Shunya's Notes

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.

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.

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.’

But such narratives mythologize both the past and the present in the service of rationalizing the status quo, including the present distributions of global power, wealth, and exploitation. These attitudes are the same prejudices once called White Man’s Burden, though we’ve adopted them as our own; we may now say Industrialized Man’s Burden, instead. The truth is, our ancestral cave-dwellers—and the few peoples who live beyond the reach of state power today—simply lived differently and with different expectations than we do. Yet they lived in a state of healthfulness and ease at least as satisfying to them as our own is to us—very likely more so. In modern times, we know that whenever any non-state society has been made to give up their ways of life in exchange for ‘civilization’ (not to be conflated with individual goods, which they might take and use on their own terms), they have always resisted the imposition with as much force as they could muster; this does not signal desire.

In fact, for most of our human experience, we could neither imagine nor desire any other way to live than to be forever on the move, sleeping in temporary encampments, no other food to eat than what commonly surrounded us. We had no other way to spend our time, other than traveling, adventuring, telling stories, looking after the children, fashioning tools and self-adornments, playing games, singing and dancing, discussing and arguing and sometimes fighting. We continually discovered, tested out, and prepared new foods and medicines, studied the lifecycles of the landscapes and animals and the shapes in the stars. We explored and learned about our world. We searched for meaning.

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.

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 2.5

Our 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.

But when the temperatures cycled upward again, the glacial periods were broken by spells of great warmth, called interglacials. The air grew warmer and moister; deserts like the Sahara might even bloom with grasses. Forests expanded, and animals moved to higher latitudes across the continents or into higher elevations on the mountainsides. Interglacial temperatures were more like what we consider historically ‘normal.’ Yet the glaciers always came lurching back, devouring mountains and plains and rivers with their tongues of ice, continually remaking the landscape.

 In fact, for the past million years, glacial conditions have dominated the planet with each episode typically lasting around 90,000 years, while the interglacials each lasted less than 15,000 years. And all of recorded human history has occurred only during our present interglacial episode, called the Holocene, which began 11,700 years ago, continuing until modern times. If humans had not so radically changed the climate, our present interglacial would also have come to an end with temperatures sliding back toward the next glacial phase, in keeping with the longstanding patterns of the Pleistocene.

This cycling of the climate through cooler-dryer and warmer-wetter millennia, the expanding and shrinking of glaciers, rising and falling of sea levels, was the world into which early humans evolved. Yet we shouldn’t presume our ancestors were miserable brutes mutely suffering these conditions; it makes no more sense to imagine they hated the ice age than to imagine that polar bears hate the Arctic today or that whales hate the sea.

The ice age shaped what we are. And in it we thrived.

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 4.0

Fire 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.

In a tale from ancient Greece, the god Prometheus steals fire from his fellow gods to share it with humans; for this transgression, the other gods condemn him to endure an eternity of torture. The Polynesian demigod, Maui the trickster, ventures to the end of the world to retrieve fire from his grandmother Pele, the god of fire, by taking her burning fingernails one by one—only to churlishly extinguish each one; Pele finally grows so angry with him that she sends fire chasing after him into the human world. In one Diné (Navajo) story, the fire god hoards fire for himself, using it only to destroy things, until trickster Coyote steals some and gives it to humans. Among different Australian Aboriginal peoples, the origin of fire is placed with various animals, or sometimes human women, from whom it is forcibly taken through violence or trickery; it’s then distributed among the trees of the land, from where anyone can recover it. The ancient Vedic and Zoroastrian traditions are a bit different, but the fire god—Agni or Atar—is both devourer and protector. As the light of knowledge and acculturation, Agni too once hid from humans, before serving as an intermediary between humans and the gods of the Vedic pantheon.

Such stories from every quarter of the planet engage with the mystery and power of fire in ways that we of industrial civilization do not. They imagine fire as being of divine origin or imbued with some property fundamentally tied to our very humanity, the world we inhabit, or divinity. Without it, our human world is incomplete. Yet an ambivalence too surrounds fire, either through explicit acknowledgement of its dual nature as both benefactor and destroyer or an implicit association of it with an act of transgression or moral corruption. But we need it, the stories tell us; its power to cook food and to keep us warm enables our human existence. Our evolutionary story is, in fact, very deeply bound up with fire. And though no living society can possibly retain a true memory of the origins of a bond forged millions of years ago, it’s remarkable that a mythic awareness of its centrality to human societies, its powers and its dangers, remains alive among peoples who retain their cultural connection with a non-industrialized worldview.

Direct human connection to fire began as global temperatures were dropping into the Pleistocene ice age. Our early hominid ancestors in Africa had left the forest canopies, where they’d enjoyed a diet of raw leaves and fruit, seeds and insects, to explore new ways of life on the expanding open savannas. Their grassland lifestyles favored evolution toward bipedalism, along with dextrous minds and hands able to sharpen rocks into cutting implements. They must have learned they could glean good food from the charred leavings of forest fires. This accidental cooking rendered some foods easier to eat and digest, enabling these hominids to enjoy nutritious foods they might not have eaten before, like the calorifically dense tubers and corms that grew underground. This meant their bodies could receive more nutrition from food while expending less energy in processing and digesting it, because fire effectively did some of that processing and digesting for them.

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.

Earth was born about four and a half billion years ago, alongside several sibling planets, all of them formed from fragments of material left over after the birth of the Sun. It began as a glob of fiery, fluid rock spinning amidst other bits of ice and stone. But over the course of Earth’s first half billion years, its molten surface cooled and solidified; its dry, sulfurous skies became unending showers of acid rain; its empty basins filled with water. In these new oceans simmered a rich elemental brew of carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, phosphorous, iron—to mention but a few star ingredients—absorbing heat-energy from deep-sea hydrothermal vents and joining together into chains of chemicals. These complex molecules then clustered together, generating higher order structures, eventually forming cells that ate and breathed and reproduced—living avatars of dust, born of Earth’s own dynamically interconnected biological, geological, and chemical processes, or biogeochemistry.

While these earliest lifeforms were coming into being, Earth’s surface was still being relentlessly pummeled by meteors, some of them the size of mountains. Great impacts injected new material into our planet, cracking and reshaping its biogeochemistry. In this environment, about 3.5 billion years ago, some of those early cells evolved a new ability to convert light-energy from the sun into chemical fuel through a process, called photosynthesis, that takes carbon-dioxide from the air and emits oxygen as metabolic waste. By two billion years ago, the buildup of oxygen was turning Earth’s skies blue above its oceans of rust-red. Many forms of life in that nascent biosphere were poisoned by this atmospheric oxygen and went extinct.

But life itself was not defeated. The cells that did survive continued to diversify into myriad new forms that could withstand and even make use of this corrosive new gas. Some of these found ways to work together, joining into multicellular lifeforms, mixing genes through sexual reproduction, eventually filling the oceans with early forms of fungi, plants, and animals by around one billion years ago. These creatures grew and died, burrowed and crawled, built residual structures, stirred sediments, altered rocks and seabeds in ways that further changed Earth’s biogeochemistry. This changing geochemistry also affected the structure and motion of Earth’s crust, now sliding and tearing, bumping and churning up the landforms into barren mountains and valleys and volcanic alleys, exposing new, unweathered rock—which further changed biogeochemical systems.

At some point in the midst of this lively flourishing, the changes led to the entire planet freezing over. By around 720 million years ago, floating icebergs and islands of slush were drifting over the tropical seas of a ‘snowball Earth,’ as the planet lay cocooned within vast sheets of ice. In the stagnant, anoxic waters beneath, life barely carried on—but it did carry on. And after the ice truly loosened its grip, about 630 million years ago, the quiescent biosphere once again surged. As the seas turned bluegreen, saturated again with oxygen, undersea life burst forth in a stunningly rapid increase in biodiversity.

Earth’s Changing Climate

A large building is seen being broken and carried away by a flooding river. Photo: X/@BhavreenMK

This 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.

During 2023, heatwaves killed hundreds in Mexico and the United States alone; heatwaves also struck Europe, China, Laos, and Thailand. Thousands died and hundreds of thousands were displaced by torrential flooding and wildfires in dozens of cities across the United States, Chile, Brazil, Haiti, Spain, China, Japan, South Africa, Ivory Coast, Pakistan, Greece, Libya—to name a few. This is to say nothing of the extensive damage to crops from heat, flood, fire, drought, and extreme winds across the world. As has frequently happened in recent years, 2023 was again declared the hottest year ever measured across the globe. But even more than that, 2023 was likely the hottest in at least a hundred and twenty-five thousand years. Yes, the situation is that far beyond what we consider ‘normal.’

As crazy as the weather has been, we are sure to see worse in the years ahead. This is because the frequency, extent, and intensity of such severe weather is increasing due to global warming caused by the accumulation of excess greenhouse gasses (GHGs)—like carbon-dioxide and methane—that trap heat in the atmosphere. These excess GHGs result directly from industrial and other economic activities linked to burning fossil fuels and destroying forests and wetlands. The excess heat they trap is causing the ice to rapidly melt away from the Arctic Ocean and Greenland, exposing dark waters and rock surfaces that directly absorb even more solar radiation; this then drives its own contribution to further warming—and thus further melting—in what’s called an amplifying feedback loop, one of several in the climate system. Over the coming decades, the lists of nations and cities hit by floods will grow longer, the heatwave death tolls more harrowing, the crop losses much higher. This much we already know will happen, as the globe continues to warm.

The Overshoot Story

[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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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:

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.

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.
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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:
 

Musings on the Anthropocene

[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.

Of Gods and Men and Human Destiny

[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.

On Progress as Human Destiny

[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.

Upheaval and Migration

[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.”

Views of Future Earth

[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.