Climate Crisis in Social Thought: Chakrabarty on Capital & Planetarity

[00:00:02]good afternoon um I'm homie Baba I direct the Mahindra Humanity Center here and I'm delighted to welcome you to a extraordinar for me uh special event um the chakrabati um is an ex a very close friend and if the term isn't somewhat outdated I would say he really has been a sole brother for many many years um this is not a formal introduction um the formal introduction will be given by Professor Emma rotschild who's director of the center for his economics and history history and economics I might have got that wrong but it's impossible for me to be um formal uh with Dees or deu as I call him um but that does not mean that I have not through our relations of informality and formality learned a great deal from him and I just want to talk about two things very briefly it's from the pish that I learned that one's academic work as much as one's personal life should be conducted with a feeling for the ethics of care both the understanding of the vulnerability of people or Planet as well as the caring agency of protection propagation responsibility witnessing care in both the senses care is in being cared worn and care as in bearing and witnessing protecting resisting taking care and I learned this from him um as I say both as a matter of life and as a matter of work and a as a matter of careful reading and for that I'm deeply grateful it was through depa's conversations with me that I understood that even as a saalan one could be caring about the middle classes and one of the some of the best discussions we had was the struggle for decency amongst the middle classes in India something we see in the the new admi am admi party now uh this deep sense of caring across the board in moments of for in moments of vulnerability is extraordinarily important and I think it actually leads to something else and although these are my words the sentiment is the paaes I remember him saying to me a number of times that the aim is not to win the argument but to be able to join the conversation now this is not exactly how he put it but if the sentiment is his and I am delighted that he's here with us today so that we can join in conversation with him and I very much hope that we will have many more opportunities to do so thank [Applause] you um on behalf of the uh Joint Center for history and economics um the Harvard University Center for the environment which is supporting this event and of course the Humanities Center it's a tremendous pleasure and honor to welcome thees chakravati he's one of the leading historians critics intellectuals and thinkers of our time his work is enormously well known to people here um he um rethinking workingclass history um had a huge impact on me and I'm sure on many others provincializing Europe postcolonial thought and historical difference he has a major book coming out about called The Calling of History s jadun Saka and his Empire of Truth he's written extensively about the nature of history and the relationship between history and the present um his biography reveals some to me unsuspected um um but for today extremely suitable um achievements his first degree was in physics he then picked up another MBA degree um and in many ways the work that he's going to be talking about today is profoundly about history and economics and the nature of capital it draws on his ongoing work on the climate of history and this work has already profoundly changed the way people think about history it's if it were not quite the wrong metaphor I would say it's had an electrifying effect on um on how many of us think about history um it it's actually not a surprise that such a wide extent of this University should be part of inviting Dees to be here the center for the environment with its deep roots in in Earth sciences and geology social sciences history and economics Humanity C and I hope um and expect that we will be inspired by Dees to think about what we can do to bring the sort of thought he's engaged in to our own home disciplines so warm welcome def thank you for [Applause] coming thank you homie thank you Emma both for this very warm welcome and also to Emma for the invitation to come and speak um I think homie is right in communicating our shared sentiment that arguments are not there to be one but to be joined um as in as forms of conversation but since I was coming to Harvard I thought in deference to and out of respect from a very well-known Harvard personality I should try and be an example of the argumentative Indian on this occasion so I will begin on a pical note uh I hope a civil and gentle pical note um after I published my first essay on the climate problem looking at it from a historian's point of view the climate of History 4 thesis um the critic and theorist slavo reek um criticized me um in his book uh living in the end times and the criticism was interesting uh to me um and I'll start with his criticism and try to answer his criticism in my talk um some of his criticisms concerned points about the true nature of hegelian dialectic which I will not discuss today but he also made a point about the relationship between anthropogenic climate change and the capitalist mode of production that provides me with a starting point for this talk so responding to my proposition that we needed to think deep history of the species and the much short history of capital together responding to this proposition J wrote that since and I'm quoting the fate of the whole with the wh by which he within bracket he says life on Earth since the fate of life on Earth the whole hinges on what goes on in what was formerly one of its parts um that is capitalism we also have to accept the paradox that the key struggle is the particular one one can solve the universal problem of the survival of the human species only by first resolving the particular deadlock of the capitalist mode of production so you have to uh resolve the problems of capitalism uh because that is the only way you can address the climate question the key as he says to the ecological crisis does not reside in ecology as such it resides in capital I get versions of these criticisms in other forms particularly in France but elsewhere too that that I don't give enough make enough room for capitalism or that I don't give make enough room for questions of Justice between nations and human beings so I I'll return to those criticism now I have no mods to pick with the proposition that um capitalism acts as approximate how whatever we call capitalism acts as approximate cause or an efficient cause for the emission of greenhouse gases uh that warms up the atmosphere and the oceans as well but I do think that to understand the climate crisis only as an accentuation of the problem of capitalism the deadlock of the capitalism of the production is to miss misunderstand the present historical moment we inhabit u in other words it is to see the present only as uh as a phase of capitalism um and to miss out I think on the very particular ways uh in which the popularization of the signs of anthropogenic climate change forces on us the popularization of the science forces on us and ask meaning commentators critics and other interested members of the reading public in the humanities and in the interpretive social sciences the way in which that science forces on us an emergent form of Consciousness an emergent mode of thinking that I will here describe as planetary um and what I want to disting make a distinction uh proposed distinction between is uh what I could call Global forms of thinking and what I'm calling emergent planetary forms of thinking they're connected but just for the sake of clarity of exposition I would want to make a discuss distinction um if you look at the literature U the literature on globalization and the popular literature on global warming date from the same period early 1990s even though we in the human sies we're all doing globalization and we not really doing climate change or global warming until the fourth report of the ipcc came out and the issue became popular which was after 2007 but the if you go to a library and look at the shelves on Popular Science on global warming you'll find the date from the same period roughly the globalization literature has developed very interesting distinctions between what they call worldwide and Global um Ari laur's work U actually has been very interesting in developing that distinction but broadly speaking in the globalization literature when the word planetary has been used it has actually meant the globe um if you go through I mean just to take take a text at random for instance Carl Schmid's book on the nomos of the earth and he uses the word planetary many times in that book so even in the 50s thinking about the world that Europeans made which was actually you know enjoys chapes terms the movement towards making human world global eventually a movement towards seeing us as living on a planet that is global in its shape it's like a globe uh you will find there are many instances where he uses the word planetary to mean Global just to give you one example at random um from Schmid I'm just reading out a couple of sentences the first attempts in international law to divide the Earth as a as a whole according to the new Global concept of geography began immediately after 1492 these were also the first adaptations of the new planetary image of the world um the English Island at the time of the Treaty of utre in 173 remained a part of the European planetary order um so in some ways if I think of the of the as a historian or the literature of how we had thought the planetary in the both during the phase of globalization as well as in the phase of studying globalization I kind of in my head uh bookend that literature with two Publications um one is of course Joyce chaplain's book recent book on the history of circumnavigation of the planet whereby the planet is experienced by us as Global and an an article interesting article that came out in the American historical review before Joyce's um book by a young historian Ben lazier uh looking at the famous uh photo of the of the earth rise that was taken from a spaceship where what you have is kind of humans looking in looking towards the Earth from outside and finding that the planet is global and that's where we all live um I want to sort of say that if that's how the planet is thought about um the word Global in that sense is fundamentally a not only a human humanistic concept but it's a concept that necessarily involves human beings so to think about the planet in the mode of uh thinking that attends globalization as a problem the planetary is something that ref refers back to humans on the planet it's our planet we through the expansion of Europe through the expansion of trade through Empires through colonies increasingly through interconnections have made our lives Global um and in that sense it's a deeply uh it's a concept that deeply implicates or implicates human in it if you look at the idea of the planet in the climate science um it's interesting that what you begin to get is what you might call interplanetary Consciousness in other words in climate science this planet is one planet amongst many and you literally see this in the careers of climate science all the well-known climate scientists um so in a way climate science the idea of the planet in in the literature and climate science drives a wedge between the planetary of globalization literature and the expression planetary on the climate science side um for even though the current phase of the warming of this planet is considered to be anthropogenic by climate scientists this is only contingently so humans have no intrinsic role to play in the science of planetary warming as such in fact one of the books there is taught the textbook in Chicago geophysics and I assume elsewhere published by Cambridge by one of my colleagues here um Ray hbert where people do mathematical exercise on warming of planets it's actually called planetary science uh so that the idea of a planet idea of a planet warming up is not necessarily or exclusively related to this planet as such and therefore the science is not even specific to Earth it is part of what might be called planetary science what is called planetary science and therefore it does not belong to an Earthbound imagination so our current warming is a is an instance of planetary warming and and it's a phenomenon but warming is a phenomenon that can be seen and has been seen in the case of other planets too uh so if you look at the carers of two well-known um concerned um climate scientists and another person who is a chemist Who's involved himself in the question of climate crisis and I'm thinking of the American James Hansen the NASA scientist and the English chemist uh la loock la loock you will find that they both became interested in the question of anthropogenic global warming by beginning to study warming on other planets so Hansen used to study warming of Venus um lavelock during a visiting appointment at Nasa when he was actually studying Mars became interested in the question of that eventually became the Gaia question um and so the other problem where you see it very clearly that that the planetary what I'm calling planetary awareness is not necessarily tied to this planet is a question that comes up in climate literature all the time but it's actually a question that was there before global warming happened in the literature in the literature like in books on um P humber's book on planetary science it's called the habitability problem and the habital problem ask why is this planet habitable while other planets are not um this is this is the question at the heart of lovelock's idea of Gaia it's a question that is Central to a book uh written by a an English geologist and his colleague Yan zitz called the goldilock planet which is actually again trying to explain this question why this planet is habitable so the implicit implicit question is that is why are other planets not habitable and therefore you can see that you you're thinking planets comparatively and that's why I'm saying that even the planetary Consciousness is actually interplanetary Consciousness that's the beginning of it that's where we come to the question of climate science and in that in that sense I would say the use of the word planetary is somewhat different from the use of the word planetary in the globalization lit in other words the planet is thought about in different ways I mean uh when Carl Schmidt writes about planetary there's no other planet in view this is the planet he's talking about and that happens um so and the other point I want to make also in the beginning polemically is that the climate crisis is not um a crisis that could have been foreseen within the problematic of globalization I mean the problematic of globalization raises other problems of Injustice multiculturalism capitalism its inequalities NE liberalism all of those question is the climate crisis does not come even out of old environmental problems you know and sometimes in environmental literature you will find what they call KET C you know whereby you pollute in the course of industrialization and then develop the capacity to take care of the pollution the climate crisis defies those sorts of propositions uh it actually comes from this other much bigger question uh about the universe and the climate crisis brings into view the Collision for the running up against one another of three histories that from the point of view of human history are formally assumed or have been so far formally assumed to work at such different and distinct Paces that they treated as as processes separate from one another for all practical purposes and the three histories that the crisis bring together um the history of the earth system which is something you have to know in order to understand what the nature of the crisis es the history of life including that of human human evolution on the planet the species question and the more recent history of industrial civilization humans now unintentionally straddle these three histories that operate on different scales and speeds what this means is that contrary to what re uh is saying in criticism of my proposition our understanding of this crisis does not lend itself self easily to politics uh precisely because it it kind of traverses all these multiple scales so the very language with which we speak of climate crisis is also shot through with the problem of human and inhuman scales of time take the most ubiquitous distinction we make in our everyday life our everyday proves between non-renewable sources of energy and the Renewables fossil fuels we consider non-renewable on our terms so when you talk about solar or wind we think fossil is non-renewable but as of the British geologist Brian lavel who's also acted as an adviser to BP and other oil companies point out not usefully uh where he says that fossil fuels are indeed renewable if only we think of them on a scale that is in human so to read his sentence he says 200 million years from now a form of life requiring abundant oil for some purpose should find that plenty has formed since our times so you can see that even in that distinction what is think of scale so paleoclimatologists tell a very long history when it comes to explaining the significance of anthropogenic global warming there is first of all the question of evidence so you can't even what I'm saying is that both the Justice argument some forms of Justice arguments some and some forms of capitalist arguments want to contain this story hold it back into the history of last 500 years whereas if you look at the definition of the problem the the very evidence on which it's based um different kinds of evidence um raises questions of many hundreds of thousands of years U the icore samples that have been critical to establishing the problem of climate change more than 8,000 800,000 years old there are besides paleoclimatic records of the past in fossils and other geological materials and again in Brian lel's book but geologists normally talk about a dramatic warming event which they actually go back to to uh kind of U foresee the sort of problems that could happen from very radical warming which is called the PM the event which took place at the paleos in thermal maximum which took place 55 million years ago long before they were human beings but when the temperature went up by 78 degrees over 10,000 Indians but they they kind of go to that archive to show what happened to life when when temperature went up by that and carbon dioxide went up to draw conclusions about what might happen now and point out that the point that the the the some of the sense of Crisis comes about from the fact that temperatures are going up over a much much fast at a much faster rate so what went up you know we're not sort of putting our temperature up over another 10,000 years we're doing it over decades and centuries at at most um so how far the Arc of the geological history explaining the present climate K projects I'm just seeing this partly to give you a sense of the scale argument that I'm going to mount soon um so how far the arc projects is seen from the itle of a book by another colleague of mine in the geophysics division David Archer's book The Long Thor the subtitle of which says how human humans are changing the next 100,000 years of Earth's climate and where he basically says a mankind has become a Force in climate comparable to the orbital variations that drive glal cycles so I won't go into the details of his um argument here but simply to say that there all agreed that eventually if we did nothing about the climate problem there are processes in the carbon cycle of the Earth where actually the planet will clean up our mess but again over a very inhuman time scale um so therefore I to go back to homie's very generous introduction the sense of Crisis actually comes from a sense of caring if one didn't care about industrial civilization if one didn't care about the values we really value in our way of life we wouldn't have a sense of Crisis um and therefore even and that's one reason why the scientists have tried to popularize the science so so what I'm saying is that drawing a very sort of Rough and Ready distinction between knowledge and what I was calling consciousness of thought which is that all of the climate science remained of course as knowledge and as knowledge it's changed or theories of global cooling then there theor of global warming but the knowledge now is becoming popularized thanks to the scientist and the scientists are popularizing it because they have a sense of Crisis that sense of Crisis doesn't come from the science itself it comes out of their citizenly involvement in our Collective life or their human involvement in our Collective life so somewhere there is a question of care which actually defines the a scientific problem as a crisis and therefore and it's only with because it's defined as a crisis and they're popularizing their own researches that I'm talking about what was once knowledge becoming uh a general mode of Consciousness just as in U globalization literature you could say that that the Earth was spherical um that you could go around that there was a scientific version of that knowledge but by the late 20th century it was part of the experience of many human beings in going around it from flying from other kinds of experiences similarly uh there's a deeply humanist question in all this which I'll return to at the end of my talk which is the question of care caring which is where the question of Crisis is um so the climate crisis thus produces problems we Ponder on very different and incompatible scales of time policy Specialists think in terms of years decades at most centuries while politicians in democracies think in terms of their electoral Cycles understanding what anthropogenic climate change is and how long its effects might last calls for thinking on very large scales scales that defy the usual measures of time that inform normal human Affairs David Archer goes to the heart of the problem here when he acknowledges that the million year time scale of one of the carbon cycles of the planet the largest cycle he says is irrelevant for political considerations of climate change on human time scales yet he insists that it remains relevant to any understanding of anthropogenic climate change since he says ultimately global warming will last for as long as it takes for the slow processes to work out so significant gaps between cognition and action between being intellectually able to foresee a problem and being able to act on it thus opens up in the existing literature on climate problem um gaps between what we scientifically know about it and how we think about it when we treat it as a problem to be handled by the very human means at our disposal these latter means have been developed for addressing problems we face on familiar scales of time I call these gaps or openings in the landscape of our thoughts about climate Rifts because they're like fault lines on a a seemingly continuous surface we have to keep Crossing or straddling them as we think of climate change they inject a certain degree of contradictoriness in our thinking for we being asked to think on different scales at once so in the end they as I said we we both in the end thinking climate we both think the global planetary the global being a very human invested category the human is always present in the idea of the global and the planetary the planet of J James Hansen's or James love loocks which actually is not a human invested concept to begin with you know it's their care that brings that into the fold of public discussion so I want to discuss three such Rifts one is now I I forgot to bring my stick I thought I'd just Nam those Rifts on some sort of screen to help you remember and also having something on on a screen in my experience helps when your mind is on a flight Behavior you can just stop listening and and then I when I forgot it I thought i' the room would have Windows unfortunately it doesn't uh so just be on a flight behavior when you want to but let me just name you that the name the three Rifts I want to talk about the first Rift I want to talk about that I see in the literature is between the various regimes of probability that govern our everyday lives in modern economies these regimes having to be supplemented in our Thinking by the knowledge of the potential radical uncertainty of the climate system so probability versus some kind of radical uncertainty which cannot be brought within probabilistic thinking is the first Rift I want to talk about the second Rift is really turns around the story of our necessarily divided human lives where we are you between us amongst ourselves about Justice about other things the rift between that having to be then supplemented in our Thinking by a story of our participation as a dominant species in the human in the history of life of the plan on the planet and that in other words the story of our participation in as a species in the Life on in the history of Life on this planet irrespective of what divides us and the third drift is really having to wrestle with our inevitably anthropocentric thinking in order to supplement it with forms of disposition towards the planet that do not put humans first and I'm not saying we can overcome these Rifts I'm really presenting them as something that almost um uh you know in Old postcolonial terms gives us a new form of double consciousness so let me go to probability and the radical um okay I'll have to edit a lot of it out in the interest of time um it's quarter of two so I'll probably speak for another half an hour and uh I can't I can't compress it anymore than that so the so I'll kind of put put my points bluntly and quickly so reability but radical uncertainty so it's simple which is that um our Modern Life in industrial civilization is ruled by regimes of probability from uh probabilistic thinking from evaluating lives for Actuarial purposes to working of money and stock markets we manage our societies by calculating risks and assigning probability values to them and I actually I discussed some of the economics literature on climate change in this section and I'll just simply tell you what my proposition is uh the proposition is that that when you look at the risk literature in climate science with the sole exception of one Harvard Economist um Martin whitesman whom read and to the degree that I understand the economics propositions um there's an assumption that because we know the relationship broadly between greenhouse gas emissions the the quantity of green gas emissions and the nature of the rise of temperature that somehow the risk of the rise of temperature uh the risk that follows from it can be calculated and we can therefore make investments now to take care of those risks then there are sort of Divisions about the discounting rate and how much we should invest now how much we invest later all those discussions are there but that's fundamentally what what economists are doing so now now I'm talking about Market you know laav J is not a market friendly person now I'm talking about Market friendly person so interestingly like people who don't like capitalism say let's work on capitalism first to fix the problem and people who love capitalism also say let's work through capitalism to fix the problem so I'm now talking about people who love capitalism or love the market and there the proposition is that that this is a risk interestingly in when you read climate scientists it's very clear so you know risk is basically the idea of risk is um and risk is an uncertainty that you can quantify if you can't quantify it there's a certain kind of uncertainty which is not risk which is something else and in the climate literature this figure of this radical uncertainty moves around the whole question of Tipping Point so the Tipping Point is when you when the warming goes to a certain point let's say 4° cus and other positive feedback loops come into play and make that 4 degre 6° 7° 8 degrees and you have run away global warming the way in which now if you read the literature you'll find that the reason why you can't model for a Tipping Point is that it's a very complex process some of it is stochastic some of it probably can be modeled for but some of it's like a chaotic process like a complex chaotic process so you can't actually model for it on the other hand because climate scientists some of them work but particularly paleo climate paleoclimatologist work as historians do basically the history of the planet is their archive the history of other planets is their archive and they go to it so they actually think of Tipping Point as a perfect perfectly repeatable phenomenon even though you can't model for it and when you read climate scientists uh what's very interesting at that point is they their metaphors become completely vitalist and the best example is in a book by Wallace broker the climate scientist and the ocean ocean scientist from Columbia University where he actually says climate is like a beast and you you keep kicking it and it kicks back at a certain point now you don't know when the Beast will kick back so what happens is that in the risk literature see in the risk literature the ultimate position is What's called the the precautionary principle the maximum principle so if you think of an outcome as um low probability but High U uh the damage is high you you that's a kind of Risk insurance you have uh but I'm saying this is a this tipping point is a particular problem of uncertainty which is not a risk proposition and even in the climate scientists the example are historical so so just to finish off on this POS this the first drift I've been talking about so the first drift I speak of organizes itself around the question of the Tipping Point of the climate a point Beyond which global warming that could be catastrophic for humans so that such a point exists is not in doubt and um let me just quickly heart quickly end this by saying so the only Economist uh who actually takes a very radical position on this when one of his pieces is Martin weitman from this University where he says in one of his essays that if this if the truth is that economists can't make policy about the climate crisis then so be it and we should accept but that's not a general position that Economist would normally take um so so the Tipping Point and the probability regimes are my first Rift in terms of scales in terms of because the Tipping Point prob question arises from Deep sort of paleontological paleoclimatic climatological evidence my second proposition my second proposition is about what I call our divided lives as humans and our life as a collected Collective shared Life as a dominant species again I'll have to rush through the propositions I can come back to to the details that are in discussion so think of the and here I come into the Justice question which divides us now the fundamental point about the Justice question which has been made by many people now some economists and some political economists too is that it comes from it's a legitimate question comes from the fact that if there are you know 10050 or so many nations in the world 90% of the emissions come from about 12 or 14 Nations India and China being part of it if you look at Humanity as a whole then most of the emissions are produced by one5 of the of humanity and the reason is that the poor don't emit very much so the Justice question comes from this proposition that if some if a minority is are having the benefits of emissions but a majority are going to suffer the consequences why shouldn't there be Justice in the process of mitigation of the problem now I'll come to the Justice question um soon but let me say um kind of in Brackets as is where again if you think about the climate problem the climate problem our climate problem today anthropogenic climate change is historically an injustice problem it has historically the way it has happened there's been Injustice in it but actually doesn't it's not necessarily logically inherently a Justice question and that's another reason why it's not of it doesn't fall into the into the bracket of into the basket of environmental problems I'll tell you why so if you do a mental thought experiment of imagining yourself back in 1917 the balv revolution revolution is happened and Stalin has lost to Trotsky and there's been a global socialist Revolution unlike Stalin's socialism is one country and the world has let's assume same amount of people uh wonderfully distributed prosperity it's much more egalitarian but the basis of that Prosperity is the use of fossil fuel the climate crisis would be worse because together we would have put out even more greenhouse gases than we've done the fact that we've not put out more greenhouse gases than we've already done is because most people are poor so what I'm saying it's it's logically not a Justice inuman Justice question but historically it has been so the Justice people emphasize the historical aspect of it and therefore tell a story of imperialism the first two people who put forward the Justice argument were two Indian environmentalists Anil Agarwal and Sunita Naran the late Anil Agarwal and Sun Narayan who wrote a little booklet called um the um the subtitle was about was about global warming 1991 and the subtitle was a case of a environmental colonialism but though that bamlet was the first place where the argument was made that in order to achieve Justice you have to calculate emissions per capita and and this has become this became accepted in the Kyoto Protocol and per and therefore sometimes in fact out of guilt out of sense of justice it's been accepted in Western countries and many people will say we Australia for instance will always say our per capita are so much more than other people who should do something and they should do something I they have a terrible government that wants to do nothing and actually is regressive but again I'm talking about scales of different histories it's really what kind of simultaneously avows and disavows the the particular feature of human history that connects Histories on different scales in the question of per capita is the question of population I mean the you know so the per capita helps uh in fact when there have been revisionist thinking with inside India in 2009 the Indian environment Minister which who is not the environment Minister now Jam Ramesh actually made a statement in the parliament where he said look you're going on about per capita but if we had been able to solve our population problem you know we wouldn't have been able to put forward this per capita argument so we making a virtue of one of our failures uh he said if you had also been economically developed we wouldn't have had the advantage of making this problem but that's not my point my point is not is not polemical I'm simply saying if you look at the population question then three things come up from the literature one is the question of increase of population clearly a phenomenon of post industrialization post 50s and has something to do the even the sheer increase of population I'm not talking about poverty has something to do with fossil fuel in artificial fertilizers and in the provision of uh Power for irrigation for artificial irrigation if you think of the distribution of population which will actually play a role in how the climate crisis plays out there's a very interesting observation in many in much of the literature which is this that whenever the geologists look at past cases of global warming on this planet species survive and and have survived previous case of global warming by migrating migrating is a natural uh mode of responding to global warming you go to more inhabitable climes what is the problem now both other non-human species and human beings who want to move away from their habitable zones will find that it's very hard to move because there are other humans standing in the way because we are everywhere now when you look at but when you look at ask the question when did hum human beings go everywhere that process was completed long before capitalism long before industrialization so the last part of the world that was to be occupied were the Pacific Islands and that happened some four 5,000 years ago so that's the other question of in which even the poor today participate in the history of the species the third qu point which has been made recently by a geologist from Duke University Peter half in an interesting suggestive intriguing somewhat controversial essay that was published in uh the Royal Society journal from Britain where he argues uh what he calls the technosphere in other words he argues um that um the num that the why the reason why we're able to support 7 billion in future 10 billion human beings on the planet is because of the all the connections that modern tech technology has made not just worldwide web but you know shipping all kinds of connections and he said if you today took away these connections human population would collapse to 10 to 12 million on the planet so he argues that the very fact that we value human lives very the very fact that we're not proposing that human beings die from climate change even though some unfortunately will um what enables so many of us to actually exist on the planet is the technology we have produced so in a way he he has an argument which is not a geologist argument that we are not sovereigns of the technosphere because we are so dependent on the technosphere to actually Keep Us Alive so in a sense however you go U he has an argument that the technosphere has a problem of not being able to recycle its waste which is CO2 and therefore the technosphere will actually need more energy not less in order to have recycling mechanisms within it but I'm simply giving these examples to say that what conjoins much larger scale histories with more immediate history of capitalism in the in the justice issue is population and so while you know we are we will fight there's a wonderful essay that Edward Wilson has uh in his book on social creatures where on creatures that are called you that he call usocial creatures creatures that form societies and he says that any creature that forms socities including us but also ants and bees and wasps uh he says that one of the critical characteristics of usocial creatures is the tendency to defend the nest in other words social creatures fight amongst themselves because their primary solidarity is not to the entirety of the species the primary solidar and then you know he can come to it through sort of selfish Gene type of arguments uh kinship selection arguments but he doesn't go into there but I'm simply saying I'm not saying that there are evolutionary biological reasons why we will fight but there's an interesting argument as to why human beings will fight and but this argument at least uh the the point about our being divided is that it's very clear from the literature that even though we call it anthropogenic human anthropogenic global warming the the expression anthropogenic or human induced global warming the expression human comes under the most extreme suspicion the discussion of Justice right because you say why is it Humanity it's really how Humanity breaks up and where you a portion blame but at the same time I'm saying that the justice issue which takes the form of per capita calculation indirectly raises the question of population and I'm saying in population history we find a history of human beings which connects both long-term developments and short-term post-industrial developments my third drift is uh this I'm just as you can see I'm U skipping over is really around this question are human special the moral dilemma of the anthropos so the Oxford moral philosopher John broom who actually uh worked on this U problem of U actually was one of the writers of the climate change report of 2007 and has a very interesting book called ethics for a warming Planet uh raises this question before I raise this question I should also say that you know because people have come up with the word anthropocene not a formal word yet but becoming popular um there's a paper written by the historian John mcneel and some climate people Paul kudon included who are trying to date this question you know trying to give the answer to the question as to from when did anthropocene begin and they at least argue that the anthropocene this human inded climate change the emissions curve it shows a huge leap of really exponential growth from the the 50s on because that's the time when they say if you if you if you look at it that's the time when other things grow exponentially like Global figur for population real gdps foreign direct investment daming of Rivers Water use fertilizer consumption Urban population paper consumption transport motor vehicle telephones International tourism and MacDonald restaurants um and they say this is when it really has a more recent kick interesting thing I should notice is of course if you think of this period and this comes back to this whole question of what is who is anthropos good for who who is for whom is fossil fuel good this is exactly the period of two kinds of developments both in the west and in the non-west in the non-west this is the period of decolonization and the period of building dams which eventually one day will lead to neoliberal economies and you can't write the history of this period as a human historian completely ignoring that Global consumerism also addresses certain questions of Justice or inequalities of consumption so if I think about the kind of Pride that an ordinary Indian takes in his smartphone or iPhone or a cheap substitute uh this is part of what they're calling the beginning of anthropos and it's also the period in the west when consumer durables become household uh Commodities so the washing machine the refrigerator are all introduced in this period and actually ad if you go back and look at the advertisement they're actually advertised as contributing to women's Freedom so in a way the qu the I mean we're in this point where you ask okay so was anthropos bad for us didn't it also help freedom and John broom asked this question he says look ultimately it must raise this question as to who uh is this this thing good for um nature good for and he said I can't answer that question absolutely he said there's an absolute question to be asked in moral philosophy what is nature good for but he say I'll tell you this that nature is good when it's good for human beings and therefore we need to I mean even the argument for sustaining nature is because it's good for us so that actually raises this question that you know are we special on what there's a in a funny way when you read this argument that on what grounds do we base our almost exclusive claims to Nature and you know I say the word exclusive because bakov SM and other Scholars actually have shown how human beings are now consuming most of the biosphere of the planet and we consume almost 90% of what the planet produces so there is somehow in that right in that thinking that we have the right to to consume thus for our welfare there's this question question that comes up implicitly on what do we base our rights to appropriate at the cost of other species the maximum the 90% 95% of the biosphere what the biosphere produces the question is very reminiscent actually of a question that Europeans often ask themselves while taking other people's lands forcibly or otherwise by what rights do we take other people's land and you will remember all the debates word Victoria the Spanish uh priests and event down to Lo and down to Australia New Zealand there's a similar question that comes up um and that in that then raises this question do we have this right and so on the one hand there John uh rooms type argument that nature is good when it's good for us um and when you when you but if you think of this question of human beings being special it's very clear again to I'm carrying on my pmic with J that the question is not a modern question the specialness of human beings has a long history much before capitalism and I mean if one source must be religions and as a broad as a broad generalization which we can again go back into I I'll put forward this idea which I want to more work on but it's a provisional idea so I'm happy to receive criticisms here is my proposition that if you look at what are called ancient religions like African religions Australian orig religions religions that are that have totemistic sort of features and think of what durheim said about totemism where he said that in totemistic religions man is always conceived of as a double both man and animal and if you think of those religions where you know you get the feeling of that human beings are not sitting outside of an idiot box watching Animal Planet in ancient religions humans are part of the Animal Planet they eat animals animals eat them you know being getting eaten being eaten eating are all part of the deal of life if you think of what Jasper once called um axial religions other was religions that came into being after the first urban Revolution that seemed to me religions that thought of a transcendental God whether in Islam or in Hinduism or in Christianity also propounded man as having a special place in Cosmos so actually I find the modern religions much more invested in creating this special place for men so I'm just simply saying the argument that humans are special and somehow we have a right to the what the planet produces is again of a vintage that is much much older than the history of capitalism the most radical uh statement I have read in this context is uh really in James llok book The Vanishing face of ga where and whatever you think of Gaia I mean it's contested Theory where he actually has this um statement where he says and it's like the motto of the book he says if you want to think of the welfare of the planet stop putting humans first but you know the interesting thing about sentence is that even that is not as an as anti- anthropocentric as it sounds in the next sentence he says if you want to survive that is on the planet stop put humans first so it's kind of an enlightened anthropocentrism the best you can do is an enlightened anthropocentrism and I'm simply saying that our anthropocentrism might be accentuated by a consumerist capitalism uh my friends in business school who work on uh researches that actually took place before laptop was invented tell me that U that these manufacturing companies were very interested in producing gadgets and maybe true of iPhones and gadgets that would develop an intimate relationship with the consumer something that you'll take to bed um um many single people take laptops to bed you know and put it on thean sort of email and do those things of that sort but so consumerism may have accentuated the anthropocentrism but anthropocentrism is something we are almost trapped in so even when you look at somebody like James lavelock who you know cares for human beings the what he can put forward is the most radical proposition even when he says don't put human first he's actually saying it's in your interest not to put yourself first so that you don't get into these problems so I called it kind of an enlightened anthropocentrism it's the best you can do and that has a long history so with now I will now come to the last section then concluding section of my um so that's and I'll just read out the LA the next three or four pages and then we'll open up for discussion and I'll try and edit even this so that in the interest of time so for the first time in their history humans of Fai faced with the question of there being actors over two completely different scales of time scales that have been described respectively as human and inhuman the structures we inhabit regimes of probability that govern our everyday lives the habits of thought that go with them are all made for scales that are human some of these habits are probably even of evolutionary origins I mean uh this question comes up in the risk literature like someone like K sunin calls it a heuristic variable um question as to why do people trust anecdotes more than expert opinion so why do people say you know it's been so cold can't be global warming and there's an there's an interesting so that what s called heuristic variables could also be evolutionary James laok actually says it's possible that anecdotes helps us to survive and therefore we have trust grown to trust anecdotes more um thinking anecdotally your trusting experience must have been crucial to human that's what it says add to this problem of our evolved capacities evolved habits the problem of the calendar for Global action that the scientists on the ipcc recommend to avoid dangerous climate change that is to keep the average warming below 2° C we need to use up our remaining qu of carbon emissions 500 gatons by 2040 that's what the fifth report of ipcc says the calendar for Global act concerted global and climate change short of anything like geoengineering is a very finite calendar that is if you care if you which is why the question comes why two degrees it's out of care the battle for interhuman justice which is where one could locate the larger story of struggle against capital is an infinitely open calendar you know it's down to the day of kayamat that you could go on fighting for justice Dera is good on that while some of our Collective inability to act on the finite calendar of climate action is due no doubt to the self-interested work of those privileged individuals and corporations and institutions whose material interests are threatened by the action on the emission on the emission of greenhouse gases some of it is also due to the problems of scale that the crisis involves and this is where that I said the Gap opened up between cognition and action in fact the radically uncertain Factor in the coming few decades is not the weather or climate the radically the most uncertain factor in the coming few decades in terms of a human understanding of this crisis are humans themselves you can draw a chart showing how the climate will behave as the temperature go up you can't draw a chart showing how humans will behave as the climate becomes nastier and when humans will behave so we roughly know the how climate will react and we know in yor Frederick's terms that the future is not what it used to be but what we do not know is how humans will act in the coming few decades will we negotiate for a global calendar of concerted action will that fail will geoengineering emerge as a real option will that lead to conflicts or human stewardship of the planet will the struggle over the deadlock of capitalist M of production become more acute than ever will there be a market-based workable solution to our climate trouble we do not know but what we know is that a new perspective on human history has emerged scientists speak of nine planetary boundaries that humans whatever their political choices must not overstep we debate the carrying capacity of the planet we discuss population biology for humans or let me take the discussion back to where I started to reject formulation of the problem and I'm quoting J so this is my the argumentative Indian performance of course D writes the natural parameters against our environment are in independent of capitalism or socialism he's quoting me they Harbor the natural parameters a Potential Threat to all of us independently of Economic Development political system Etc However the fact that their stability has been threatened by the dynamic of global capitalism nonetheless has a stronger implication than the one Allowed by chakrabati in a way we have to admit the whole is contained by its part that the fate of the whole hinges on what go goes on in what was formerly one of its parts that let us suppose that J is right in his prescription for Action win the battle against the capitalist mode of production and the whole life on Earth will be secured again but the more immediate fact of relevance to this debate is that even J now has to build do something that Marx never thought of doing he has to build into the analytics of capital the story of something that has existed for a period much much longer than the history of capital and something that will one can say this with complete Assurance survive the domination of capital which is the story of life on Earth marks took it for granted this is the sign of what I was calling an emerging planetary Consciousness which I locate and reject in the same way that he locates in me a faulty reading of hegel's dialectic um so our action on climate change will be routed through all that divides us we will legitimately fight on issues of immediate Justice whatever the impc ation of such conflicts for the calendar of global action on climate change but one thing is sure there will be no going back on the new perspective on The Human Condition that is now gradually becoming General so whatever our political positions on climate change it will increasingly be difficult to pursue them without being broadly aware of how the Earth system works how the history of Life on this planet has worked out and where humans figure in it overall thank you very much [Applause] by asking say bit more un right sure yeah well I mean briefly what it seems to me like looking at the stern report um what the economist go to is actually uh what I might broadly call the physics of climate change rather than the paleoclimatological evidence of climate change so the physics of climate change creates a it's not a linear model but creates a model uh which broadly where broadly you can say that within certain confidence level so much increasing greenhouse gas um will warm the temperature by so much and these might be possible implications right the impact volumes will do that the Tipping Point argument doesn't come out of modeling it comes out of historical valoc climatological so it actually doesn't as I was saying the Tipping points may be structurally such that you can't model for them because there might be a chaotic process involved and not just a probabilistic process involved um at least that's my impression from reading the literature and and therefore the Tipping Point argument doesn't lend itself self to calculation of risks so it's not even the maximum security principle you know it's not even you can't say okay the probability is low you can't say the probability is low and that's why James Hansen you know I quoted W Brooker but James Hansen for instance says climate system is not lethargic again a vitalist metaphor but he's simply saying you know it can happen in 10,000 years it can also happen in decades so the historical evidence suggests that it can happen suddenly and it's very hard to make policy against something that is not even covered by the maximum security principle of the risk literature that's what I was saying and therefore I was saying that therefore it's it's not accidental that the Tipping Point argument comes from much longer histories which is paleoclimatological histor whereas the physics argument comes from you know most of late 19th century experiments on to sort of healing temperature records and now satellite you know all kinds of observations so that um so that comes out of what seems more easily modeled in I think someone didn't yeah I think you can hear me if I yeah that I might not even be able to formulate into a question and I think that's a lot of what you you presented some quandries that are very difficult to formulate into question questions um it seems like as it's Dawning on some of the Insiders to The Climate debate the depth of the challenges of um not only planetary justice but the time scales that we're having to think on that we're beginning to realize that we can't actually sort through the climate problem rationally like our our probabilistic models aren't working um and then there's the the problem of of thinking ethically we haven't really made much progress on thinking about our commitments to Future generations and commitments to other species um John broom points out that uh we um you know the way moral philosophy tends to work is the philosophers do this work thinking about the problem often centuries ahead of the solution and we don't have that kind of ability with climate change we have we have to think through how to deal with these problems morally in a in a very short time frame and philosophers are just just getting on it and so so what I see going on amongst people like Mike Hume and Andrew revkin is that there's this collapse of a rational discourse into a sort of the wicked problem definition yeah it's a wicked problem and we just have to muddle through it which might be the best we can do we have to muddle through it and um we Embrace local Solutions and sort of learn to live with it and I'm wondering if you can just address I mean I mean I think okay here's I mean the you know pratap's here and we've talked about it um one of the one of the best books that I've found on the question of intergen Ethics is Steven Gardner's book perfect moral storm right uh that's I think the best Exposition and it's pessimistic it is pessimistic um but um so there are two kind of arguments one kind of argument you get in uh there's a book called this dying planet in sustainability literature but arguments that are drawing back on evolutionary biology um and I found arguments that you know comparing sort of humans to behavior of D rites uh saying that that we are most sensitive to the approach of a danger if the the the signals of danger suddenly go up or down if there's a sudden huge change but if it's a slow incremental change we don't respond to it now if that's true evolutionarily of us if that's kind of you know a universal proposition let's say psychology experiment will bear out uh then from that it follows that unless the danger is imminent and upon us we probably won't act which sort of in ter of human you know it goes back to Benjamin's sort of History flashes up at a moment of danger maybe at that moment uh but the problem with climate crisis is that it's not like the nuclear Holocaust argument so it's not a one event that happens there's an emergency we all come together it's a Cascade of things and very many things so uh it seems more likely than not that we'll muddle through it meaning that we'll pay for it in different ways uh and at some point maybe we'll come together but um this book by the Oxford I don't know if he's an economist do you know him you're anyway here's a book this interesting book because the future is not what it used to be where his argument is that another reason for inaction is that during this what David Archer calls moderate phase of climate change so kind of uh what the you know the extreme weather events apparently by their Reckoning is still moderate and the argument is that the the more richer countries have the wewi with which to pay the costs incurred by these moderate extreme weather events so if the frequency goes up so it goes back to the same argument that that maybe as a species we are not equipped to actually react until the danger is imminent right so so you can see what I'm trying to do I'm not dis I'm not disavowing any of the arguments that Nami or esus and people make about climate denial and self-interested cl denial I'm saying but there's a larger problem which goes beyond self-interest and goes beyond history of climate research you know the the the the change in the theory from global cooling theories to global warming theories I think I think there is also some we actually and that's where I in in wearing my moral Humanities hat I had an argument about a kind of negative Universal history or kind of a intimations of our being in this in different ways all of us you know so when I wrote uh in my essay I wrote you know there's no life boats for the rich in the problem and I gave examples from California and Australian bushfires and GJ makes fun of this saying yeah true there were class conscious bushfires going on in California you know but uh but the thing is really it's I mean in Frick's terms it becomes a cost argument you know if you feel you can bear the cost of these events then you will simply pay the cost right um so it it depends again on I mean that's where humans become the least certain of the factors involved the things I I just want to say two things just yeah um so it seems to me that the the the you you you described various kinds of temporality mhm and the question seem to be how that for certain types of temp temporal um temporal spans one can imaginatively take certain kinds of responsibility but to care for temporal spans that go you know then it becomes very difficult to think of agency responsibility and so on so just two issues here so is the problem you know Contra where he wants to put it all with within the history of capital is clearly um um you know a very superficial reading of the situation but isn't it the problem that we've got to it's not just the two spans of time but how do we switch back and forth both ethically so it's it's more about one moment you have to be able to do to act in this particular medium of time and at another moment you've got to act in this medium of time bearing the at the same time the the the the impossibility in a way of seeing what effectivity would be in that other longer period of time but you've got to move between the two that somehow at some point that's why I was calling it Rifts yes but that's why I'm saying there's a yeah they're like Rifts but they're also like jazz Rifts you know where you take it where there's a particular moment then you set up and you do something so it's where you like Great Barrier reefs no reefs isn't they're not like great barriers I'm just said so the question really is that intersection that moment of or or what is that moment in and out in and out you know where you go between the temporalities and just one other issue there that in some ways the and I and I think you you without quite saying to in some ways you know the problem of religion even in traditional way is the same sort of problem you know there is God there is this long thing there's hell which will go on forever there's Heaven which will go on forever and then there is a life to be lived and people have been thinking this long time fate if you like and the shorttime Fate in the same way so that well the only difference is I mean well first of all two things you know homie did you had you finished I did yeah I just wanted to say thanks yeah thanks how to bring these times you know together no first of all I should say so my take takeway from all this as a historian what I'm saying is that you know Dan's work Joyce's work I'm reading all these Alison bashford's work I'm reading all these works is saying something has fundamentally changed about how we think of human society history today how we solve the problem is I'm coming to it what we do but I'm simply saying that even knowing that we have to do this to and fro back and forth between these different things U climate change is the popularization of the science of climate change produces a shift in the perspective from which we look at human history both backwards and going forward so Paul wordss work for instance on calculating energy of old ships versus new ships and all of those things which comes out of this crisis so in a way the question of scale has emerged I think and will emerge big time in the discipline of History it will impact on English another way it will impact anthropology in another way so that's my first takeaway from the problem without solving the actual problem because it has to be solved by economists and other and well together going to your question the the where it's different from religion and I think there's a similarity that you pointed out and I think it's right where it's different from religion is that from the science a certain kind of demand for action in the now emerges which is precisely over which there disagreement amongst economists as to how much do we invest now for future Generations which is disagreement about technically about discounting rates right but uh my friend Dan archers my colleague Dan Archer's book where he claims that we have already changed the climate for 100,000 it begins not in a geologist vein it begins by addressing the audience imagining them to be Western audience invested in Pride of Western Civilization so he says imagine if the Greeks had found uh access to a cheap fo and really lived it up and we had to deal with the mess would you still still think of Classical Greece as the you know high point of Western Civilization now he thinks that that's how he's going to get us to think about 3,000 years hence now then you C against the difficulty of what Steven Gard other talks about that it's very difficult to think about 3,000 years secondly it's a climate problem is a backloaded problem we are suffering the results of not the emissions that we are producing but emissions that have been produced in the past um so you come up then against the question of can we do something in the now thinking about 2,000 years hence right but 3,000 years hence in real historical time where whereas religion will say can you do something now thinking about your your welfare in the afterlife so and and you do it individually whereas here there's a demand for Collective action so what I'm saying is while there is a similarity so it's so you're right in actually thinking that this problem as such is not a new problem having to think on different scales of time uh once at once but what is difficult is actually that there are action propositions attached to that yeah sure you're right there is of course there is a difference and there is a difference in the nature of the action there's a difference the quality of the action but I'm just trying to think of the formal problem and I'm saying but religious decisions or religious actions are also Collective actions yeah they're National actions they involve money uh you know whether it's in South India where you give them two million bits of your gold jewelry in order to you know to to ensure your place in heaven or in so I'm saying what fascinates me is the is analogical ways of thinking about the long past as the long future therefore I think come into it yeah no is not that different because it also prescribes action agencies institutions and more than that you know me so Bruno latu recently gave these gford lectures at the University of Edinburgh and it's funny I mean I I met with him s a few weeks ago um and because he had sent me these lectures I thought I should read them before I so I finally read them and I said to him I said you know when I reading your lectures I thought uh if someone was um wanting to make a play out of this this will lend itself to a very interesting play because even though he discusses human natural and all that what he builds up to with the Gia argument is that we need a secular goddess right now he's got to the and he said he said to meish have written this play and it's yeah so so I know I'm we also trying to see if we can bring to Chicago uh but again the performative does not take does not substitute for the other action that's also being prescribed yeah sure thank you for a wonderful talk um incredibly lucid and thought-provoking I wanted to frame this in terms of how you framed it which is in this disagreement with XI right and considering that his commitment is to kind of regenerated somewhat regenerated form of Marxism right I wanted to ask you in part because you're using the term Rift about the metabolic Rift John bamy Foster and this notion and whether or not you think that the usage of those parts of book three of do Capal on Modern Agriculture and soil depletion and so forth or how you how you think about no actually the the John Foster uh and his colleagues book The metabolic Rift that is actually one of the few Marxist writings on the subject that I've come across that actually take the geological argument quite seriously um and there is of course a again as I was saying it's U but then uh my problem with all that is with the solution part of it to think that the solution is in uh a Marxist program of fighting against capitalism so they kind of think of capitalism itself having created this problem and the problem couldn't have existed first of all you know if Bill riman and Earl Ellis's argument about anthropos having started 10,000 years ago if that is right then this argument doesn't stand its ground though I I'm more with them on the cap ISM question it's really sort of trying to fold all this back into the history of capital actually also means changing marxis category of capital and they should they should be upfront about it and acknowledge it that this is a new analytic of capital that they're producing then where I'm with them is that exactly what I was saying our perspective has changed so now to even to think Capital you have to think parameters you have to think all those large questions back into it secondly and this I say in a light-hearted vein and not to insult anybody but you know sometimes when I sit down with Marxist friends uh once I in Chicago I was giving not this talk but a talk related to climate change and next to me was a colleague Marxist colleague and he had the grunda and he opened it at a certain point look at this word the P metabolism it's there in marks and you know my friend Sheldon poock has from he works on he's an indologist works on Indian textt and has this very interesting idea of the final text in the final text comes from a proposition that you find in Indian literature about the Mahabharata the big epic we have which is also called the bharata and the land is also called bhat India is also called bhat and there's a saying which says that if it's not there in the bhat meaning the text then it's not there in the bhat in the land so a final text is the text that has already contained the entire future of humankind in that text so so I kind of think that uh you know there's sometimes this final TT kind of attitude that comes across um yeah you've given a talk of great erudition thank you now comes the hard part of the question yes definitely but I've already thanked you but let let me place it in in in a very specific way right you talk about planetary but you don't talk about about ecological and for me the problem is that we're not thinking in terms of systems and certainly not thinking in terms of ecological systems right and so for me all of your erudition is sort of beside the point if we're not if we don't think ecologically if we don't think systematically if we don't think within systems but only as individual actions we get nowhere or we make the situation worse right I mean you know first of all as I said you know my own point was really um I mean I would like to hear more about your your point what call just to learn from what you're how you're thinking and not to criticize it because to me your propositions are not altogether obvious so I'd like like to like to hear more but you know again as I said you know I I'm a historian and I kind of think and I'm a humanistic historian so I kind of think you know I'm not competent to tell people how to solve this problem that I'm I mean there are people who are competent who who actually can who either do the research or do ecological research who can actually say this is the way you have to go as a historian I kind of think what has happened in the emergence of what I was calling a new kind of thinking a new kind of Consciousness I see that as having an impact already on some of the fundamental assumptions of my displ when I first wrote my first essay which was really saying this is how it looks like we need to rethink history human history so I would I'm so my Landing point is really this talk about a perspective on human history and that may very well be beside the point that you are looking for and that can always happen um but um but tell me a little more about the about your proposition about ecology and what you were saying yeah sure um I go to a lot of a lot of uh events around climate change and energy here right between Harvard and and and MIT for 30 years and one of the things that I see most recently is people talking about geoengineering yeah and when they talk about geoengineering they're talking about single fixes right no I see what you I see what you mean now there's another stream of thought yeah John Todd Alan Savory right Tom goo and there will be a book coming out soon I believe on geother theapy where they're talking about ecological systems Solutions rather than single shot technological solutions and the way that I phrase that is I see people thinking like hammers but I don't see people thinking like trees does that does that make sense to you yeah it's like the they the thinging like a mountain it's in that spirit and and I I take the spirit of the question I I'm not I know John Todd's work a little bit but I don't know the others work um so I'm open to what you're suggesting open to reading more and and learning more in that area just quickly though I mean I again I didn't have time to go into the details of the papers but on the geoengineering question you know I already find the debate the implicit debate between Mark Linus's God species type arguments and Clive Hamilton's book on geoengineering I already find the area fascinating but at the same time I also fear I that's I'm now just expressing a personal opinion that I can't I can't honestly see a future in which we will not have some version of GE engineering hi uh my name is Kangal I'm a PhD candidate in urban studies and planning at MIT thank you very much it's a pleasure to hear you in person and I really uh appreciate and and I see your your your idea to reframe this in various time scales and to complicate the matter in a bit in terms of this issue of transcending capitalism and the issue of Justice we arguably we still exist in this moment of this particular moment of capitalist uh Global capitalist um mode of production and in order to get anywhere else we have to transcend systemic modes systemic structures of Oppression and inequality that operate now so even if we are thinking backwards and forwards in these broader longer time scales there are things that are happening at the moment which seem like like we have to deal with and if we don't take more seriously capital and what is happening at the moment how do we do that okay um I'm I'm you know I have no as I said I have nothing to argue against um any movement that is aimed at securing more Justice for the vulnerable oppressed people um that is aimed against the inequalities of neoliberal group growth I have no argument against those propositions I my problem comes from two things again what the calendar that the ipcc produces that we have for Global action however would we do it is a very finite calendar it says by 2040 so their argument is that if we have another 500 gatons of carbon we can produce collectively whether we produce that by letting India and China industrialize and us becoming static or how how we do it is not the you know they kind of do a blackbox thing so they say you've got up to 2040 to do this buy and whereas it seems to me that by its own nature the struggle against capitalism if there was no climate problem would have been an open more open calendar right I mean you wouldn't have you wouldn't have said like the maist in said in India in the early' 7s that by 1975 India will be socialist right you wouldn't say that by 20040 capitalism will be gone we don't know so given that I I was I was trying saying I was not saying that we can avoid the questions of inequality I think we will those questions will come but I was trying to read even J to say that when we fight those questions and fight other humans on these questions somehow the perspective from which we will fight will have this additional element in it of our awareness of a much long larger history that's what I uh enlightened anthropocentricism not putting humans first is a is a very benign homoy but how do you do that I mean yeah is it ever possible or is it necessary to assign values to species in a hierarchical fashion or is it even conceivable that we can have a biotic egalitarianism how do you do that in in in practice I don't know uh I mean you can refer to other things you know like the what was the Latin American country that few years ago gave rights to ponds and rocks I forget which country did that Ecuador right yeah um but you know let me come back to this the proposition as such that love look is saying government of India in the white paper on climate change the government of India is always fond of quoting Gandhi or actually misting Gandhi so they begin this uh white paper by saying let me read it out actually they begin by saying um as Mahatma Gandhi said there's always enough for um for uh everybody's need but not enough for everybody's greed or something like that and the actual statement from Gandhi said the Earth has enough resources to meet people's needs but will never have enough to satisfy people's greed and actually the emphasis in Gandhi's writing is typically on the individual sense of moral responsibility so Gandhi so if you read if you do a gandhian read in of love loock then uh Gandhi would probably claim that he had a lifestyle in which he tried not to put himself ahead of other species in terms of his consumption how you do it collectively I don't know because I I actually read love loock sentence as you you use the word anod or bromide I forget what you banal something you you had a negative adjective I actually to be to be generous to him I I called it an enlightened form of anthropocentrism still because his argument is that if that the climate crisis will bring about these problems and these problems have come about because we are laying these claims on the biosphere so in effect we have put ourselves first by saying human lives is valued we have to Value human life we have to support this level of population make them prosperous which will have even more claims on the biosphere so he's saying that is the path of self-destruction if we do that then we are all collectively doomed and there therefore to back off I mean he's saying to back off from it but he doesn't clarify how to back off from it and my argument was that it's very hard to back off from it so I actually go back to the argument of Peter H the geologist from duke I quoted where he's actually saying you know if you want to however you want to make these people prosperous and survive the 7 to 10 billion people you will actually need more energy in future than less and the problem with that is that when I read the energy literature everybody says that even if we went completely renewable um energy will become more expensive so actually the cost of that survival would be higher but in terms of practical I don't know how to do this so um I did want to uh raise the the question of the religious roots of anthropocentrism that you suggested right right um so it seems to me that um um I mean when when people uh speak of totemistic religions um it's often uh so there's this assumption that they they consider themselves as part of nature um so sort of as equal members of of uh the the natural Community uh but but the the the the argument that I have against it is that as long as you cannot communicate with the other you're always is um acting on the basis of some sort of empiricism and that's true um and maybe the the totemistic religions had a different form of empiricism than the ones that we and also the fact is that your totem animals they don't know that you actually have made totems out of them right and so in that sense we are not so different from them I was simply saying that you know when you read the texts of the big religions of the world including Hinduism so I mean Tor gave a lecture called the hiot lectures in Oxford in 1930 called the religion of man and you know what's fascinating about it he actually acknowledges that there is a Hindu theology within which you can conceive of a God who doesn't give a damn about what happens to human beings and then he says but I have no use for that God right I have to go to a God who makes my life special who makes who creates the epiphany of human living and he sort of goes to Buddhism and all this so and ecologists often mention know passages from the Bible so and I have some passages from the Quran to show this in there's a discussion about why is Allah Rahman why is Allah merciful and the argument eventually becomes that Allah is merciful because he has stalked the world with Provisions for us so what haiger calls you know the technology question or you know looking at the world as as as U as this what Reserve was it the English expression standing Reserve standing res right um you see that more clearly in these axial religions right so I'm I'm saying that once you claim a transcendental God your relationship becomes special your your place in the cosmology becomes special much whereas you know we don't have texts of ristic religion so we go by later Colonial European reconstruction of it I mean durkheim's a lot of the book was actually dependent on Spen and Gillan Expedition which was a colonial Expedition into Australian sort of Outback and original peoples so um so then Durham is surmising from them so but he's theoretically is saying you imagine humans as this double man and animal uh whereas I'm saying in the Axel religions the separation is much clearer so but the problem that we don't communicate with the at least most of the time with other species that remains so in that sense it's not the same as the so in that sense it's not the same as the colonialist problem in his relation with the with the orientalist other no no no the colonial problem I just raised was with respect to this larger question how on what grounds do we claim the majority of the products of the biosphere and the same question was asked by Europeans on what ground do we claim most of this planet right so I think there's a similarity between those questions I was not saying their identical questions maybe I work on colonialism who reminded me of that it could have been a pure accidental reminiscence hey uh I was just wondering you know so you've thought a lot about it seem these different time Scapes and riffs and whatnot and you know divisions between people and lacks of information and different ways that we can conceptualize problems of climate change um and also you know how uh climate science becomes a climate crisis through the scientists themselves right through the care through exactly so then but how do you think you know we can really make sure that even anxieties about these problems are channeled effectively like what about the problem of anxiety from knowing too much or realizing the extremity of problems and that creating inaction so not the inaction being where you are or what your time scape is but uh you know just knowing too much possibly and how that could even make the problem worse the problem of action was knowing too much about the problem doesn't make the problem worse right uh but makes our problem worse um it may I mean um what could I say to somebody you know who is paralyzed by having to face a problem I You' need a better counselor than I I would be I I don't have any answer that question you know I'm simply saying that that that what the science has done its popularization is changed our perspective on our own history um whether that perspective immobilizes us or whether that perspective leads us to raise new questions about disciplines about how we do history How We Do anthropology that's an individual Choice um but for more inspiring answers on those questions you should listen to Bill mcken or you know an activist climate sort of knowledge knowledgeable person or Jim Hansen and you'll find all lots of answers all the extraordinary knowledge that Professor chakrabati has accumulated on this subject has led to action and he's deeply deeply changed ing not only the discipline of history but his millions of admirers around the world and so I mean I think I can speak on behalf of hom and me and say that we very much hope that you'll come back here thank you much stay longer talk to us more about this and I also hope that we will have done a little bit more ourselves thank you in this and thank you very much