Category: Anthropology & Archaeology
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What Can I Do About Climate Change?
This is the last article in a 12-part series about the Earth-system, how our planet has shaped us as human beings, and how we, in turn, have shaped it The article appeared here first, in Unraveling Climate Change, a series for The Wire.
Aravali Biodiversity Park in Gurgaon, Haryana, was a quarry site that’s been rewilded with native species and opened for use as a public park. It’s a remarkable example of how a group of ordinary citizens came together to protect biodiversity and wild heritage for public benefit. Photo: Vijay Dhasmana via Ecological Restoration Alliance In this series of articles, I aimed to provide some context around our environmental predicament, including climate change. I discussed its multilayered complexities, how we got here, and where hope for the future of humankind may be found. In this final article, I’ll consider the next hardest question I’m frequently asked: What can I do about climate change?
It’s a pressing question. The role of the individual within larger systemic changes is difficult to map, but clearly most vital. For though we are in so many ways enmeshed and often powerless, still the totality of our enmeshed, individual actions is what makes our world. Nor can our answers today, arrived at within our current social and material frameworks, be complete; they can only be steps, taking us into a future of inevitable discontinuities: unexpected, abrupt, and snowballing social and material changes stretching through our lifetimes and for generations beyond. We already live in a climatically different world than the one that shaped human evolution and all of human history—the world to which we are best adapted—and more extreme changes are inevitable. For both the Earth-system and its subordinate human system have a momentum that carries us along and is difficult to turn.
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Is There Hope?
This is the eleventh article in a 12-part series about the Earth-system, how our planet has shaped us as human beings, and how we, in turn, have shaped it The article appeared here first, in Unraveling Climate Change, a series for The Wire.
‘The Eye of the Storm’. Credit: OrganikArts In the face of climate change, people often ask me if I have any hope for the future. For it seems a bleak prospect to contemplate the fundamental unsustainability of industrial civilization, as I’ve done throughout this series. It is, after all, the only way most of us know how to live. But without a shared context for what futures we understand to be possible or desirable, I find hope a slippery topic. It matters very much what we hope for.
Many of us simply ‘hope’ our world will carry on as it has been, while governments and corporations control global warming with technical fixes. But this attachment to a desired outcome without evidence that it’s possible is blind faith, not hope. Indeed much of what gets called hope today actually includes beliefs held contrary to evidence. These are fantasies or delusions, wishful thinking or willful ignorance. All such false hopes are dangerous. They lull us into inaction. They guide us down wrong paths.
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Fossil Fuels and Modern Myths
This is the tenth article in a 12-part series about the Earth-system, how our planet has shaped us as human beings, and how we, in turn, have shaped it The article appeared here first, in Unraveling Climate Change, a series for The Wire.
As heterodox economist Steve Keen likes to point out: Technology without energy is a sculpture. A city without energy is a museum. And labour without energy is a corpse.That’s a vivid summation of the fact that there is no economy without work, and there is no work without the flow of energy. But we do not create energy. We can only take existing energy and change its form, converting heat energy into motion or motion into electricity, for instance. And as energy flows through the processes of doing work, converting from one form to another, some of it is lost at every step, irreversibly depleted as waste heat that can’t be recovered to perform work, including to support life. These rules governing energy flows of course also apply to the human economy.
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Our Insatiable Quest for Fire
This is the ninth article in a 12-part series about the Earth-system, how our planet has shaped us as human beings, and how we, in turn, have shaped it The article appeared here first, in Unraveling Climate Change, a series for The Wire.
Everyone alive today has known only a world of rapidly increasing global material wealth: More goods are more available to more people than ever before. More people are eating more food. More new things are being continuously invented. More people have access to more technology-mediated healthcare, cars, computers and phones. More roads are built, buildings raised, clothes worn, toys and gadgets and appliances used. More people are traveling farther and more often. And the global Gross Domestic Product—possibly the most revered metric in all of human history—has been going up and up and up.Graphs of consumption or production of various commodities and goods—like sand or cement, steel or cars, houses or furniture, and a host of other things—as well as the size of the human population, emissions of industrial waste, or other metrics reflecting our use of energy and materials, nearly all indicate a strikingly similar growth pattern across time: around the 1950s, all these things began to accelerate. Geologists, anthropologists, and others call this astonishing trend the Great Acceleration. But the Industrial Revolution began two hundred years prior to this. So what was happening in the middle of the 20th Century to fuel such a rush in the consumption of energy and materials, the associated pollution of air, water, and soil, and a dramatic acceleration in the extinction of species and loss of biodiversity?
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The Agricultural Revolution: An Alternate Telling
This is the eighth article in a 12-part series about the Earth-system, how our planet has shaped us as human beings, and how we, in turn, have shaped it The article appeared here first, in Unraveling Climate Change, a series for The Wire.
Much as men were likely the primary hunters in foraging societies across the ages, so women were the primary ‘gatherers’ and plant specialists, providing the bulk of the food and medicine. By 21,000 BCE, those of the Levant knew well the produce of their coastal woodlands and neighboring steppelands, which stretched eastward for hundreds of kilometers. At least two common steppe grasses, wheat and barley (jau), produced tasty, nutritionally-dense seeds. Using long, thin, flint blades, they gathered these grasses by the armload. In their small encampments, they threshed out short mounds of seeds and ground these with stones.Alongside more than a hundred varieties of other plants they gathered nearby, plus meat from hunting, this grain provided an astonishing, almost effortless surplus from their cold, arid landscape. Even with the world in the grip of extreme glaciation, it was enough for their small bands to remain stationary for most of the year—the first multi-seasonal camps we know of, anywhere in the world. But eventually the nomads moved on, leaving behind their heavy mortars to be found and reused in future years, if the grasses grew well.
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Of Mice and Men, Energy and Cancer
This is the seventh article in a 12-part series about the Earth-system, how our planet has shaped us as human beings, and how we, in turn, have shaped it The article appeared here first, in Unraveling Climate Change, a series for The Wire.
It takes energy to get food—whether you’re chasing it in a hunt, climbing for it in the trees, digging it out of the ground, or farming it and trucking it across the country. Most animals, of course, lack trucks or other vehicles, so whatever food they eat they must gather on foot (or fin or wing). But for an animal in balance with its healthy home environment, it will be enough. Our human ancestors also acquired enough energy and materials from gathering and hunting to reliably reproduce at a slow and steady rate, make their tools and artworks, dance and sing and play and participate in other essentials of community life.But sometimes the landscape provides an unexpected stockpile of food, so that one need expend hardly any additional energy to gain lots more of it. When human societies—or any other living systems—gain access to such a source, they may experience this as a sudden expansion in the carrying capacity of their environment; that is, suddenly the same amount of effort returns enough energy and materials to make and support a lot more of them. We might call this a ‘cheap’ supply of energy and materials that stimulates growth.
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Modern Myths of Prehistory
This is the sixth article in a 12-part series about the Earth-system, how our planet has shaped us as human beings, and how we, in turn, have shaped it The article appeared here first, in Unraveling Climate Change, a series for The Wire.
Anatomically modern humans—people like us—have been living on this planet for some 300 thousand years. Most of that time—over 98% of our time on Earth—all societies were nomadic, subsisting entirely on foraged, wild foods. There were no permanent buildings or roads. Every person lived in a wild landscape. That is, they didn’t live in a world primarily shaped and controlled by human desires, but rather one where humans were only one among many forces—some equal to or more powerful than themselves—all co-creating their environment.Popular narratives that imagine those early lifeways tend to presume that our ancestors lived such materially simple lives because they were primitive brutes, simply incapable of building anything more ‘advanced’ or ‘civilized.’ Prehistoric, non-state peoples—often derided as ‘cave men’—are cast as mentally dim, miserable and hungry, impulsive and cruel in their treatment of each other. Or as Thomas Hobbes imagined it, their lives were ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.’ We expect they understood little and did nothing worthwhile. Since their time, we tell ourselves, humans have followed a preordained path of progress from lower to higher states of understanding and living. We’re led to presume our modern lives are so much richer and full of leisure or pleasure than theirs could possibly have been. And this leads us to presume that those beyond the reach of modernity even today are in want of our ‘civilization’ and programs for their ‘development.’
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The Human Animal in the Circle of Life
This is the fifth article in a 12-part series about the Earth-system, how our planet has shaped us as human beings, and how we, in turn, have shaped it The article appeared here first, in Unraveling Climate Change, a series for The Wire.
Basic ecology teaches us that there is no life without the flow of energy. Most of life’s energy is sourced from the sun: Sunshine falls upon the land and water, at a finite daily rate, where it’s absorbed either kinetically—as heat, driving winds and ocean currents and evaporation—or chemically, by plants whose photosynthetic powers can trap it within the chemical bonds of carbohydrates, a form of fuel that can later be burned as needed by most living cells, for growth, health, and reproduction.Almost every living thing on the planet takes its energy from this sun-fed system, either tapping into it closer to the source, like the plants who first capture it, then the deer who eat the plants, or further from the source, like the big cats who eat the deer, or the fungi and microbes who eat all of these after they’ve lived and died. Humans eat all of these things too. After we die, we’re also eaten by the fungi and microbes; the materials that make up our bodies are returned into the soil and the air, and eventually reabsorbed by the plants. Energy and materials flow through this circle of life—really, multiple interconnected circles, or a web of life—with each species occupying its place, or niche, within the flow.
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Becoming Human: Shaped by Ice
This is the fourth article in a 12-part series about the Earth-system, how our planet has shaped us as human beings, and how we, in turn, have shaped it The article appeared here first, in Unraveling Climate Change, a series for The Wire.
Morteratsch Glacier, Switzerland. Photo: Daniel Schwen/CC BY-SA 2.5Our planet has experienced great temperature fluctuations throughout its past. Even in the Pleistocene ice age, beginning about 2.5 million years ago and continuing until the present, average global temperatures have repeatedly cycled between extremes of five or six degrees. When the temperatures swung downward, glaciers engulfed large parts of Eurasia, North America, and Greenland, burying the midlatitudes, which we consider temperate today, under mountains of ice. We call those frigid periods glaciations. The air was cold and dry; subtropical deserts expanded or shifted their locale.
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Becoming Human: Forged by Fire
This is the third article in a 12-part series about the Earth-system, how our planet has shaped us as human beings, and how we, in turn, have shaped it The article appeared here first, in Unraveling Climate Change, a series for The Wire.
Wildfire in Bandipur National Park, 2019. Photo: NaveenNkadalaveni/CC BY-SA 4.0Fire looms large in the ancient myths of many peoples around the world. Interestingly, most of these old stories share a common motif, in which fire was withheld from humankind—either by gods or by some other being—until humans finally acquired it only through an act of theft, violence, or other ignoble means.
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A Planetary Perspective
This is the second article in a 12-part series about the Earth-system, how our planet has shaped us as human beings, and how we, in turn, have shaped it The article appeared here first, in Unraveling Climate Change, a series for The Wire.
Ancient lava flows, part of the Deccan Traps, visible today in Panna National Park, MP. Photo credit: shunya.net.We live on a madly unstable planet. For billions of years it has never stopped wobbling and wandering, freezing and thawing, cracking and flowing, blooming, dying, regenerating. Small changes in its chemical composition, geological cycling, orbit, or orientation in space cascade into extreme changes felt on its surface. Despite this—maybe because of it—our planet has also given birth to a complex, interwoven, and forever changing family of living beings, a rarity in the cosmos as far as we know. Understanding this bigger picture of the relationship between the planet itself and human life can help us gain some perspective on our modern predicament. So let’s begin at the beginning.
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Earth’s Changing Climate
A large building is seen being broken and carried away by a flooding river. Photo: X/@BhavreenMKThis is the first article in a 12-part series about the Earth-system, how our planet has shaped us as human beings, and how we, in turn, have shaped it The article appeared here first, in Unraveling Climate Change, a series for The Wire.
If it seems like you’re hearing a lot more stories about heatwaves, fires, and floods than you remember hearing ten years ago, it’s not your imagination. June 2023 alone saw extreme heat break over Bihar and Uttar Pradesh that killed scores of people. Violent floods pummeled parts of north India in July and August, and Sikkim in October, drowning dozens of people, displacing untold numbers, causing landslides, destroying crops, homes, and infrastructure like roads and bridges. Parts of Delhi too were flooded as the Yamuna rose to its highest level in 45 years. And these are only a sample of stories from India.
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Zoomorphising Humanity
[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.
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What We Talk About When We Talk About the Future
[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.
Category: 3QD, Anthropology & Archaeology, Culture, Economics, Environment, History, Politics, Science, Video -
This Is Not the Zombie Apocalypse
[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.
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Stories of Collapse
[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.
Category: 3QD, Animals, Anthropology & Archaeology, Culture, Economics, Environment, History, Religion -
Stories of Continuity
[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.
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What a Way To Go
[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.
Category: 3QD, Anthropology & Archaeology, Art & Cinema, Culture, Economics, Environment, History, Politics, Science, Video -
Toward a Polyphony of Stories
[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.Category: 3QD, Anthropology & Archaeology, Culture, Economics, Environment, History, Religion, Science -
Namit Arora interviewed by Scroll
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.
________________‘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
Category: Anthropology & Archaeology, Books & Authors, Culture, Economics, History, Justice, Politics, Religion, Science, Travel
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