1 July 2019 OUTLOOK 61
There are many issues here. The lobby is
not all over the West; it’s only in English-
speaking countries, in the UK, US,
Canada and Australia. This is very much
a sort of Anglophone phenomenon.
Secondly, it is not surprising. The big oil
companies have been spending some-
thing like $200 million a year on funding
these lobbies. Obviously, it is in the oil
and coal companies’ interest to pretend
there is nothing wrong. They are actually
following the playbook of the tobacco
companies 20-30 years ago. Naomi
Oreskes, a historian of science, has shown
that they are following an older script.
They have sold the idea that man’s inte
rference in nature is so minuscule that
in the broader scheme of things it is
impossible for him to make an impact.
Look, it is no longer possible to claim
that climate isn’t changing. So, their
second line of defence is that humans
are not changing it but it is happening
on its own. It has been clearly demon-
strated that there are anthropogenic
impacts, it mainly comes from the
burning of fossil fuels. But when it
serves people’s interest, they just tell
lies that are constantly exposed.
The other theme in your new book is
migration, a hot political topic the
world over. How do you see that unf
olding, is the backlash against mig
rants increasing?
Migration and climate change are con-
nected in multiple ways. For example,
when people’s lands are swamped by the
sea they have little option but to move.
Similarly, when there is extreme drought,
as in the Sahel, or desertification, as in
parts of Sudan, people are directly dis-
placed by climate. There is another way in
which migration and climate change are
connected. We live in a world in which
because of communication technology,
information is going around in billions
and billions of bytes every nanosecond,
goods are circling around the world
through logistics technology, things
aren’t made in a single factory anymore,
different factories make different parts,
then they are assembled through these
logistical chains. So, you have goods cir-
cling at endless speed around the planet...
how can you expect that this acceleration
will not affect humans? These communi-
cation technologies are absolutely funda-
mental to migration. Every movement in
the journey is made possible by them. For
example, the payments to the traffickers
are made through phone, the routes are
discovered through phones. Both climate
change and migration are effects of the
same thing—which is acceleration.
Globalisation, both economic and cul
tural, was the mantra in the ’80s and
’90s; you couldn’t say a word against it.
After this explosion of globalisation, do
you think more countries are now
raising barriers for both trade and
people and looking inward?
This neo-liberal ideology behind glo-
balisation was also an aspect of this
acc eleration that we see. I think it’s
cur ious that it is only now that people
are waking up to realise how profoundly
disruptive these new technologies are.
But it’s too late. People are recoiling inhorror from what they have unleashed.
I met a migrant who said that they keep
talking about stopping migration...it
can be done easily, it can be done in five
minutes. I said how and he said just shut
down the internet.
That’s when you realise you are no
longer in control, I mean, is it even
possible to shut down the internet?
Maybe the internet will fight back. It’s
reached a kind of self-awareness which
will not allow itself to be shut down.
That’s the scary and uncanny thing
about it, they can be as nativist as they
like but can they do without their
iPhone? And that iPhone cannot be
made without the logistical system. So,
that’s the paradox—this nativism isusing the same technologies as that
which makes migration possible. They
call it nativism, but if you look at the
sort of stuff that is said by the Indian
right or the Turkish right or the
Australian right, they just copy each
other, saying exactly the same things. Is
there any genuine localism in that?
The other term you touch upon is
‘slow violence’, that the media doesn’t
spend as much time on the violence
unleashed by climate change as on
riots or bomb blasts.
Slow violence is a term coined by literary
critic Rob Nixon. The part of climate
cha nge that get covered are the wildfires
or big tornadoes or cyclones. But the way
climate change is impacting most our
lives is exactly like this terrible heatwave,
like the droughts. They unfold very
slowly, they are not spectacular pro-
cesses for a newspaper to report on. But
they are incredibly violent. People are
dying, they are shortening people’s lives.
The place you keep revisiting in your
writings is the Sundarbans. What is
that attracts you to the mangrove
forests so much?
I have a very long relationship with the
Sundarbans, through an uncle who
used to work there. Over the years I
have visited it a lot. Then I wrote a book
about it, The Hungry Tide. The Sundar-
bans is a very powerful landscape, it
imposes itself upon you, it’s so unique,
so distinct. It is also ecologically very
fragile and it is suffering the impact of
climate change in catastrophic ways.
There was a cyclone in 2009 which
des troyed many lives. Since then we
have seen a massive outmigration from
the Sundarbans...not just people going
abroad but even within India. In Kerala
and in Karnataka, the Bengali is the
working-class people now.
You were one of the first people to sign
a petition against the politics of hate
before the general elections began.
Now the results are out, the new gov
ernment has swept in, how do you
react to it?
I signed the petition because it was really
unobjectionable, I mean who would want
politics of hate? So many writers were
there, sometimes you have to stand in
solidarity with the people in your profes-
sion. Whatever may be the case in these
elections, I don’t think it’s correct to say
it’s just the politics of hate. It’s a much
more complicated scenario than that. O“Nativists raging about
migration cannot do
without their iPhones.
That’s the paradox: they
use the same technology
that enables migration.”“The neo-liberal ideology
behind globalisation is an
aspect of acceleration of
people and goods that’s so
damaging. People are now
horrified, but it’s too late.”