buddhism had already begun its decline in the seventh century and why it had vanished in all but a few pockets in Eastern India by late tenth century. Modern scholarship has shown that Ambedkar, speaking generations ago, erred on this topic but Trivedi still hangs onto those superseded ideas, even while, I suspect, he feels little affinity for the Ambedkar who said subversive things about caste or Brahminism.
I welcome reasoned critiques of my work but this wasn’t one of them. Trivedi’s review indicates neither honest differences of opinion, nor simple ignorance, nor just a little disdain for contemporary scholarship in history. It raises awkward questions about his social vision and politics. His review was particularly disappointing because the one time I had met him, he struck me as a charming, erudite and witty man. Oddly, despite his reservations, he still seems to have liked Indians enough to conclude that ‘One can hardly wait for his next book.’ I thank him for his engagement and hope he’ll bring a more open mind to my next book.
(Addendum: Screenshot from Biblio below)
[The ninth in a series of essays, On Climate Truth and Fiction, in which I raise questions about environmental distress, the human experience, and storytelling. It first appeared on 3 Quarks Daily. The previous part is here.]
—Change. Resilience. Where do we start? I’ve got no idea. What happens after this? Listen! The answer is here!—
These words, splashed on posters, jumped out at me from images sent by a friend. The posters were part of an exhibition called We Need To Talk About Fire, hosted at an artists’ gallery along the Nowra River, about halfway between Sydney and Canberra. The Nowra River region had been hard-hit by the catastrophic Australian bushfires of 2019–20, following an unprecedented drought. Fire season in Australia is worsening as the planet warms, just as it is in the western United States, the Amazon, and Siberia. And the 2019–20 Australian season was particularly horrific, igniting a follow-on spate of depression and suicides in the area. What struck me about these posters was the raw simplicity of their messages, which ranged from forceful platitudes to agonized queries.
In their talk about these bushfires of extraordinary fury, worsened by climate change, there’s no mention of technical solutions. No demand for new wind farms or lowered carbon intensity. Instead, the posters surface what so often gets buried beneath the statistics, acronyms, and cost-benefit analyses common in our dialogs on climate and environment. They voice the thoughts of people who narrowly escaped the flames as the sky burned. People who lost pieces of their lives in an incomprehensible inferno—loved ones or homes or a quietude of mind. For me, the posters recalled the millions more, elsewhere, who might also be expressing similar feelings: Survivors of entire towns leveled by fire in the western United States, from Paradise, California in 2018, to the several communities of Detroit, Blue River, Vida, Phoenix, and Talent, Oregon in 2020. Survivors of back-to-back typhoons Kenneth and Idai, the two most powerfulcyclones ever to strike Mozambique, which hit within six weeks of one another, in March and April of 2019, fueled by rising sea surface temperatures. Survivors of typhoon Goni, the strongest recorded cyclone ever to make landfall anywhere, which hit the Philippines just days after typhoon Molave had hammered the same region, during the Covid-19 pandemic in October and November of 2020. Others too, for whom the damages and dangers of our rapidly changing planet must already feel immediate, existential, and relentless, eclipsing hopes for a return to “normalcy.”
I’m thus far fortunate to not have lived through traumatizing weather disasters. Still I felt I recognized something in those posters that talked about fire. Their words echo within my own chasms of dread, as I come to appreciate more keenly the depth, breadth, and scope of our planetary and civilizational predicament. In dwelling on these Earth-shattering matters, it seems to me, so much of what you want to imagine you know gets stripped away. You are gripped, at times, by an acute sense of disorientation, something akin to an experience I described at the start of this series, of a time I got lost in a drowning tropical deluge: alone in the dark, no light from any quarter, no solid substance in my grip, no trust in what might be real. And before you can discover what to do about such a dislocation—what new story might provide a thread for you to find your way—the raw and urgent formulations are all that’s left: Change. Resilience. Where do we start? I’ve got no idea. What happens after this? Listen! The answer is here!
Every natural disaster is surely agonizing and disorienting. There have always been survivors of floods and earthquakes shaking their heads on the evening news, stoic as they vow to rebuild. But in the context of irreversible planetary change, of mounting and overlapping disasters—flood, fire, drought, derecho, pandemic, hurricane, avalanche—striking year after year, sometimes month after month, within the radius of one’s personal awareness and attachments, I wonder if more survivors may be feeling that it’s not just a matter of rebuilding what was lost. That the loss far exceeds the immediate calamity. That their baseline presumptions of stability may no longer be valid. That perhaps everything is not going to be alright and they will never be returning home.
So too with the survivors of slower environmental catastrophes, whose livelihoods have dried up over the past two or three decades, as agriculture falters in Central America, western Asia, Australia. As fish catches plummet and the land sinks along Indian Ocean coastlines, or on Pacific islands like the Carteret atoll and Kiribati. The Carteret Islanders, for one, already know they must completely abandon their ancestral homeland, where dying coral reefs, overfishing by international commercial vessels, and rising seas have incapacitated their once idyllic atoll, rendering it now uninhabitable (those who remain there today are dependent upon food shipped from Bougainville, the nearest island nation, over fifty miles distant). Their relocation, most of them to Bougainville, is likely to be a death blow to the Carteret Islanders’ once self-sufficient and peaceable way of life. Their traditions of power sharing, their egalitarian economy, kinship ties and mutual obligations, skillsets and aesthetics, their very worldview was intimately tied to the landscape they had inhabited and the livelihood they had practiced for hundreds of years; it’s not clear how these cultural features will morph as they’re ported into a materially new world with new landscapes, settlement patterns, foods, livelihoods and leisure, outside influences, novel desires, and an unimagined vulnerability to poverty.
Sometimes dubbed the world’s first climate refugees, Carteret Islanders number only a couple thousand. But they will be followed in their fate by the hundred-thousand people of Kiribati, who will suffer a similar magnitude of loss. So too the Marshallese. Hundreds of thousands of refugees will accrue from the small island countries alone. Entire sustainably operating societies summarily displaced through no fault of their own, their collective and individual futures stolen from them because we, in the “developed world,” were told we could—we should!—have as much “stuff” as our hearts desired, that the Earth would provide without limit, and we wanted what we wanted.
And then there are those along the eastern seaboard of the USA, millions living near low-lying shorelines, whose future stability is also uncertain. There are towns like Cameron and Creole, Louisiana, hit by five hurricanes since 2005—three of them in 2020—where more and more residents are giving up on rebuilding, opting to migrate instead. In Alaska, thousands of Indigenous people live in villages that are sinking as the permafrost thaws and the sea climbs. Living in the US, one might expect that these people will find some sort of protection. But while the wealthiest may have insurance, insurance schemes are faltering and the non-wealthy majority are unlikely to receive any restitution for lost land or plummeting home values. And what can compensate for the abandonment of multi-generational landscapes or communities and social networks that have been dispersed? For Indigenous Alaskans, their villages on the sea are essential to their way of life. There was once a hope the government could help reconstitute their villages on more solid ground. But when moving an Arctic village of four hundred people was found to cost about four hundred million USD, the idea was abandoned.
The Next Great Human Migration
Humans are a migratory creature, by nature. Our time on Earth once saw families and whole communities roaming irrepressibly across open savannas, leaning hard into the blowing tundra, scaling snowy mountains and crossing jagged ranges, fording dense marshlands, even sailing edgeless expanses of ocean. For nearly three hundred thousand years of the human story, our ancestors were always on the move. They walked and walked. Ceaselessly. Until only a few thousand years ago—like yesterday, on an evolutionary timescale—when the stable Holocene climate and rising human population densities prompted the first settlements. Viewed against the long past, this new fashion of unbudging sedentism is anomalous human behavior.
But territorially defined nation-states abhor nomadism. So, during the centuries of European colonial expansion, the colonial powers did everything they could to destroy the lifestyles of nomadic peoples, forcing them to settle and work as laborers, through coercion and indoctrination. Increasing settlement, entrenching patriarchies, and the spread of the growth economy, aided by improved urban hygiene, facilitated human overpopulation to the point where there remain no more open lands to buffer migrations or absorb human displacements. In a very short period of time, we’ve built and ossified a world in which migration is utterly disruptive to how we live—to our politics, identities, social order. The disruption is felt by both the migrants, who lose everything, and by those asked to take them in, who fear the changes or the competition the newcomers will bring. Given the unfolding planetary changes, this is an unfortunate position we’ve backed ourselves into. Because people will be migrating once again in larger proportions.
According to data from the UN, the number of people who have been forcibly displaced from their homes from all causes has been steeply on the rise since 2012, increasing from forty-three to over seventy-nine million in 2019—that’s already over one percent of the people on the planet. A third of those are children. Of these, the vast majority were directly displaced by disasters, especially extreme weather events, based on data by the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre of the Norwegian Refugee Council (IDMC). As people migrate to flee disaster, ethnic tensions are often inflamed, weakening economic and social institutions and sparking conflicts that displace millions more. Growing numbers of displaced people, mounting hunger, and rising sociopolitical conflict each exacerbate the other in a vicious cycle, so that displaced people are accruing faster than they can be rehabilitated.
In the years ahead, these numbers will rise further with the frequency and severity of disasters, overwhelming the capacity of humanitarian organizations. What happens when there are not just a hundred thousand people leaving barren farms and the ensuing local violence to gather at the southern border of the United States, but a million? When five million flee the killing heat of Western Asia for Eastern Europe? Or try to outrun the expanding Sahara Desert by crossing into Southern Europe—from there to Central and Northern Europe? When fifty million north Indians, Pakistanis, and Bangladeshis disperse in search of water, after their major river systems, fed by Himalayan glaciers, fade into streams? When a hundred million Southeast Asians abandon their coastal zones, their lands inundated by salt, their seas emptied of fish, their cities submerging? The UN High Commission for Refugees has stated that two hundred and fifty million climate refugees by 2050 is a conservative estimate; the UN International Organization for Migration cites estimates ranging as high as a billion people on the move by midcentury, depending on just how poorly things play out. Such displacements are far too big to be contained within national borders or answered with temporary aid. States will collapse; borders will get redrawn; other nations and communities will be called upon to provide support and make space to accommodate the desperate. And while such migrations won’t just erupt in a flash-mob one fine evening, it will behoove us to figure helpful responses now, as the problem relatively quietly accrues.
Under even the most optimistic scenarios, the numbers of people needing to relocate over the coming decades are bound to fracture our shallow notions of statehood and borders, let alone the governance of major cities where rural and small-town migrants will congregate. If we don’t find a way to accept and humanely manage mass migrations, they will shatter our very humanity too. The West already faced a great humanitarian challenge in 2015, when a million of those fleeing war in Syria sought refuge in Western nations, where their desperation stoked ethnic hatreds. Since then, we’ve seen the flimsy boats from North Africa, carrying refugees from across the Global South, capsize in the Mediterranean or get turned away at Italian ports. We’ve seen the deployment of US troops to the US-Mexican border where Central American children were caged like animals. All of these horrors will become memories of a simpler time, as pulses of impoverished people abandon desiccated fields or flee contests over water, sinking coastal zones, and lethally hot regions of the low latitudes, their fates wholly uncertain.
We might conceive of this as a new era of human migration, at a scale not seen in thousands of years, undertaken in a world no longer accommodating of it. It’s difficult not to imagine great waves of humanity on the move, pressing up against militarized borders possibly to be gunned down, turned away, or cast into refugee encampments. The tumbled and drowned refugees, the distressed camps, the caged children—these represent just a glimpse of the migrant tragedies yet to come. It’s in this context that I wonder at what point mass migrations might find the tipping point that upends our current geopolitical organization, or even our present globalized civilization.
Climatic and ecological breakdown is—above all—a humanitarian crisis. It’s about people losing their lands, their livelihoods, their communities and social support networks, their sense of security, their identities, their dreams for their future, their cultural and material inheritances, their lives. It is a matter of the profoundest upheaval, of change and resilience, of seeking answers as people ask, What happens after this? Our challenge is to protect people, especially the most vulnerable. If we’re approaching the problem humanely, those are the foundational matters that should lead—rather than merely result from—any technological fixes we allow to guide our politics. And yet, today there isn’t any legal recognition of a “climate refugee,” let alone a refugee from depleted fisheries or poisoned soils. Yet these matters should be a part of our conversations on environmental justice and climate change, no less than carbon taxes, battery technologies, and Green New Deals.
It’s often remarked that the ecological crises presently besetting the planet are primarily a problem for no one else but human beings. The Earth and its biome have undergone many phases, contractions, regrowths, altered states during its billions of years, and will continue to do so without us. All our present concern for the planet is premised upon maintaining the planetary status quo of the previous few thousand years and the continuance of the global industrial civilization we’ve built. But if we recognize that the way we presently live is unsustainable—and within sight of its own demise—that clinging to the status quo will only increase human suffering in the decades to come, what new incarnations of human civilization might we discover? Knowing everything we know of all the many social arrangements we humans have had, how might we embrace migration as a fundamental piece of civilizational adaptation for the future? If we are truly haunted by the specter of children in cages, if we are sincere in our concern for desperate people arriving on boats, in “caravans,” in the airless cargo holds of trucks, if we are worried about the chaos and conflict that can erupt when too many of us are left to wander in distress, then we cannot allow our respective governments to ignore the issue of mass migrations in addressing international climate negotiations and preparedness. And those of us in the climatically better-situated and wealthier nations must ready ourselves to take the migrants in.
[Part 10: On Progress as Human Destiny]
Earlier Essays in this Series
1 What We Talk About When We Talk About The Weather
Images
1. An image of some of the posters featured in Spark A Reaction, Wendy Murray and Shoalhaven Community, 2020 (Installation image in Bundanon Homestead). Photo by Suneeta Peres da Costa.
2. A graph showing the recently rising number of displaced persons from all causes, worldwide, from the UNHCR report, "Global Trends: Forced Displacement 2019".
3. A graph showing that disasters cause far more displacements than conflict, from the IDMC report, "GRID 2020: Global Report on Internal Displacement". The especially large spike in 2010 is primarily due to extreme flooding in China and Pakistan during that year, which displaced 26 million in those two countries, alone.
4. Syrian and Iraqi refugees arrive by boat in Lesvos, Greece, in 2015, where they're met by Spanish volunteers to help them. Image by Ggia. Creative Commons.
I spoke about Indians in an online lecture, my first one based on the new book (1:08 hr). Hosted by Avid Learning and supported by the Bangalore Lit Fest, I delivered it on 25 Feb to listeners on Zoom (occasional choppy audio). If history or Indians interest you, check it out.
[The eighth in a series of essays, On Climate Truth and Fiction, in which I raise questions about environmental distress, the human experience, and storytelling. It first appeared on 3 Quarks Daily. The previous part is here.]
In the late fifteenth century, European seafarers began searching for what they called the “Northwest Passage,” a fabled route across the Arctic Ocean, which would allow them to sail northward from Europe directly into the Pacific in search of fortune. But the Arctic of their time, during the so-called Little Ice Age of the fourteenth to mid-nineteenth centuries, was covered by thick, impenetrable sheets of ice and densely packed icebergs. Nor had they any reasonable expectation that the great mass of ice would soon melt away. That they imagined finding a reliably navigable route through a polar sea seems to me a case of wishful thinking, a folly upon which scores of lives and fortunes were staked and lost, as so many adventurers attempted crossings, only to flounder and often die upon the ice.
But now that the Arctic sea ice is melting away, the Northwest Passage has become real in a way the adventurers of old could not have dreamed. Today, nations encircling the Arctic Ocean jockey for control of its waters and territorial rights to newly exposed northern continental shelves, which promise to be full of oil and gas. What had been a deadly fantasy is now a luxury cruise destination flaunting an experience of rare wonder, including opportunities to watch polar bears on the hunt. “A journey north of the Arctic Circle is incomplete without observing these powerful beasts in the wild,” entices the Silversea cruises website, with nary a note about the bears’ existence being threatened by the very disintegration of their icy habitat that makes this wondrous cruise possible. Meanwhile, in China, the emergent northern sea routes have been dubbed the Polar Silk Road, projecting a powerful symbol of their past wealth and influence onto an unprecedented reality.
By now, we’re all aware that the planet is profoundly changing around us: angrier weather, retreating glaciers, flaming forests, bleaching coral reefs, starving polar bears, disappearing bees. Yet how blithely we go on making plans, as though the future will follow as neatly and predictably from today, as today did from yesterday. From buying a new beachside home to booking a cabin in the redwoods a year in advance, the ongoing planetary changes apparently figure little in the plans so many people make. It seems I regularly read articles in which mainstream economists make predictions that entirely disregard the changing climate and collapsing biodiversity, as though these concerns lie beyond our economies. Even governments and corporations who seek to profit from changes like the opening of the Arctic Ocean often presume themselves the drivers of “disruption,” creating new market opportunities in an otherwise stable or predictable world. They don’t seem to recognize that the true nature of what’s upon us might just be greater than they imagine and far more consequential.
Yet the visible changes we already notice in the world are merely harbingers of deeper and more far-reaching changes we don’t yet see—and even changes we might see but don’t pay much attention to. These changes, visible and invisible, will drive further changes; some we might try to predict, but others we won’t—especially those resulting from causes we’re not tracking, including the unknown unknowns.
Canaries in a Coal Mine
One evening some years ago, I noticed that something about our back patio light looked… unnatural, though I couldn’t say just what about it was odd. Only weeks later did it hit me: the light was absolutely denuded of any cloud of insects that should have been swarming irritatingly around it. Indeed, I don’t remember the last time I saw a moth in or near our home. In the years since I’ve settled in the National Capital Region of India, moths seem to have disappeared from our neighborhood. Gone are the days of periodically cleaning out dead bugs from the light fixtures. Geckos, who used to peek down at us from somewhere near the ceiling or behind wall hangings, are no longer seen or heard. Stately kite hawks circling above, hunting from the updrafts, have nearly disappeared. Parrots, too, have mostly vanished. We used to see great flocks of parrots sweeping across the muted hues of dusk. Or perched like ornamental gems upon the red sandstone relics of Delhi’s lost dynasties. No longer. It seems that the delightfully messy accommodation of nature in Indian urban spaces, which I remarked uponwhen I first arrived, was failing.
A 2020 report on Indian birds has shown that eighty percent of one-hundred and forty-six well-tracked species are in sharp decline. In North America, bird populations have crashed by twenty-nine percent in the past fifty years. Starvation was responsible for at least one mass die-off of songbirds in the US southwestern desert last year. Worldwide, forty percent of bird species are in decline. It’s not only canaries at risk in our global coal mine. Among land-dwelling vertebrates (including birds), five hundred species are expected to go extinct within the next twenty years—that’s double the rate of extinctions from the previous century, which is already, conservatively, fifteen times the natural background rate of extinction in pre-human times. Forty percent of amphibian species have already been lost over the past hundred years. The picture is even worse for invertebrates. Across the planet, insects from dragonflies to beetles are vanishing. Studies from the UK and US suggest that disappearing populations of moths and butterflies aren’t limited to my neighborhood in India. It strikes me that the tired but often unavoidably apt old expression, “like moths to a flame,” won’t even mean anything to a child under ten. “What’s a moth?” they might ask.
But this concern goes beyond nostalgia. Birds, beetles, geckos, worms, fungi, grasses, microbes—every form of life plays a part in the intricate web that supports us and all living things. Sever too many strands, and the whole edifice of life as we’ve known it will collapse. Is collapsing. But though climate change gets nearly all of the environmental press these days, it isn’t the primary driver of this ongoing loss of biodiversity. The present mass extinction event began before the mass burning of fossil fuels. It’s been driven by overexploitation, habitat destruction, and myriad forms of pollution, including a host of toxic chemicals. It has accelerated aggressively in this Industrial Age.
Since the dawn of agriculture, human activity has reduced the Earth’s total plant biomass by half; plants comprise about eighty percent of global biomass. Since pre-industrial times, wilderness areas have shrunk by seventy-five percent, wetlands by ninety percent. In 2020, the mass of plastic in use was double that of all the animals living on Earth. This figure doesn’t include plastic waste, so it comprises only part of the crisis now dubbed “Global Plastic”: the total infiltration of macro- and micro-plastics into landscapes, oceans, air, and living beings. Artificial waste, industrial and agricultural chemicals have wound their way into the fabric of our planet, into the very bodies of living things, with consequences not yet fully understood, though certainly detrimental to the health of life on Earth. Indeed, the rapid decline of our living world has been so drastic in recent decades that we’re just beginning to come to grips with what we’ve wrought—let alone actively imagine what is truly signified by the changes around us. To reckon with what is unfolding, we must acknowledge that the future world will be very different from the one our ancestors knew—or even the one many of us grew up in.
Redrawing the Maps
The future world will be more barren than the one we’ve known, traveled by fewer animals, both in kind and in number. Fewer birds making a ruckus in the treetops. Dwindling herds of elk and moose, families of lemurs, orangutans, river dolphins, whales, and elephants. Fewer fireflies enchanting a summer night or ladybugs charming the afternoon. No more rhinos. No more polar bears. Every loss of an animal or plant species changes the local balance of life, further destabilizing its ecosystem. Similarly, when forests and meadowlands are fragmented into patches separated by fields or roads, the mix of animals and plants that live within them also changes. Thus, habitat fragmentation or local extinctions can kick off a trophic cascade that alters the very shape of the landscape, even the flow of rivers, the size of lakes, the pattern of rainfall. Due to fragmentation and climate change, the Amazon Rainforest is on the verge of converting to grass and scrubland, with untold consequences for regional weather patterns and agriculture that helps supply the western hemisphere.
Climate change is driving the northward expansion of the Sahara Desert to engulf all of North Africa, jump the Mediterranean Sea, and overtake southern Europe. In the Alps and other mountain ranges, receding glaciers will trigger avalanches and rockfalls, while the Ganga, the Rhine, and other glacier-fed rivers and lakes dwindle. As the familiar icy patch that once adorned the far north of every world map shrinks, the southern reaches of the northern boreal forest and peatlands will burn off, inviting a different mix of trees and grasses to creep northward and occupy the more temperate plains of the former tundra.
Kiribati, Maldives, and Micronesian states will be engulfed by rising seas. Thus, fewer far-flung islands will dot our maps, exchanged for far greater expanses of unbroken ocean. All the familiar shapes of the continents will take on new contours. Fine beaches from Florida to Maine will wash away, as coastlines everywhere are increasingly inundated and submerged, as hurricanes become more intense and destructive, tsunamis more powerful and lethal. Major cities, including New York, Mumbai, London, Jakarta, and Shanghai will migrate or shrink as decades of steady sea level rise—or a more rapid rise from the loss of the West Antarctic ice shelf—make them increasingly vulnerable to storm surges and tides. So too with long stretches along the coasts of eastern England and northern Europe.
Ways of life or infrastructures built with the expectation of predictable seasonal cycles or climatic conditions will suffer and people will migrate. Nigeria is one region already feeling this, as rain patterns change and deadly conflicts erupt over dwindling water. Globally, conflicts over water have more than quadrupled over the past thirty years. Syria has disintegrated into a failed state, partly triggered by lingering drought that fueled internal migration and political conflict; Central America’s emigration crisis largely results from changed weather patterns. In both cases, the changing climate eroded the agricultural basis of local livelihoods and communities, sparking unrest and violence (though much news reporting elides the climatic causes). Meanwhile, tens of millions of people in southern China and the montane regions of south-central Europe are reeling from the home-wrecking deluges that will continue to plague cities into the future.
As seasons alter their timing and character, longstanding agricultural centers around the world will wither while new regions spring up. Hotter summers, warmer winters, drought, melting glaciers, and extreme weather already adversely affect the cultivation of strawberries, fruits, nuts, wine, chocolate, coffee, and other everyday foods. The world’s breadbaskets will relocate—or cease to exist—due to changing rainfall, heat, and extreme weather, such as is already squeezing agricultural production in Australia. In just the past year, the United Kingdom, Poland, Romania, Turkey, Pakistan, China, India, Brazil, and the United States, among other nations, have suffered significant crop damage or reductions in yield due to weather or climate. To make matters worse, the rising concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide is decreasing the protein, iron, zinc, and other essential nutrients in plant foods, making agricultural produce less nutritious. However far-fetched it may seem now, the UN warns that mounting losses to agriculture will increase risks of widespread malnutrition and famine on scaleswe haven’t seen in half a century, as anticipated this year in Nigeria. Heat waves will intensify to such a degree in some parts of the world—including western and southern Asia—that some currently populated regions may be rendered unsuitable for human settlement. Rising heat in India is already costing tens of billions of hours in lost labor each year, while chronic heat stress is causing a growing epidemic of premature death by kidney failure among farm laborers in India and Central America.
Restructuring Civilization
My sketch of a future world is premised upon geophysical and biospheric changes that are already well underway. And while there are, of course, uncertainties about the future, what we do know for sure is that the situation is already dire. On the matter of planetary heating, alone, we know that in 2019 the global average temperature reached 1.2ºC warmer than the pre-Industrial baseline. The UK Met Office predicts a twenty percent chance we’ll exceed the “safe” threshold of 1.5ºC for at least one year by 2024. A different analysis calculates a seventeen percent chance we’ve alreadyexceeded the carbon budget to remain within the 1.5ºC threshold. Yet another suggests we’d exceed the extreme threshold of 2ºC by 2070, given a modest mitigation scenario in which greenhouse gas emissions don’t increase but remain the same as today. Meanwhile, the extreme effects of global warming are accelerating.
What we can surmise for certain is that our ecological crises—our sustainability crisis—will change how we live on Earth. Within the space of the irreversible damages already underway and our best efforts to avoid more catastrophic damages, it’s inevitable that we’re on the cusp of a global material and social adjustment or renewal. In the best of all remaining possible human futures, we will not continue with the climate or the lifestyle patterns of recent decades; rather, we will undergo a transition of human civilization to accommodate a new climate regime and new ways of life altered for sustainability. Because it’s not only the consequences of global warming and mass extinction that will drive extensive changes. Our most effective means of adequately mitigating global warming and other environmental degradations will themselves propel us into a new world, one in which we’re called upon to change ourselves, undertaking “unprecedented transitions in all aspects of society”, to quote the IPCC SR1.5 report from 2018, produced by an international team of scientists.
By now the most effective strategies for mitigation and adaptation recommended by the IPCC and others are widely discussed, if not as vividly imagined in their everyday repercussions: All nations must fully decarbonize and scale up renewable energy production, storage, and distribution infrastructures at a frantic pace. Just as rapidly move away from chemically intensive farming, deforestation, and destruction of wetlands. The world must identify and preserve between thirty and fifty percent of our land and sea area for untrammeled wildlife habitat. Elevate national and international priorities to construct sea barriers, water harvesting and flood management systems—the wealthier nations aiding the poorer—and also possibly thousands of massive (and as yet unproven) carbon sequestering facilities. As well as cover the costs of mounting disaster recovery and rehabilitation of displaced persons, which will stress the coffers even of wealthy governments and aid agencies. And—not least—dismantle patriarchy to slow population growth, among other excellent reasons.
All of these necessary actions, at unprecedented speed, scope, and scale will require nothing short of a material, technological, economic, and social reinvention of global culture. It requires us to change our diets: what we eat; how we grow it; where we grow it. It means moving away from meat and animal products grown on the hoof and adjusting to a different mix of locally available fruits and vegetables in any region. It will change what materials we use in construction and to fashion everyday household objects, as we jettison carbon-emitting concrete and petrochemical plastics. It will ultimately require us to recycle everything we consume in order to conserve water and curtail mining, from river sand to metals to the remaining fuel, which must be left in the ground. This in turn will alter what materials and articles we produce and how affordable everyday items remain, right down to the clothes we wear.
The changing climate and necessary lifestyle adjustments will include changes in how and where we live and build our cities, as we abandon unrecoverable infrastructure along some coastal areas. It will affect how far, how often, and the means by which we travel. All these measures will have consequences in daily living. They entail a change in what we value, how we construct and signal social status, what we expect to achieve and how we measure success in our individual lives. What kinds of jobs are available and necessary and esteemed, possibly tilting more in favor of food producers, naturalists, and social workers. Wealth and opportunity will get reshuffled as, over the coming decades, the changing planet fundamentally alters our economies, geographies, geopolitics, societies, and cultures.
Environmental degradation is ultimately driven by overconsumption. If overconsumption is equitably reduced, societies that currently enjoy the most comfortable, “first-world” standards of living with the largest per capita carbon footprintswill be the ones who feel their way of life most egregiously altered or curtailed, and those profiting most immediately from the present status quo will be dethroned from their apogees of wealth and power. However, if we don’t undertake adequate measures, the burden will fall first and worst upon the world’s low-income communities and nations. Given this equation, it’s no mystery at all why no meaningful mitigation has yet been undertaken—and likely will continue to be forestalled: privileged individuals and nations are unlikely to vote for policies that dampen their present experience of prosperity. Yet in a scenario where we don’t act aggressively to slow the warming, stanch pollution, and reverse habitat destruction, our world will be increasingly rapidly destabilized, and even the well-off will soon find themselves unable to continue as they are.
Just how much, how fast, and which consequences are more extremely felt by whom depends upon what we as a human community elect and are able to do. Yet too many of us with the most to sacrifice—for it does entail sacrifice by overconsumers—resist the transition. They do so by refusing to acknowledge the need for fundamental socioeconomic change, casting it as unspeakable apocalypse, by deflecting dialog away from deeper changes that are required toward the superficial technical fixes. They limit themselves to arguing about solar versus nuclear power rather than also challenging our culture built around growth economics. But technical fixes alone will never be sufficient to achieve civilizational sustainability. And a deliberate civilizational transition is our best hope to prevent the more apocalyptic scenarios that could actually result from our inaction. The hope—if we can navigate it justly and effectively—is the revival and sustenance of clean air, clean water, wholesome food, and more healthful and equitable living among ourselves and with the planet.
So as the onrushing planetary changes erode the modes of life we presently cling to, we must adapt our lives to more sustainable practices. To do our best, we must squarely face the uncertainty and distress that our predicament presents, recognize the systemic problems, and change the way we collectively live and work, produce and consume. This means disabusing ourselves of our present vainglorious narratives of entitlement. It means dreaming, instead, new stories that kindle new visions of hope, a hope invested not in a “business as usual” future, bedecked with solar panels, but rather in a salutary and equitable transition to new ways of living and thinking and being. For this is the only hope. As António Guterres, the UN Secretary-General, has put it, “Making peace with nature is the defining task of the 21st century.”
[Part 9, Upheaval And Migration]
Earlier Essays in this Series
1. What We Talk About When We Talk About The Weather
4. Tales From a Changing World
6. Modern Myths of Human Power
Images
1. An image of the Arctic sea ice at its minimum extent in September, 2020, the second lowest on record. The lowest summer sea ice extent, which wasn't very much lower, occurred in September, 2012. Image by NASA. Public domain.
2. A parrot sitting on an outbuilding at the Qutb Minar in Delhi in 2004. Image by shunya.net.
3. A visualization of Mumbai with 2ºC of global temperature rise. Image by Inhabitat.
4. Corn stalks flattened by a derecho. Over six million acres of corn were damaged in Iowa in August, 2020, along with several massive silos full of stored grain, by this single wind storm that lasted a few hours. Image by Gary Fandel, Iowa Farm Bureau.
5. Women modeling clothing made out of Tensel fabric. Tensel is a fiber made from wood, which the Tensel company says is sustainably grown and manufactured, as well as very soft and versatile. Promotional screenshot.