Shunya's Notes

“Indian Civilization is an Idea But Also an Enigma”: Karan Thapar interviews Namit Arora

I was honored and delighted to receive an invitation from Karan Thapar himself, one of the sharpest and most incisive and intellectually astute interviewers in India today. He wanted to discuss the web series Indians on his show. But I’m also media-shy, and right after saying yes, I grew anxious about the interview. Well, I think it turned out alright. :) Thapar asked about 15 questions and masterfully summarized at several places what I’d said in long-winded ways, illustrating once again the basis for his high reputation and numerous awards. See for yourself! 

Exploring India's Past: From Al-Beruni to Marco Polo and Ibn-Battuta

I was recently invited to participate in a forum called The Black Hole, an "educational and intellectual space" in Islamabad whose goal is to further science, art, and culture in Pakistan. It is run by Pervez Hoodbhoy, a physicist, author, and secularist known for his vocal and courageous advocacy of scientific temper and progressive values, and who I've long admired. He invites authors and thinkers to present and interact with his live audience.

I was delighted by the invitation and overcame my enormous media-shyness to join this event. The session, held on 24 March, began with an introduction by Pervez Hoodbhoy, followed by a screening of Episode 7 of Indians (Alberuni and Marco Polo in India) and a Q&A interaction in Urdu/Hindi/English that lasted over an hour.

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.

So rather than imagine that any individual can do something to slow down climate change and other ecocide, it seems most useful to first orient ourselves toward a broadly conceived vision of a more equitable and less consumerist world. We might then try to align our actions with helping to create that world in place of this one, piece by piece, even as conditions change significantly along the way—new problems, new possibilities opening before us, new conflicts and catastrophes, new understandings that change our older ones.

The one lesson I feel sure about is that any helpful response cannot entail promoting the further expansion of the human enterprise. It will not be found in the direction of using more energy and creating additional layers of technological or social complexity devised to maintain the course of our present civilization. Rather we must look toward disentangling ourselves from them, thread by thread. Any genuinely hopeful response can only be found in embracing greater simplification. In our civilization. In our lifestyles. It must lead toward a reduction of the overall human ecological footprint in the most equitable manner. And the most effective and equitable long-term responses will ultimately be the highly localized ones: locally conceived and built to answer local needs and issues, endeavours that deliver both their benefits and attendant costs to the same community.

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.

But real hope is essential for human thriving. And real hope is built upon the possible. It’s arrived at by facing hard truths, understanding what the challenges truly are, and contemplating the difficult tradeoffs. It isn’t passive; it arises through engagement.

As I’ve shown in this series, to significantly slow the rate of anthropogenic climate change and its underlying cause of ecological overshoot requires us to radically staunch emissions from combustible fossils while also broadly promoting global ecological integrity, including rebuilding fluidly equitable human societies within the dynamic web of life. This unavoidably entails commensurately radical and rapid changes to our global economy and sociopolitical systems. But whether and how these might occur or be achieved remain open questions. Nor are the answers limited to matters of global cooperation through officialdom. Revolutionary reforms centered on our relationships with the Earth and each other will not be technocratically mandated from the top down. Given all this, it seems clear that hope must find purchase not in fantasies of continuing the present patterns of civilization, but in departures from the world we’ve known.

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.

Yet our presently dominant mythological universe—which guides policy today no less than the ancient Sumerian belief system guided theirs—doesn’t accept these kinds of empirical constraints. It teaches instead that different forms of energy and materials are perfectly substitutable and able to sustain energy use and economic growth without limits. Its stories dismiss the diminishment of the living world and dismemberment of its essential geochemical cycles as though they’re neutral to the flows of energy and materials that comprise the global economy. It even posits that technology can substantially ‘decouple’ economic growth from consumption and its associated pollution.

Our modern stories substitute money for energy and materials, and then reify money as a thing in itself. Disregarding physics and ecology, they foreground the finances that represent the flows of capital in the world. But the finances aren’t real, in that they don’t account for the true biophysical cycles and interrelationships constraining the larger system which provides all that capital. Finances float above the world, when reality is enmeshed within the world; they constitute merely a selectively descriptive artifice, an opaque bubble of reasoning that ultimately obstructs our view of what’s actually happening in the larger, biophysical world of which we’re an inseparable part.

This modern story-verse lets us imagine that we can get more out of a system than what goes into it. We call this magic profit. But it is a trick of accounting. For gains at the center of our finite system are actually losses from its peripheries; whatever we take as profit is ultimately felt as a loss to someone or something else. In the present world, that loss usually cuts most deeply into the non-human biosphere as well as the most vulnerable members of global society. Of course, our mythology simply labels losses to the biosphere or the exploitable classes as externalities: things that don’t concern us. Yet they do concern us, for by over-extracting from them, we’re destroying the body within which we live.

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?

Indians | Ep 10: The Faiths of Varanasi | A Brief History of a Civilization

Varanasi, or Banaras, is among the world's oldest living cities. Its archaeological finds go back to the 9th century BCE. Emerging in history as Kashi, Varanasi became an early centre of learning. The Buddha preached his first sermon here, which effectively launched Buddhism. The city has an impressive history of religious pluralism and still hosts Brahminical Hinduism, various major and minor faiths and sects of old India, shrines to sundry matas and folk gods, and many flavours of Islam: Shia, Sunni, Sufi, Ahmadiyya. Located on the left bank of the Ganga, it’s the city of Shiva, of seekers and pilgrims, Pirs and Aghoris, death and instant moksha. Muslims form 30% of its people and most of its weaving industry; their Hindu ancestors made Varanasi famous for textiles even in ancient times.

Foreigners like Xuanzang, Alberuni and Bernier left accounts of Varanasi. How do scholars today view religious conversions and temple desecrations in the city under Muslim rulers? In these centuries, popular religion—including Bhakti and Sufism—thrived in Varanasi with locals like Tulsidas, Kabir and Ravidas. It was Tulsidas's Ramcharitmanas, composed in the 1570s during Akbar’s rule, that turbo-charged Rama’s career as a god in north India. The city then also became a major centre of Indo-Persian culture, co-created by Hindus and Muslims at both elite and commoner levels. I'll close with a few words on its present.

(Bibliography & Transcript)

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.

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.

Notice that in living systems the consumption of energy and materials are linked: if a system is able to use (consume) any new source of energy, it will do so in conjunction with an increased usage of materials, whether that material is the food itself or other materials—like firewood or coal or iron—that are acquired by expending that energy. Imagine, for instance, beavers living along a river encaged as a zoo exhibit. If zookeepers leave them extra food and let them do as they please, they will become more beavers, who will then cut down more trees—as beavers are wont to do—and then build larger dams or more dams, increasing the overall size and complexity of their beaver world along their river. It is the combination of energy and materials that a living system uses to grow in size, number, or complexity.

Indians | Ep 9: The Mughals and Bernier | A Brief History of a Civilization

The Mughal Empire was founded in 1526 by Babur, who was part of a long line of people—since at least the Indo-Aryans—to have entered and settled in the subcontinent. It grew to become the largest, most opulent empire yet in India. As with most long-lasting, multi-ethnic, and multilingual empires, most Mughal rulers too espoused pragmatic ideals, especially Akbar and Jahangir. Co-opting elites from diverse groups of Hindus into their administration, they presided over a brilliant fusion of Indo-Persian culture and syncretic creations in art, architecture, literature, music, dance, painting, cuisine, dress, crafts, and more.

In 1658, a French doctor, François Bernier, came to Delhi as a physician to Dara Shikoh, and wrote about the bloody war of royal succession and the first decade of Aurangzeb’s rule. Bernier’s insightful account describes Mughal courtly culture in Delhi, the economic condition of Indians, their science and intellectual life, and Hindu cultural and religious customs. Scholars routinely critique the Mughal Empire’s record on many fronts, but the Mughals have lately also attracted much cultural vilification, especially from Hindu nationalists. They allege that the Mughals persecuted and forcibly converted Hindus to Islam on a large scale, and indiscriminately desecrated tens of thousands of temples. Is that true? I’ll explore the evidence behind such allegations—and a lot more—in this episode.

(Bibliography & Transcript;  On The Wire)