The late English novelist and playwright William Golding may appear an unlikely starting point for understanding the multiple crises convulsing our world today. But, for acclaimed Indian writer Amitav Ghosh, childhood reading in the English-speaking world – including Golding’s Lord of the Flies – has something to answer for here.
These treasured texts of English literature are part of a story of belligerent individualism that readers “imbibe” from an early age, the Kolkata-born author argues. In recent years, Ghosh has emerged as one of the foremost anglophone voices writing about the climate crisis.
In 2018, he became the first English-language writer to receive the Jnanpith Award, India’s highest literary honour. The following year, Foreign Policy magazine named him one of the most important global thinkers of the preceding decade. On Saturday, Ghosh is to deliver a lecture on one of his recent non-fiction works The Nutmeg’s Curse (2021), coinciding with the launch of a new round of activity being set in motion by the Field Day Theatre Company.
The annual lecture is named after the late Seamus Deane, a driving intellectual force behind the original project. Along with Deane, actor Stephen Rea and the late playwright Brian Friel began Field Day in 1980 as an artistic and intellectual response to what seemed like intractable political crisis in the North, then gripped by the 30-year conflict now known as The Troubles.
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This new round of work will examine more contemporary concerns: namely, accelerating climate breakdown and its roots in European colonialism, an intertwined history that Ghosh has long traced.
Rea told The Irish Times that some of the themes explored in his colleague and cofounder’s most celebrated writing hold relevance for dispossessed communities at the front lines of the climate crisis today. “The issues we began to explore in Brian Friel’s Translations – territory, belonging, language and dispossession through renaming – are still current around the world for indigenous peoples,” he said.
“Amitav has made a singular contribution to our understanding of the ways in which issues such as climate justice are closely bound up with our histories of colonialism.”
Ghosh also sees clear crossover between Field Day’s work and his own. “Most of all, [in] questions of place,” he says. “How do we care for a place? How do we inhabit a place? And, equally, issues of humans and non-humans – how they interact with each other.
“How do we tell stories about this? About human and non-human interactions. That’s something I’ve been very concerned with and, in that sense, there’s an overlap with Field Day, I think.” The power of narrative is evidenced, Ghosh points out, in the developmental arc of man-made climate change itself. But while one dominant story, in particular, has driven the crisis, stories also offer possible ways out.
“I think it’s very important to tell stories,” he says. “I mean, that’s partly because I’m a storyteller.
“But, in effect, if we look around us, if we look at the planetary crisis in the broadest possible sense, it is in a sense a crisis that has been brought about by a story: a story of endless profit, endless growth, of individualism.
“And these stories are very deeply planted, especially within the Anglosphere. Children begin to imbibe them from the time they’re in school. They’re made to read Lord of the Flies, for example, which is this whole idea ... that humans are by nature inclined to create a war against all. This isn’t the case at all – it’s just an Anglo view of how the world is.
“So I do think it’s very important for us to create new kinds of narratives. And a lot of my work has been pushing in that direction.”
An established set of narratives that Ghosh’s work closely scrutinises are those surrounding European colonialism. Ireland is particularly germane to these concerns, he says, because it is “where the British created all their colonial methods, that’s where they tried it out first”.
One way he opens up these points for a contemporary audience is through a reconsideration of plant life, the cultural and economic histories tied up with plants and their figuring in language. In Ghosh’s writing, organic matter is not something inanimate or mute. Plants are revealed to be historical subjects with an astonishing power to influence the events framing our lives.
“I’ve become really interested in the whole question of plant sentience,” he says. “There’s a huge literature on it now. We do know that plants can actually experience certain kinds of emotions. They have certain sorts of responses and reactions.”
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In Ghosh’s most recent work, Smoke and Ashes: Opium’s Hidden Histories, as in The Nutmeg’s Curse, plants such as the nutmeg and opium poppy – controlled, commodified and appropriated in the interests of empire – become historical subjects in their own right, shaping world events in critical ways. To illustrate his point, Ghosh underscores the historical roots of the British and Dutch imperial projects as “narco-states”.
“They used opium to finance themselves, especially in Asia, where their revenues rested largely on opium. But it’s a very curious thing to see how opium creates these repetitive patterns throughout history. What opium did to China in the 19th century was to create an absolute political, moral and financial catastrophe for the country. And it took them decades and decades to finally recover in the 20th century. It’s very striking to me today that, with the opioid crisis and the drug crisis in America, generally speaking, we see remarkably similar patterns emerging.”
In 19th-century China as in the US now, Ghosh adds, “the areas that were most affected were areas with mines and the populations that were most affected were working-class people – miners, et cetera – people who did very heavy physical labour. And, so, I think when you see these patterns, you can’t help but feel that this plant, the opium poppy, is actually a historical agent which is creating certain cyclical patterns in history.”
More recently, the author says, instructive details concerning the development of the climate crisis could be spotted in this decade’s Covid-19 pandemic. The public health emergency not only reshaped domestic and international politics, in Ghosh’s eyes – it was a “forerunner”, or dry run, for the big political battles of the 21st century.
It also prompted a degree of undue optimism, he says, as one crisis gave way to other, deeper crises. “I think, on the whole, what we see is that epidemics actually don’t lead to any kind of rethinking. So, for example, the 1918 influenza [Spanish flu] epidemic – immediately after that, you get this huge stock market bubble. People go back to doing whatever they were doing and they do it at triple intensity. And that’s exactly what we see after Covid.”
I think it’s very important to remember that half the greenhouse gases that are in the atmosphere have been put there since 1990. That is, since the end of the Cold War
There were lessons, however, concerning western vulnerabilities to growing climate instability and a lack of preparedness. In the last number of weeks, this has been underscored by the devastation wreaked by hurricanes in the US and flash floods in Spain. Covid-19 was, to Ghosh, “in many ways a forerunner of what’s going to happen as climate change intensifies. And I think it shows us the patterns of certain outcomes.
“So, for example, the standard narrative on climate change is that climate change will devastate poor countries, while allowing rich countries to come through and [find themselves] not being that badly affected. There was the same narrative around Covid.
“You’ll remember in 2019, there was a study done on which countries were the best-prepared for the pandemic and the results were published. Naturally, the US was on top, the UK second, and then a whole string of European countries. And, of course, African countries were right at the bottom.
“But, in fact, the way that it played out was almost the opposite of what this study had found. Many African countries, like Senegal, had very good outcomes, comparatively speaking. Whereas the US and the UK had the worst outcomes – not just in terms of people dying of disease, but [also] the degree of polarisation that it created.”
However, in another important sense, Ghosh believes the world is entering a new chapter – with potentially disastrous outcomes for those most vulnerable to the effects of climate breakdown. “For 400 years, Europe and the West have been dominant across the globe,” he says. “Now, suddenly, we’re finding that it’s no longer dominant – we find especially that Europe has become quite marginal to what’s happening in global politics.”
As UN climate talks concluded at the Cop29 summit in Azerbaijan, in the shadow of a second Trump presidency, Ghosh sees so-called developing nations increasingly adopting a “western, extractivist model” of economic growth. It is one of a number of consequences of 35 years of US global dominance, he says, adding that its decline may produce yet more damaging fallout.
“I think it’s very important to remember that half the greenhouse gases that are in the atmosphere have been put there since 1990,” he says. “That is, since the end of the Cold War, since the ‘unipolar moment’, since the establishment of American hegemony, and along with that went the Washington Model – extractivism, rampant consumerism and so on.
“It was that impetus that has really accelerated the climate crisis. It would have happened at some point, maybe, anyway. But since 1990, since that geopolitical moment, it has hugely accelerated.”
Ghosh even traces the big pollution events choking some of Ireland’s most important freshwater bodies, at Lough Neagh and Lough Corrib, back to the growth-driven policy initiatives of this period.
“Now, the curious thing, of course, is that it’s in this period that the EU put in place these very market-oriented policies, especially in regards to agriculture, pushing models of industrial agriculture, which now have led to disaster.
“In the Netherlands, for example, these huge lakes of nitrogen, which have built up because of industrial farming. So, all of that really goes back to that one geopolitical moment.”
Diminishing US hegemony and a shift towards a multipolar world, however, will not mitigate climate breakdown, Ghosh reflects. Instead, a new contest for geopolitical supremacy will bring about a “massive intensification” of the crisis.
“Basically, it’s a disaster for the climate,” he says. “These wars that have broken out [in Ukraine and the Middle East], because, as we all know, the single most environmentally destructive environmental activity is war.
“These wars are intensifying ... One thing these wars have made clear is where the world’s priorities lie.”
He adds: “Climate as an issue has now become completely marginal, even as we’re seeing more and more climate disasters occurring all around us. We’re living through an absolutely catastrophic conjuncture of events.”
The Seamus Deane Lecture 2024 is scheduled to take place at the Guildhall, Derry, on Saturday, November 30th. Amitav Ghosh and Stephen Rea will also speak at the Royal Irish Academy of Music, Whyte Recital Hall, Dublin, on Sunday, December 1st. That lecture is the flagship Notre Dame Dublin event for the 2024 Notre Dame Forum.
