Shunya's Notes

The Climate Crisis and India

(A version of this article first appeared as the cover story in The Caravan, The End of Nature: Ecological myths and warming climates.)

FIVE YEARS AGO, there was some speculation as to whether Narendra Modi, the prime minister of India, was a climate-change sceptic, after he made a remark that indicated he was unconvinced about the phenomenon. “Climate has not changed,” he said, in September 2014, during a televised address to a group of schoolchildren. “We have changed. Our habits have changed. Our habits have got spoiled. Due to that, we have destroyed our entire environment.” In a remark made to a group of students at Sacred Heart University around the same time, he displayed total incomprehension of the matter: “The reality is this that in our family, some people are old ... They say this time the weather is colder. And, people’s ability to bear cold becomes less.”

These statements contradict Modi’s imperative to readers of his 2011 book, Convenient Action: Gujarat’s Response to Challenges of Climate Change, in which he references Al Gore, the environmentalist and former vice-president of the United States, who has been vocal about the need for urgent action to save the planet in his 2007 documentary An Inconvenient Truth. It is also entirely at odds with some of his other public statements, such as his declaration at the World Economic Forum, last year in Davos, that climate change constitutes the “greatest threat to the survival and human civilization as we know it.” This apparent contradiction is reflected in the disparity between statement and action when it comes to his government’s measures to protect the environment. For example, his acknowledgement that climate change is our greatest existential threat does not align with the present government’s lack of urgency around decarbonising India’s transportation sector or its energy grid. It has created no institutional structures designed to specifically tackle such a grave existential threat. His government has even failed to properly allocate earmarked funds toward environmental initiatives.

Previous governments were resistant to setting targets for limiting emissions, citing development priorities. The Modi administration at least signed on to the much lauded Paris Agreement in 2015, which aimed to get countries to voluntarily reduce their greenhouse gas emissions, with the goal of limiting the rise in global average temperature to 1.5º Celsius above what we call the pre-industrial baseline, or the average global temperature in the centuries before the Industrial Revolution, when the mass burning of fossil fuels began to change the atmosphere. In addition, under Modi, India ratified the International Solar Alliance, an agreement intended to nurture cooperation among “solar rich” tropical countries in developing and deploying solar power infrastructure. Such measures that the Modi government intends to undertake are helpful but not substantial. While India’s carbon emissions are expected to rise for some years, far more aggressive steps need to be taken to alter the emissions trajectory that India is currently on.

Stories About the End of the World

(This essay first appeared in Pangyrus literary magazine, June 2019.)

My first visit to a science museum, when I was kid, had a remarkable impact on me. I might have been eleven or twelve; it might have been in Los Angeles or San Francisco or Seattle. In one hall of the delightful exhibits, an electronic signboard hung mutely overhead. It displayed only a number—a very large number, of a magnitude difficult to grasp, though I don’t recall how many digits—that represented the estimated number of species currently living on our planet. This number was silently ticking down, like a clock running backwards. I watched the display for a while, as the last digit dropped. And dropped again. Five species lost. Then ten. Right before my eyes! Unsettled by this, unable to accept the implications, I wandered off to find a fun distraction in the museum. When later I returned to check, I saw that dozens of species had already gone extinct that very afternoon. Nobody else in the museum seemed alarmed. I told myself this must be because it’s a bigger number than I can comprehend, and I’m childish to be concerned; everyone else understands it’s not such a big deal. But there was no denying that it was dropping very fast, and it’s haunted me ever since.

It’s possible that seeing the extinction clock struck me with such force because I’d already noticed living things disappearing around me at home. As a child growing up in the arid hills of southern Idaho, I’d once discovered a colony of tiny creatures living on the side of our home. Each one was about the size of a thumbnail on my six-year-old hands, bearing a curled shell, like a snail. But these shells were soft, and the animals within seemed dry and sticky, rather than slimy. Their rate of movement was imperceptible to me, but every summer a great throng of them clung to the sunbaked red bricks of our southwestern exposure. A couple of summers after I’d first noticed them, I realized that there were fewer of them. Their numbers shrank every year, until, by the time I was eleven, they were simply gone. I never found out what kind of animal they were, and I’ve never seen or heard reference to animals like them anywhere again.

I’d already noticed, too, that the shimmering explosion of grasshoppers, which once erupted from our every footfall as we walked through the weedy grasses, where our lawn gave way to tumbleweed, sagebrush, and juniper, had gone still. The long, fat earthworms that exhumed themselves during every rainstorm, to twist awhile and then dry up on the pavements, no longer left their brown stains along the sidewalks. Stinkbug beetles and roly-poly potato bugs, once our playthings on idle summer afternoons, had become harder to find. The little scorpions that occasionally took shelter in our house, hiding in our shoes, stopped coming inside (though I habitually tamped out my shoes before wearing them for years after). No longer did we have to scrub our car’s windshield and grille clean of the bugsplats that coated them after every night drive along the highway, for the swarms of flying insects that once hovered ubiquitously over the sundowned desertscapes had thinned and finally vanished.

It seemed to me as though all the bugs, everywhere (except the pesky mosquitoes!), were disappearing. As in the museum, no one around me seemed concerned about this. My peers and elders carried on as though the world remained limitless and unchanging. In the fifth grade, I didn’t know much about bugs and I had no one to ask. I wasn’t aware at the time how much of the living world depends upon their daily toil, their unremarked—and still largely mysterious—interactions that link the microscopic and macroscopic worlds. Yet somehow I intuited that their demise was a dire warning, like canaries in a coalmine.

But it was worse than that: it was not a warning but a collapse already underway. Today we know that perhaps eighty percent of the world’s insect biomass has vanished in just the past three decades. The ticking signboard I saw at the museum, and the research results of scientists I’d learn about decades later, confirmed to me that the silent decline of the natural world was not merely my imagination.