Amitav Ghosh, writer: ‘The doomsday shelter industry in the United States has become very big’

The Bengali writer Amitav Ghosh, 69, says that lifeboat ethics is a racist theory that claims someone already aboard a lifeboat has the right to stop others from climbing in to avoid sinking.

Yet the author of The Glass Palace and The Nutmeg’s Curse, who lives in New York and took part on April 24 in an event at Madrid’s CaixaForum on the climate emergency, believes wealthy countries would be making a grave mistake if they think they can shield themselves from global warming and the current polycrisis by leaving the rest of the world behind. In his new book, The Great Derangement, Ghosh reflects on today’s lack of response to the climate disaster and offers a different approach to climate change, one that goes beyond the Western perspective.

Question. Will future generations wonder if we were crazy?

Answer. Yes, absolutely. I absolutely think they will. After World War II, children used to ask their parents what they had done during the war. In that same way, our children and grandchildren will ask us what we did while the world was collapsing. We’ve lost so much already, and we are on our way to losing much more.

Q. Why do you think writers and artists are complicit in what you call the great derangement?

A. We are all complicit in various ways. As artists and writers, one aspect of our complicity is that we have not reflected these serious realities in our work, especially in the last 30 years, when most of the greenhouse gases have been put into the atmosphere.

Q. Are there no good books on climate change?

A. We shouldn’t reduce all the environmental problems that we see solely to climate change; there’s also species extinction and more. That said, there are plenty of them. One of the most outstanding books reflecting this multidimensional crisis is Flight Behavior by Barbara Kingsolver. Another excellent book is The Overstory by Richard Powers. There are others.

Q. Is the increasing individualism of the modern world a barrier to addressing climate change?

A. Climate change is a collective problem; it has to be addressed collectively at every level, but we live in a world that’s becoming more and more individualized. If we look at young people today, many can hardly relate to each other. They’ve become so accustomed to staring at their phones that they find it difficult even to just communicate with each other.

Q. Why do you claim that the climate change discourse is Eurocentric?

A. It is Eurocentric at various levels. Almost all the scientific work on climate change comes out of the collective West, from the United States and Europe. Because of that, the focus tends to be on Western issues. A lot of the data collected on climate change skews the issues in various ways. For example, studies on heat responses are based on data from people in the West.

Q. However, you state that most of the potential victims of climate change are in Asia. Isn’t that correct?

A. Yes, because Asia has huge concentrations of population. The population of Tuvalu, a small Pacific island that is slowly disappearing, is around 10,000 people. In contrast, the flooding of a single island in Bangladesh, Bhola, affected more than half a million people. Because of the huge concentrations of population across Asia, there is also a huge concentration of risk.

Q. What is the lifeboat ethic?

A. That idea was put forth by a theorist called Garrett Hardin, a right-wing eugenicist and racist thinker. His idea is that if you’re in a lifeboat and others are trying to get into it, you have every right to throw them out, to prevent them from climbing in. He compared this to what the United States and other rich countries should do with migrants. It’s a very racist, right-wing approach to the crisis that we have. Basically, it calls for sentencing very large numbers of people to death.

Q. Isn’t this precisely what some politicians in Western countries are now advocating?

A.This is a very exclusivist, almost genocidal, approach to this polycrisis. And it won’t work because people in the West are also going to be affected by these crises very powerfully; a higher GDP won’t protect them. The best example of this was COVID-19. Theoretically, the countries best prepared for the pandemic were those with the most resources, but that wasn’t the case. Countries like Italy, the United Kingdom, and the United States were severely affected. In contrast, comparatively, some African countries like Ghana managed the pandemic much better. I think it’s a delusion to think that the West will be protected from these environmental problems. GDP is a misleading statistic; it doesn’t tell you anything about resilience.

Q. Who is least prepared for a large-scale crisis?

A. It’s a contradictory picture because the wealthiest people in the West may be able to preserve their wealth. We already see Mark Zuckerberg, Peter Thiel, and other major tech entrepreneurs building doomsday shelters to survive the end of the world. They’re built to be completely self-sufficient for four or five years. So they’re already preparing for a disaster. The doomsday shelter industry in the United States has become very big. You can now buy one for as little as $35,000. But I think the most vulnerable people will actually be the middle class, both in the West and in the Global South, because they don’t adapt the way the working class does. At least the working class tends to adapt to difficult circumstances.

Q. What are you referring to?

A. I’ll give you an example: In recent years, the United States has experienced very dangerous storms. Warnings are issued way ahead of time, and people evacuate, but many don’t leave. Why? Because they are middle-class people. Their entire lives are invested in real estate, which ties them to a specific place. If they leave, they risk facing poverty. This will be the same in India, in places like Bombay. These are the most vulnerable people. They may know how to work on a computer, but other than that, they have very few life skills.

Q. Asian countries are potential victims but also responsible for the crisis. Today, China is the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases and India the third.

A. Yes, but those are gross figures. Per capita, both China and India have much lower emissions than the United States and other countries. Saudi Arabia and the other oil-producing powers have very large per capita footprints of greenhouse gas emissions. In a general sense, you can say that Asia, particularly China and India, are major emitters. But when I’ve asked people severely affected by climate change in India, Indonesia, and elsewhere if they don’t think they should try to reduce their carbon footprint, the answer is always: “Why? Others with a much larger footprint got rich when we were weak and poor; now it’s our turn.”

Q. Is it possible for everyone on the planet to live like Americans or Europeans?

A. No. But we can’t forget that, for decades, Americans and Europeans told Asians to live like them. The World Bank’s concept of poverty and wealth is completely tied to fossil fuels and their consumption. The main objective after the dissolution of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s was for everyone to live like Westerners. The reality is that if every person in India had two cars, the world would burn up. Mahatma Gandhi understood this and warned about industrial capitalism. There were also Chinese thinkers who understood it. But it was the West that imposed the criterion of opulence, living in this very big way. And now, they tell people in Asia: “No, you shouldn’t do as we did; you must do it differently.”

Q. What alternative is there?

A. It must be said that China is very different from India, because it has led the way in renewable energy. And now it is installing more alternative energy plants than the rest of the world put together. As for the Western imitation effect, this offers hope: if the West were to change its way of life, if it were to embrace alternatives like those advocated by young people like Greta Thunberg, then people in other parts of the world would also want that way of life.

Q. So you have hope?

A. As Gramsci said, we must have pessimism of the intellect and optimism of the will. I think that’s the only thing we can say at this point, because everything is heading in the wrong direction. The United States is in the grip of a crisis as it has never experienced before; no one has ever seen a polarization of the kind that exists today in the country. I think what really threatens Americans right now are the problems related to the standard of living. Today, the average age of a first-time homeowner in a city like New York or Chicago or San Francisco is around 50. And in Europe, where until now the climate issue was very important, they now only talk about rearming.

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