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Why have India’s ultranationalist aspirations made Lakshadweep the unlikely locus of its tourist aspirations and exacerbated tensions with the Maldives? FEATURES The Lakshadweep Gambit Why have India’s ultranationalist aspirations made Lakshadweep the unlikely locus of its tourist aspirations and exacerbated tensions with the Maldives? Rejimon Kuttapan Kerala: On 4 January, pictures of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi snorkeling in Lakshadweep hit social media. The pictures were accompanied by his invitation “for those who wish to embrace the adventurer in them, Lakshadweep has to be on your list,” and incited a cascade of unanticipated events in the Indian archipelago of 36 islands lying to the west of India’s southwestern coast, in the Laccadive Sea between the Arabian Sea to and the Bay of Bengal. The photos triggered a surge in Google searches unseen in 20 years. Maldivian ministers in Malé, a mere 900 kilometres southwest of Lakshadweep, were alarmed. A few vented against Modi on social media. Hassan Zihan, Mariyam Shiuna, and Malsha Shareef, all deputy ministers, were suspended for the social media posts they made against Modi. Maldivian ministers have been sacked for lesser blunders, however, the president has chosen to keep them on government payroll following a temporary suspension. At a time when the Israeli-Palestinian conflict had escalated to levels previously unseen following the Hamas-led terror attacks in October 2023 and in the wider context of Israeli settler violence in the West Bank, Shiuna pointed out India’s ties with Israel. Other public officials joined in and said that Modi’s visit to Lakshadweep was aimed at undermining Maldives’ luxury tourism industry, which prides itself on its secluded pristine beaches. Indian travel and tourism agencies and celebrities added fuel to the controversy by using hashtags #MaldivesOut and #ExploreIndianIslands . In January, Maldivian President Mohamed Muizzu broke with tradition and prioritized visits to Turkey and China, flouting India's “ first-visit ” protocol. He flew to China, signed 20 deals , secured a massive 1000 crore aid package, and upon his return, urged India to withdraw its 80-member army contingent stationed in the Maldives by 15 March. The first well-known Indian presence in the Maldives was in response to the 1988 coup, under Operation Cactus , following a request from then-president Maumoon Abdul Gayoom, which protected the Maldives from Sri Lankan militants. There were 77 Indian officers stationed in Maldives since 2010 when the Indian government gifted two helicopters and a Dornier aircraft. Recent news suggests the first batch of Indian troops, some 25 soldiers, have already left the island country. In short, Modi’s Lakshadweep pictures created something of a diplomatic crisis that could significantly reshape Indian and Maldivian relations. Muizzu’s moves while in power have signalled a subtle but important shift in Maldivian foreign policy, with China gaining significant ground and India's traditional influence facing a challenge. But as diplomatic tensions between India and the Maldives have simmered, Muizzu’s deals with China, aimed at turbocharging tourism through large-scale construction projects and marketing to new countries, have raised crucial questions about the fragile archipelago’s environmental sustainability. Lakshadweep is similarly threatened—and if Modi’s agenda is realized, also poses a threat to the tourism sector pivotal to the Maldivian economy. Swallowed By the Ocean While Maldives-China 20-point MoU cooperation in disaster management and green and low-carbon sounds positive, deepening blue economy cooperation and accelerating the Belt and Road initiative raises serious concerns for the low-lying island country. In late 2021, highlighting the Maldives’ extreme environmental vulnerability, Aminath Shauna, the former environment and climate change minister noted, in an interview with the International Monetary Fund (IMF), that a staggering 80% of the country's islands sit less than a meter above sea level, over 90 percent of the islands report flooding annually, 97 percent are reporting shoreline erosion. “Fifty percent of all our housing structures are within just 100 meters of the coastline. So most really cannot withstand tidal floods, let alone tsunamis. Really, everything is at stake,” she had said. In 2008, concerned about the rising sea levels threatening the Maldives, then-President Mohamed Nasheed proposed relocation to neighbouring countries. However, in comparison, the current president’s plans differ greatly. He envisions reclaiming land, building elevated islands, and fortifying them. A report from the Economic Society of New Delhi-based Shri Ram College of Commerce reveals how extensive extraction for development disrupts beaches, harming marine life, compromising conservation for commerce, fuelling rapid biodiversity loss, around 21 percent of daily waste comes from tourists, polluting water and endangering health and untreated sewage and depletion threaten freshwater resources. But tourism continues to be integral to the Maldives economy, with growth in the sector in 2022 exceeding pre-pandemic levels with a remarkable 13.9% growth, outpacing even optimistic forecasts, fuelled by pent-up demand from both European and Asian tourists. Indeed, tourist arrivals and revenue in the Maldives have rebounded sharply, with total receipts soaring by 28% from $3.5 billion in 2021 to an estimated $4.5 billion in 2022. Fascinatingly, leading the charge was the recent upsurge in Indian travellers , some of them prominent Bollywood stars, with 209,198 visiting the island paradise in 2023. Close behind were 209,146 Russian visitors, followed by 187,118 Chinese tourists ranking third. According to the Maldives Monetary Authority, fuelled by a booming tourism sector, Maldives’ total government revenue surged 38 percent to USD 1.82 billion in 2022, outpacing both tax and non-tax revenue hikes. Financial figures show strong tourism recovery in the Maldives, raising concerns about its impact on the region's fragile ecosystem. However, the nation's latest partnerships, especially with China, may offer opportunities for balancing economic growth with environmental protection. Chalo Lakshadweep Can India reasonably pitch in Lakshadweep as a competitor for Maldives? While the idea of Lakshadweep as a competitor to the Maldives might be tempting, environmental concerns raise serious doubts about its feasibility. Lakshadweep’s environmental fragility, limited infrastructure, and local concerns cannot be ignored. A fresh study paints a grim picture for the Lakshadweep Islands, revealing that all of them are facing significant threats from rising sea levels, regardless of future emission scenarios. This marks the first time climate models have been used to assess potential inundation across the archipelago. The study predicts drastic land loss for smaller islands like Chetlat and Amini, with 60 to 70 percent and 70 to 80 percent of their shorelines vanishing under rising waters. Even larger islands like Minicoy and Kavaratti, including the capital, are not spared, facing potential land loss along 60 percent of their coastlines. The only relatively safe haven appears to be Androth Island, though it too will be impacted. Minicoy , the second largest and southernmost island in Lakshadweep, shares a unique historical connection with the Maldives. Known locally as “Maliku” in the Maldivian-Minicoy language, Minicoy was separated from the Maldives in 1752 by the Ali Rajas of Malabar (Kerala) and remained distinct ever since. The remaining northern islands of Lakshadweep, the Amindivi group, fell under British control much earlier in 1799, following their victory over Tipu Sultan of Mysore (who ruled them from 1787). The Laccadive Islands (southern group) and Minicoy were annexed to the British Empire later, with the suzerainty of Minicoy transferring to the British Indian Empire in 1875. However, the Arakkal House held a trade monopoly over these islands until 1905, when they were fully surrendered to the British. When India gained independence in 1947, the Union Jack continued to fly over the Minicoy lighthouse until 1956, when a representative of the Queen lowered it, marking Minicoy's official integration into the Indian Union. Lakshadweep’s current infrastructure caters to its 60,000 residents and a limited tourist influx. In 2021, the islands welcomed 13,500 tourists, a number that jumped to 22,800 in 2022. While this growth is encouraging, it also strains existing resources. There is only one airline operating flights to Lakshadweep and six ships ferrying people, and any Indian, who is not a native of Lakshadweep, shall have to obtain an entry permit . The reason for this, as per the Lakshadweep Tourism website, is to protect the Indigenous peoples residing there. Following a Supreme Court order in the 2012 case of M/s Sea Shell Beach Resorts v. Union Territory of Lakshadweep and Others, an expert committee led by Justice R.V. Raveendran evaluated the Integrated Island Management Plan (IIMP) for Lakshadweep. The IIMP is a crucial document that outlines the vision and strategies for sustainable development in Lakshadweep. The Supreme Court's order emphasized the need for balancing development with environmental protection in the islands. The Raveendran Committee's report made several recommendations, including, strict adherence to environmental laws and regulations, prioritization of sustainable tourism and eco-friendly practices, protection of the islands' fragile ecosystems and cultural heritage. Having said that, recently, the Lakshadweep administration planned to develop eco-tourism projects in 11 islands in public-private partnerships. NITI Aayog, the Indian government’s policy body, had sought proposals from consultants. The administration of the union territory identified the islands of Bangaram, Thinnakara, Pareli-II, Pareli- III, Chariyam, Kalpitti, Tilakkam, Kavaratti, Perumal par, Viringili island, and Minicoy. Additionally, branded hotels are coming up , while water villas are also on the horizon. However, the one and only parliamentarian from Lakshadweep has already raised his concern over tourism development projects. Talking to the media , he said the “Chalo Lakshadweep” call may not even get off the ground given multiple constraints, including the lack of direct flights and the minuscule number—150—of hotel rooms. “Even if it does, the tourist inflow has to be controlled in view of the fragile ecology of the island that has been propped up by a rulebook that lays down the number of tourists the islands can contain each day,” Mohammad Faizal, the parliamentarian from Lakshadweep, told media. Faizal cited Justice R.V. Raveendran’s suggestions to protect the island. The media quoted him, adding that the island is looking for high-end controlled tourism. Meanwhile, in a phone conversation with SAAG from Androth, the largest island in Lakshadweep, Mohammed Althaf Hussain, a former Panchayath president, discussed the potential benefits and drawbacks of increased tourism focus in the islands. Hussain noted that “pumping more money into tourism development can create job opportunities, help locals diversify their income, boost earnings, and popularize local culture.” However, he also acknowledged environmental concerns, stating, “Like any other place, our islands face environmental challenges due to climate change, including waste management woes.” He concluded by expressing optimism that “with scientific solutions, we can overcome these challenges.” Dr Naveen Namboothri, Trustee and Programme Head at Dakshin Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to environmental conservation and sustainable development, shared a note prepared by Lakshadweep Research Collective. This note responds to the draft development plan for the island proposed by the Indian government. The note shared by Naveen, who is part of Lakshadweep Research Collective, states that, the then development plan poses a dangerous threat to Lakshadweep's ecology, community, and culture. The note adds that the plan ignores Lakshadweep's unique ecology and climate vulnerabilities, proposing unsustainable development that endangers reefs and livelihoods. “It grants authorities power to take land and resources, jeopardizing traditional practices and local economies. Proposes a narrow, “fast-track” approach focused on infrastructure and exploitation, neglecting social well-being and ecological integrity,” the note adds. On 1 February, while presenting the interim budget, Indian Finance Minister Nirmala Sitaram, named Lakshadweep. “To address the emerging fervour for domestic tourism, projects for port connectivity, tourism infrastructure, and amenities will be taken up on our islands, including Lakshadweep,” she said . And there are reports that India has proposed a ₹3,600-crore infrastructure upgrade plan for the Lakshadweep islands, aiming to transform them into a tourist hub. Back in 2021, the Lakshadweep administrator was accused of introducing policies that could harm the environment and cultural heritage of the islands. The controversial proposals included a beef ban and restrictions on those contesting in local elections. At the time, India’s opposition leader Rahul Gandhi also raised his concerns. The tensions between India and the Maldives can be attributed to hypernationalism displayed by both state and non-state actors. While Maldivian deputy ministers criticized Prime Minister Modi, Indian social media users fueled the issue with their own brand of hypernationalism and unrealistic expectations regarding Lakshadweep. For India, boycotting the Maldives may well have negative political consequences. Meanwhile, losing the trust of a long-standing strategic partner whose culture is intertwined with its own would be a major detriment for the Maldives. Fueled by budget allocations and amplified by media buzz, India seems intent on making a "Maldives™" out of Lakshadweep, propelling ultra-nationalist sentiments in both countries. This move suggests that India is far from closing the chapter on instigating a previously non-existent tourism rivalry between Lakshadweep and the Maldives. ∎ Kerala: On 4 January, pictures of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi snorkeling in Lakshadweep hit social media. The pictures were accompanied by his invitation “for those who wish to embrace the adventurer in them, Lakshadweep has to be on your list,” and incited a cascade of unanticipated events in the Indian archipelago of 36 islands lying to the west of India’s southwestern coast, in the Laccadive Sea between the Arabian Sea to and the Bay of Bengal. The photos triggered a surge in Google searches unseen in 20 years. Maldivian ministers in Malé, a mere 900 kilometres southwest of Lakshadweep, were alarmed. A few vented against Modi on social media. Hassan Zihan, Mariyam Shiuna, and Malsha Shareef, all deputy ministers, were suspended for the social media posts they made against Modi. Maldivian ministers have been sacked for lesser blunders, however, the president has chosen to keep them on government payroll following a temporary suspension. At a time when the Israeli-Palestinian conflict had escalated to levels previously unseen following the Hamas-led terror attacks in October 2023 and in the wider context of Israeli settler violence in the West Bank, Shiuna pointed out India’s ties with Israel. Other public officials joined in and said that Modi’s visit to Lakshadweep was aimed at undermining Maldives’ luxury tourism industry, which prides itself on its secluded pristine beaches. Indian travel and tourism agencies and celebrities added fuel to the controversy by using hashtags #MaldivesOut and #ExploreIndianIslands. In January, Maldivian President Mohamed Muizzu broke with tradition and prioritized visits to Turkey and China, flouting India's “ first-visit ” protocol. He flew to China, signed 20 deals , secured a massive 1000 crore aid package, and upon his return, urged India to withdraw its 80-member army contingent stationed in the Maldives by 15 March. The first well-known Indian presence in the Maldives was in response to the 1988 coup, under Operation Cactus , following a request from then-president Maumoon Abdul Gayoom, which protected the Maldives from Sri Lankan militants. There were 77 Indian officers stationed in Maldives since 2010 when the Indian government gifted two helicopters and a Dornier aircraft. Recent news suggests the first batch of Indian troops, some 25 soldiers, have already left the island country. In short, Modi’s Lakshadweep pictures created something of a diplomatic crisis that could significantly reshape Indian and Maldivian relations. Muizzu’s moves while in power have signalled a subtle but important shift in Maldivian foreign policy, with China gaining significant ground and India's traditional influence facing a challenge. But as diplomatic tensions between India and the Maldives have simmered, Muizzu’s deals with China, aimed at turbocharging tourism through large-scale construction projects and marketing to new countries, have raised crucial questions about the fragile archipelago’s environmental sustainability. Lakshadweep is similarly threatened—and if Modi’s agenda is realized, also poses a threat to the tourism sector pivotal to the Maldivian economy. Swallowed By the Ocean While Maldives-China 20-point MoU cooperation in disaster management and green and low-carbon sounds positive, deepening blue economy cooperation and accelerating the Belt and Road initiative raises serious concerns for the low-lying island country. In late 2021, highlighting the Maldives’ extreme environmental vulnerability, Aminath Shauna, the former environment and climate change minister noted, in an interview with the International Monetary Fund (IMF), that a staggering 80% of the country's islands sit less than a meter above sea level, over 90 percent of the islands report flooding annually, 97 percent are reporting shoreline erosion. “Fifty percent of all our housing structures are within just 100 meters of the coastline. So most really cannot withstand tidal floods, let alone tsunamis. Really, everything is at stake,” she had said. In 2008, concerned about the rising sea levels threatening the Maldives, then-President Mohamed Nasheed proposed relocation to neighbouring countries. However, in comparison, the current president’s plans differ greatly. He envisions reclaiming land, building elevated islands, and fortifying them. A report from the Economic Society of New Delhi-based Shri Ram College of Commerce reveals how extensive extraction for development disrupts beaches, harming marine life, compromising conservation for commerce, fuelling rapid biodiversity loss, around 21 percent of daily waste comes from tourists, polluting water and endangering health and untreated sewage and depletion threaten freshwater resources. But tourism continues to be integral to the Maldives economy, with growth in the sector in 2022 exceeding pre-pandemic levels with a remarkable 13.9% growth, outpacing even optimistic forecasts, fuelled by pent-up demand from both European and Asian tourists. Indeed, tourist arrivals and revenue in the Maldives have rebounded sharply, with total receipts soaring by 28% from $3.5 billion in 2021 to an estimated $4.5 billion in 2022. Fascinatingly, leading the charge was the recent upsurge in Indian travellers , some of them prominent Bollywood stars, with 209,198 visiting the island paradise in 2023. Close behind were 209,146 Russian visitors, followed by 187,118 Chinese tourists ranking third. According to the Maldives Monetary Authority, fuelled by a booming tourism sector, Maldives’ total government revenue surged 38 percent to USD 1.82 billion in 2022, outpacing both tax and non-tax revenue hikes. Financial figures show strong tourism recovery in the Maldives, raising concerns about its impact on the region's fragile ecosystem. However, the nation's latest partnerships, especially with China, may offer opportunities for balancing economic growth with environmental protection. Chalo Lakshadweep Can India reasonably pitch in Lakshadweep as a competitor for Maldives? While the idea of Lakshadweep as a competitor to the Maldives might be tempting, environmental concerns raise serious doubts about its feasibility. Lakshadweep’s environmental fragility, limited infrastructure, and local concerns cannot be ignored. A fresh study paints a grim picture for the Lakshadweep Islands, revealing that all of them are facing significant threats from rising sea levels, regardless of future emission scenarios. This marks the first time climate models have been used to assess potential inundation across the archipelago. The study predicts drastic land loss for smaller islands like Chetlat and Amini, with 60 to 70 percent and 70 to 80 percent of their shorelines vanishing under rising waters. Even larger islands like Minicoy and Kavaratti, including the capital, are not spared, facing potential land loss along 60 percent of their coastlines. The only relatively safe haven appears to be Androth Island, though it too will be impacted. Minicoy , the second largest and southernmost island in Lakshadweep, shares a unique historical connection with the Maldives. Known locally as “Maliku” in the Maldivian-Minicoy language, Minicoy was separated from the Maldives in 1752 by the Ali Rajas of Malabar (Kerala) and remained distinct ever since. The remaining northern islands of Lakshadweep, the Amindivi group, fell under British control much earlier in 1799, following their victory over Tipu Sultan of Mysore (who ruled them from 1787). The Laccadive Islands (southern group) and Minicoy were annexed to the British Empire later, with the suzerainty of Minicoy transferring to the British Indian Empire in 1875. However, the Arakkal House held a trade monopoly over these islands until 1905, when they were fully surrendered to the British. When India gained independence in 1947, the Union Jack continued to fly over the Minicoy lighthouse until 1956, when a representative of the Queen lowered it, marking Minicoy's official integration into the Indian Union. Lakshadweep’s current infrastructure caters to its 60,000 residents and a limited tourist influx. In 2021, the islands welcomed 13,500 tourists, a number that jumped to 22,800 in 2022. While this growth is encouraging, it also strains existing resources. There is only one airline operating flights to Lakshadweep and six ships ferrying people, and any Indian, who is not a native of Lakshadweep, shall have to obtain an entry permit . The reason for this, as per the Lakshadweep Tourism website, is to protect the Indigenous peoples residing there. Following a Supreme Court order in the 2012 case of M/s Sea Shell Beach Resorts v. Union Territory of Lakshadweep and Others, an expert committee led by Justice R.V. Raveendran evaluated the Integrated Island Management Plan (IIMP) for Lakshadweep. The IIMP is a crucial document that outlines the vision and strategies for sustainable development in Lakshadweep. The Supreme Court's order emphasized the need for balancing development with environmental protection in the islands. The Raveendran Committee's report made several recommendations, including, strict adherence to environmental laws and regulations, prioritization of sustainable tourism and eco-friendly practices, protection of the islands' fragile ecosystems and cultural heritage. Having said that, recently, the Lakshadweep administration planned to develop eco-tourism projects in 11 islands in public-private partnerships. NITI Aayog, the Indian government’s policy body, had sought proposals from consultants. The administration of the union territory identified the islands of Bangaram, Thinnakara, Pareli-II, Pareli- III, Chariyam, Kalpitti, Tilakkam, Kavaratti, Perumal par, Viringili island, and Minicoy. Additionally, branded hotels are coming up , while water villas are also on the horizon. However, the one and only parliamentarian from Lakshadweep has already raised his concern over tourism development projects. Talking to the media , he said the “Chalo Lakshadweep” call may not even get off the ground given multiple constraints, including the lack of direct flights and the minuscule number—150—of hotel rooms. “Even if it does, the tourist inflow has to be controlled in view of the fragile ecology of the island that has been propped up by a rulebook that lays down the number of tourists the islands can contain each day,” Mohammad Faizal, the parliamentarian from Lakshadweep, told media. Faizal cited Justice R.V. Raveendran’s suggestions to protect the island. The media quoted him, adding that the island is looking for high-end controlled tourism. Meanwhile, in a phone conversation with SAAG from Androth, the largest island in Lakshadweep, Mohammed Althaf Hussain, a former Panchayath president, discussed the potential benefits and drawbacks of increased tourism focus in the islands. Hussain noted that “pumping more money into tourism development can create job opportunities, help locals diversify their income, boost earnings, and popularize local culture.” However, he also acknowledged environmental concerns, stating, “Like any other place, our islands face environmental challenges due to climate change, including waste management woes.” He concluded by expressing optimism that “with scientific solutions, we can overcome these challenges.” Dr Naveen Namboothri, Trustee and Programme Head at Dakshin Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to environmental conservation and sustainable development, shared a note prepared by Lakshadweep Research Collective. This note responds to the draft development plan for the island proposed by the Indian government. The note shared by Naveen, who is part of Lakshadweep Research Collective, states that, the then development plan poses a dangerous threat to Lakshadweep's ecology, community, and culture. The note adds that the plan ignores Lakshadweep's unique ecology and climate vulnerabilities, proposing unsustainable development that endangers reefs and livelihoods. “It grants authorities power to take land and resources, jeopardizing traditional practices and local economies. Proposes a narrow, “fast-track” approach focused on infrastructure and exploitation, neglecting social well-being and ecological integrity,” the note adds. On 1 February, while presenting the interim budget, Indian Finance Minister Nirmala Sitaram, named Lakshadweep. “To address the emerging fervour for domestic tourism, projects for port connectivity, tourism infrastructure, and amenities will be taken up on our islands, including Lakshadweep,” she said . And there are reports that India has proposed a ₹3,600-crore infrastructure upgrade plan for the Lakshadweep islands, aiming to transform them into a tourist hub. Back in 2021, the Lakshadweep administrator was accused of introducing policies that could harm the environment and cultural heritage of the islands. The controversial proposals included a beef ban and restrictions on those contesting in local elections. At the time, India’s opposition leader Rahul Gandhi also raised his concerns. The tensions between India and the Maldives can be attributed to hypernationalism displayed by both state and non-state actors. While Maldivian deputy ministers criticized Prime Minister Modi, Indian social media users fueled the issue with their own brand of hypernationalism and unrealistic expectations regarding Lakshadweep. For India, boycotting the Maldives may well have negative political consequences. Meanwhile, losing the trust of a long-standing strategic partner whose culture is intertwined with its own would be a major detriment for the Maldives. Fueled by budget allocations and amplified by media buzz, India seems intent on making a "Maldives™" out of Lakshadweep, propelling ultra-nationalist sentiments in both countries. This move suggests that India is far from closing the chapter on instigating a previously non-existent tourism rivalry between Lakshadweep and the Maldives. ∎ SUB-HEAD ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: Clare Patrick (Our) Worlds and (Plant) Wisdoms Kareen Adam · Nazish Chunara A Dhivehi Artists Showcase Artwork courtesy of N.K.P Muthukoya. SHARE Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Reportage Lakshadweep Maldives India Nationalism China Foreign Policy Environment Climate Change Islands Lakshadweep archipelago Operation Cactus Mohamed Muizzu Modi Minicoy Tourism Belt and Road Initiative Luxury Tourism Mohamed Nasheed IMF Maldives Monetary Authority Sea Shell Beach Resorts Integrated Island Management Plan Laccadive Maliku Kavaratti Androth Chalo Lakshadweep Amindivi Eco-tourism Turkey Maumoon Abdul Gayoom Infrastructure Diplomatic Relations Malé Maldivian Economy Environmental Disaster REJIMON KUTTAPPAN is a Kerala-based independent journalist, migrant rights researcher, and author of Undocumented: Stories of Indian Migrants in the Arab Gulf (Penguin India, 2021). 29 Mar 2024 Reportage Lakshadweep 29th Mar 2024 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 On That Note:

Information asymmetry, shadowy military operations, mining mafias, and the consent, or lack thereof, of the working class in how their information, labor, and presence are used are all tied to the production, distribution, and consumption of food, energy, and water in India. For climate journalist Aruna Chandrasekhar, this understanding, as well as the proximity of Operation Green Hunt to her hometown, led her to journalism. COMMUNITY On the Ethics of Climate Journalism AUTHOR AUTHOR AUTHOR Information asymmetry, shadowy military operations, mining mafias, and the consent, or lack thereof, of the working class in how their information, labor, and presence are used are all tied to the production, distribution, and consumption of food, energy, and water in India. For climate journalist Aruna Chandrasekhar, this understanding, as well as the proximity of Operation Green Hunt to her hometown, led her to journalism. SHARE Facebook ↗ Twitter ↗ LinkedIn ↗ ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: AUTHOR Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 AUTHOR Heading 5 Interview Andhra Pradesh Climate Climate Change Investigative Journalism Coastal Displacement Anthropocene Parachuting Mining Freelancing Environmental Disaster Environment Power Dynamics Operation Green Hunt Bombay Diaspora Diasporic Distance Journalism Ethics of Journalism Displacement Evictions COVID-19 Forest Collective Energy Crisis Telugu Tamil Movement Organization Corporate Power Adani Group Coal Visakhapatnam Vizag Port Cities Labor Rights Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. DISPATCH Interview Andhra Pradesh 22nd Aug 2020 There is an imbalance of power to be corrected—how do you level a playing field where, for centuries, you have oppressed, displaced communities, and always justified it for your own benefit? RECOMMENDED: " How One Billionaire Could Keep Three Countries Hooked on Coal for Decades " , NY Times . By Somini Sengupta, Jacqueline Williams, and Aruna Chandrasekhar. On how the Adani Group lobbied successfully to mine for coal in Australia and subsequently transporting it to India and contributing to energy and climate crises in both India and Bangladesh. Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Next Up:

“Recently, I spotted an issue of Harper’s harboring a cover story about the apocalypse. It is subtitled 'The Sense of an Ending,' which I reckon is less of an editorial choice than the wave of a white flag to imagination.” BOOKS & ARTS Into the Disaster-Verse “Recently, I spotted an issue of Harper’s harboring a cover story about the apocalypse. It is subtitled 'The Sense of an Ending,' which I reckon is less of an editorial choice than the wave of a white flag to imagination.” Kamil Ahsan I am sorry for every mistake I have made in my life. I’m sorry I wasn’t wiser sooner. I’m sorry I ever spoke of myself as lonely. Mary Oliver Just once in my life—oh, when have I ever wanted anything just once in my life? Amy Hempel Rapture. July 2017. Some months back, at work, I daydreamed about disappearing. I felt invisible regardless, and the world did not seem quite right for me. It seemed not quite right because it rarely isn’t for anyone at all. A plot hatched. A plot to be raptured. It was something of a lark, but not really. At the time, the final season of The Leftovers was airing, and I found Evie Murphy’s hoax to be aspirational. It was easy to imagine. My friend Chris would ordinarily be the most likely to notice my absence, but we’d fought months earlier and had since been avoiding each other. My roommate would probably assume—if he wondered—that I was sleeping at some boy’s place. “I think I’m coming down with something,” I said out loud in lab the next day. Everybody in the lab told me to go home, as expected. Once home, I booked an Airbnb for two weeks. I’d considered Milwaukee, which I’d passed by once, but landed elsewhere. It was a house overlooking the lake. It was cheap. It was beautiful. I’d have it all to myself. It was meant for four or more. I packed lightly. I bought a new toothbrush and razor, split my medications into separate bottles, and put unread books on my nightstand. I did the dishes, threw out the trash, folded my clothes, and got to the train station early. All on my own! It was the first time I’d been punctual in months. See, for the past two years or so, I’ve tried to kill myself several times. Some were not at all intended as cries for attention, but it was fine. I made peace with them being seen as such. Thrice, I stockpiled an increasing number of benzos, along with increasing amounts of alcohol, and went to sleep. Each time, I woke up in the afternoon, befuddled. The third time, I could no longer make sense of my body’s ability to metabolize a month’s worth of prescription pills. And that was that. Others were indeed intended for attention, and I reliably got caught. I became good at pretending I meant it, at the tearful apology administered while thinking unspeakable things. But what I never said—because no one wanted to hear it—was that though my friends and family did a great deal for me, they also greatly exaggerated their importance. And, honestly, how could sixty 2 milligram pills of clonazepam be so unsatisfactory? Then when I was gone, they never found out. I wanted to keep up the disappearance, like a character in a spy novel you let yellow in your bathroom. I’d fake my identity! Become the ghost of some much-lauded novel! I knew, of course, that any such story would end with deportation, but still. It was a nice daydream. Things were different on the train back home, two weeks later. Everyone who wanted me alive had gotten lucky, they wouldn’t know just how much. I knew that most ways of narrating the story would elicit some proclamation that I was “burned out!” and I needed to get away. Which was fine. But it wasn’t true. A strange new axis of time snuck in. Any time before, I would’ve gotten caught. Once, years ago, my sister had called the police when my flight didn’t land on time. Now, I was perfectly capable of life in whatever narrow sense it meant. The day after I got home, Chris walked over to my desk in lab, frowningly. “Where have you been?” he asked. “Just seeing someone,” I said. “Probably not anymore. Why? What’s up?” “So you weren’t sick?” “No. Well, I was, but nothing major. I needed a break.” I don’t think he bought it, but he didn’t push it. I’d missed him, he’d missed me. The following Sunday we watched the new episode of The Leftovers , as we had the two years before. Laurie Garvey went scuba-diving, possibly to commit suicide. It was marvelous. I spent two weeks at that lakefront house, armed with Diet Cokes, pre-made deli sandwiches, cookies, and a carton of cigarettes. I watched old seasons of The Leftovers . Then Lost . Then The OC . I kept my phone on silent. I didn’t hear from anyone. My greatest act of attention-seeking got none at all. I slept till mid-afternoon each day. After a week, I thought I had bedsores. Then I got restless. I fumed, as I still do, about society’s extreme moral judgment of suicide, which I consider—if I’m honest—just as much a human right as any other. We cannot, we must not, ask anyone to live if they do not wish to. We mustn’t ask for them to relinquish that right, no matter how terrible it may be for the living. It was odd, I thought later, how the future returned. Privately, reflexively fuming about moral beliefs much bigger than me was an old sensation, but more than that it was a new one. An idea whose absence I had not noticed rustled back to me. A knot tied loose. Passively, I began to make decisions. A sprinkling of the still “so much to see, so much to do, so much to read.” For a little bit there, I remember thinking very hard about time and the world in the way I imagine Bill Bryson must, like an unfinished picture book freshly encountered. It was chronological. That’s one way of narrating it, which makes it sound very triumphalist, if it weren’t for how funny it was. Forced solitude cures suicidal ideation—hurrah! But then there was something else too. I learned about a very strange people. During my little Eat, Disappear, Bon Iver retreat, I read only one book I’d pulled from the bottom of my to-read pile that I assume I bought because I used to have a morbid fascination with libertarian culture: Matthew Schneider-Mayerson’s Peak Oil: Apocalyptic Environmentalism and Libertarian Political Culture . A suicidal person and a peakist walk into a bar. Someday, there’ll be an audience for a very niche joke. Between 2005 and 2011, the particular subculture of “peakism” emerged in American society. Peakists believe that global oil production, in particular, had either already peaked or was about to. So is everything: food supply, energy, topsoil. Things are about to get dire. The global economy is on the brink of collapse, as is capitalism itself. As a group, peakists are left-leaning and white; they hold graduate degrees; they’re pessimistic about the possibility of political change. Peakists are survivalists, but ordinary. They stockpile resources, grow their own food, ride bicycles, compost, and try unsuccessfully to convince their friends and family to buy into this impending doom and gloom. They make fringe websites, write books, and become YouTube stars: like “Oily Cassandra,” who preached peakist dictums while performing a striptease. They do not often meet : they become hermits. The more pessimistic amongst them foresee apocalyptic scenarios, like in The Day After Tomorrow, The Happening, and Mad Max . Warfare over scarce resources. Famine. Epidemics. Billions dead. The slightly less pessimistic see a post-peak world with more self-sufficient communities. Yet, they live, despite having all the makings of a suicide cult. These are people who had seemingly answered Camus’ famous dictum that “there is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide.” On the heels of the Great Recession, the burst of the housing bubble, Occupy Wall Street, peakists are, by their own definitions, convinced not of the resilience of capitalism but its imminent collapse. Perhaps the strangest thing is that very few of them (28 percent) have ever been involved in formal or political activities related to energy or environmentalism (most who made up this figure had only attended a meeting or so). They see the apocalypse coming not by way of radical Christian millenarianism or eschatology but as an extrapolation of what we all know. To foresee the end of American imperialism or global capitalism: if only. And, of course, of course: it’s a shame to have so little hope—which must be what their friends tell them, making them want to gouge their eyes out. But at the same time: how much evidence do we really have, at that guttural, searching level, that peakists are irrational? I can’t imagine believably pathologizing such beliefs or compartmentalizing them into “religious fervor.” If a peakist dies by suicide tomorrow, won’t we do what we always do—ascribe it to mental illness instead of seeing it as a reasonable conclusion of their own ideology? I can’t say why, but peakists have been crowding my head, fuming in it, ever since. I found the forums, the books, and Oily Cassandra. I want to hold onto that. They’re in this “category” I can’t quite name, a resolution that I know has many more forms. I want to find enough things to fill this category, to figure out what it really is. I won’t be trying to kill myself again anytime soon. I’ve been reassuring my friends and family that I’m no longer suicidal for a while now. I reassure them that I’m no longer suicidal because I sense that the things that feel suicidal seem to be expanding. They don’t yet know I actually mean it now. Which is fine. Chronology still matters little to me. Even the possibility of all this newness peakists see coming feels woeful. But there is something about this time, in forward motion, that feels unanswered. Into this computer screen bubbles the thought, I know these people, don’t I? Team Sweet Meteor of Death. May 2023. If this is dying, death sure is noisy. It’s all gotten a bit much, see. All this anticipation of extinction. Almost as if we’ve all signed some collective suicide pact, waiting in the wings to be euthanized. Almost none of us have any ability to change things, which has ossified into an excuse for some very loud resignation. Almost as if Stoicism has finally prevailed as the most wise tradition in moral philosophy. Montaigne once praised the tranquil nature of peasants who had been ravaged for war, plague, and destruction, and remained stoic above it all. Perfect little saints, those peasants. The ones who paid no mind to the horrors they endured. They accepted it all willingly, and quietly. But we’re not those peasants. We’re certainly not quiet. We seem perhaps a little too willing. I’m talking, of course, about the apocalypse and that all who anticipate it do so with such wildness. Despairing with such hedonism, we herald autumn upon a single fallen leaf. Every moment in time brings cultural affirmation of an infinite number of responses to climate change ranging from the gleefully optimistic to the pessimistic, and now we are at its most abyssal ebb. Everywhere, there is a feverish variation of that Larkin verse: Most things may never happen: this one will. And that faint hint of the absurd , an inner voice insists, for the sake of completeness. More than a faint hint. Recently I spotted an issue of Harper’s in an airport harboring a cover story about the apocalypse. Subtitled “The Sense of an Ending,” which I reckon is less of an editorial choice than the wave of a white flag to imagination, the story is mostly a long list of apocalyptic trends. One could conclude that it is about reaffirming Giovanni Arrighi’s idea of late capitalism’s impending “systems collapse,” but mostly, it’s a lengthy primer of, and thus more about, Christiandom’s long history of thinking about the end times. I couldn’t say. It’s horribly imprecise. In the most recent editorial of the Real Review : “If every summer is the worst on record, then all summers are one summer, an identical experience; disaster as inevitability.” Alas, alack: we are going to die. Mark Bould’s The Anthropocene Unconscious deconstructs apocalyptic tropes in culture: the match cut montages in films and television shows, the attempts towards making the apocalypse ridiculous, the consumer demand for hours upon hours of television shows about the world after the Big Thing happens. At some point in the early days of The Pandemic, I realized just how homogenous my to-read pile of books, recently or imminently published, really was. Disaster. Catastrophe. Death. Precarity. Crisis. Extinction. Apocalypse. We could quibble all day about each of their different meanings, but boy, do they blur together nowadays. I started keeping a list of all this apocalyptic stuff when the pandemic began (like Riley on Buffy the Vampire Slayer , I feel an urge for the plural—unhappy with the real one and doomed by all possible choices, I proffer a gluttony of apocalypses). The list kept me from feeling too useless, but soon it became so long I started using tally marks. Before I stopped counting entirely, I had a tally of seven pieces in the New Yorker , with the annotation “somehow mostly about Trump?!” I do not recall any of them, but the note sounds plausible. I did, however, write a generous paragraph on Amanda Hess’ piece “Apocalypse When? Global Warming’s Endless Scroll” in the Times. Then other lists of lists. Philip Lehmann wrote about climate engineering: he began by listing recently-published books Generation Dread , The World as We Knew It , and Global Burning . As I read, I got caught up in a series of semantic dilemmas. Has the meaning of “late capitalism” changed, I wondered. Late capitalism today seems to mean the phenomenon of a system going extinct because humanity is too. It’s not just a pyramid scheme anymore. It’s not just about the gig economy. It’s just late, as if to a party. There was also Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All , a technocratic tract that put me off reading for weeks. Climate Change Apocalypse: A Young Engineer’s Travels into the Science and Politics Behind Global Warming , of which I received two advance copies. There was The Apocalypse and the End of History , which I did not read and did not seem to me to be about climate change at all, but the title reminded me of Rancière's idea of “endism,” a phrase used to describe the post-Soviet trend for historians and philosophers to declare something major had ended : whole eras of history or culture. There was a truly startling number of opinion pieces on climate depression, a mental health issue to which I’ve become quite indifferent because it seems to depend on “bad news”, of which we’ve never had a shortage. I begrudgingly watched The Last of Us . Bella Ramsey’s thirteen-year-old Ellie quipped: “People are making apocalypse jokes like there’s no tomorrow.” I chuckled, then thought: if only. Used to be that whenever I read the testimony of survivors of tragedy, I retracted in anguish: accounts from bushfires in Australia, post-nuclear Japan, witness accounts from genocide in 1971 in Bangladesh, or the numerous accounts in Truth and Reconciliation Commissions reports from South Africa, El Salvador, and many other countries after years of unspeakable horror. People who have befallen no such tragedies talk like that now; they use millennial therapy-speak. Why bother calling it “climate anxiety”? Let’s call it what it is: climate nihilism. Usually, when a friend needs to vent and starts with the disclaimer that it’s “not that bad/first world problems,” I reassure them that nobody will be ranking their problems. But in this case, scale really is the nub of the issue. Whose climate nihilism are we hearing from nowadays? Who comprises all these storied authorial voices? The survivor of a flood that’s claimed countless lives writes an obligatory column or two. Quasi-simultaneously, American East Coasters, in presumably their first heat wave, tie themselves up in knots, and that’s all one hears or reads about until it’s over. Climate nihilism is very de rigueur . Like buccal fat removal and crop tops in the men’s section. With the apocalypse all around us, it's hard not to keep thinking of Rancière. Endism was not about climate change, but that tendency he saw—to proclaim an end to History or Politics or Ideology—is easily extended to Humanity. On endism, Kristin Ross wrote in 2009 that “philosophical activity undertaken under the sign of urgency is a new version of an old phenomenon: the heroicizing of the philosopher’s voice, the philosopher as prophet who can see ‘the end’ that others cannot see.” Endism is a viral meme now. There are TikTok stars who may as well all be named Francis Fukuyama. But, I insist, if we’re going to die, let’s at least take a moment to find the right words. The placement of the stress matters. We are going to die. We are going to die . We are going to die. (We are going to die. Too far?) Or we could defer to a YouTube commenter who wrote, on the partially unrelated subject of social media: “I’ve been on Team Sweet Meteor of Death for at least six years.” It’s a bit derivative, but it sounds fun! Apocalypse jokes like there’s no tomorrow, indeed. Climate Psychiatric Alliance. July 2023. In the New Yorker , Jia Tolentino writes about “climate anxiety” and how psychology and psychiatry conduct “climate therapy.” Her sources are in unison that “climate anxiety” is a legitimate pathology peculiar to our time. “Climate anxiety,” writes Tolentino, “differs from many forms of anxiety a person might discuss in therapy—anxiety about crowds, or public speaking, or insufficiently washing one’s hands—because the goal is not to resolve the intrusive feeling and put it away.” It’s an awfully pedestrian way to think of anxiety: there are any number of things that are unresolvable, but sure, I suppose, we can sigh and pretend this “new” pathology, too, is believable. Halfway through the piece, Tolentino pivots, pondering her own luxury to pontificate about climate change. It's a welcome pivot, to be sure, but it seems designed to be surprising . A young Filipino woman, Isabella, skewers the Western tendency to be “thinking about the Earth, and journaling about it.” Isabella survived Typhoon Ulysses; she experienced more immediate emotions of panic and grief, with little time to process them. Later, a Native American fisherman impacted by the Exxon Valdez oil spill confesses to living and organizing through a sense of vengeance. None of this is surprising, of course, but it allows Tolentino to end ambivalently. For whatever reason, the story’s surprise element is conveyed most through Tim, a Floridian millennial with whom the piece begins, a man whose journey is meant to seem epiphanic. Tim majored in mechanical engineering. He later traveled to Indonesia, where he felt “dazed by grief” upon the news that orangutans were going extinct. He traipsed around the Sumatran jungle, returning unable to stop thinking about polluted water and carbon footprints, and with a viral case of climate anxiety. He went through a breakup during the pandemic and spiraled into a deep malaise. He then improved through therapy through the Climate Psychiatry Alliance. When we return to Tim at the end of the story, we discover that he had undiagnosed A.D.H.D. “He’d come to suspect,” Tolentino writes conspiratorially, “that he’d sometimes used climate anxiety as a container for his own, more intimate problems.” Well, duh. That’s obvious for the same reason this essay may feel obvious: humans are self-indulgent. That is fucking banal. Not so for Tolentino. Save the global pandemic, Tim suffered no natural disaster. He did, like many of us, suffer more prosaic disasters. Breakups. Intense isolation. An undiagnosed condition. In the meantime, psychiatry constructed a whole new pathology to ascribe to his fixating mind. Tolentino unfurls it like some freshly discovered ancient scribe. I may be a formerly suicidal person, but I’d like to think I’ve never thought of myself as uniquely grappling with anything at all. This is what everyone deals with. Isn’t climate anxiety, or even active crisis, always simultaneously in the domain of the intimate and the global? The notion of “climate anxiety” can support a plausible story of a fixating mind. But it cannot support a plausible story of disaster-induced anxiety: a brand-new thing! The neat story can ascribe anxiety to climate change, even pathologize it. An unrelated diagnosis can undo it entirely. Pathologies are often fragile and fictitious. And that’s fine to admit! My own woe led me, rather inexplicably, to study the very thing breeding peakists and nihilists—climate change—and I insist it’s fine to admit to all the conflation. The Climate Psychiatric Alliance cannot possibly be “holistic”; there will always be something greater one will attempt to perceive. And that’s fine! It would not be cruel to deny its categorization, which, I suspect, might be what the Climate Psychiatric Alliance might argue. Yes, I find the pathologizing of “climate anxiety” simplistic and ahistorical. That doesn’t mean that I dismiss the psychic toll of impending disaster. Relationships or careers crumbling as orangutans go extinct? Depressed because you lost your job at the same time as islands far from you are sinking? Therapy’s great for that. Disaster is always personal, always omnipresent. It’s a given. Not the apocalypse— disaster . The kind that reaches into our lives. The kind that is never unique because it lives in skies, seas, selves, and cheap similes. It patiently grows until we can see it. Like any life lived, it aches. Elsewhere, it blazes across scales. In every part of our being and everything else too. Disaster, like life, is all-encompassing; let it be so. Carbon footprints cannot assess pain, for pain is comorbid with far too much. So is disaster. Twin Bed. October 2017. I’ve just realized that I’ve lost another of my closest friends, a friend from college. I’ve sent her so many texts I feel like I’m in a Taylor Swift song. She loves Taylor Swift. I hope she listens to more of her music and gets back to me. “You will lose people!” Zoya is telling me very gravely. Zoya is one of my childhood best friends. She does not tolerate self-sabotage. “And you need to grow up about it,” she continues, because, of course, she does. “I know you’re really bad at letting people go, but you need to get better because this shit happens. People lose friends.” My friend hasn’t gotten back to me. She never will. I’m really not quite sure why the end of a friendship is so much more emotionally gutting than most everything else in life. It’s confounding. Once, my mother didn’t speak to me for six months, and I spent them with no knowledge of how long it would last. I have lost romantic partners. Friends, though—those are some real disasters. They have so little cultural weight. You can’t use them as excuses. The last time I met my friend, I was staying at her apartment in New York. As usual, we shared the bed. One night, halfway to sleep, she told me about the moment she was certain we’d be in each other’s lives forever. A year or two earlier, we’d had a very big fight on Christmas in Chicago. Drunk, we went to a CVS together because we needed to pee. Outside the bathroom, we happened upon a corkboard where the store’s staff had pinned wish lists for a Secret Santa party. That’s so sad, I said. That’s so fucking condescending, she said. It was a glorious fight. I argued that it was really sad because the things they asked for were really cheap and for family members: "$7 airplane model for my son,” “$4 bar of chocolate for my mom.” Wasn’t it enough that they had to work till 2 AM over the holidays? She argued that regardless of my insistence on some sort of solidarity, I was looking down on them. We yelled at each other for twenty minutes, fumed all the way back to my place, and didn’t speak for two days. Neither of us apologized, and then one day, I needed her help, as the only fellow biologist, for an important presentation, and without noting what had happened, we were friends again. Such things happened with many of my friends. But she and I rarely fought because when we did, it was terrible. We once cleared a roomful of drunken partiers dancing to EDM music. Our fights required resolution, or else. The night she recounted our sole unresolved fight, she told me that that was when she realized that no matter how angry she got with me, I was too much like family to her. When I remember that fight and its desperate need for resolution, I return to something about respect. I still think I had a point in that fight, but she did, too, because she has a strong moral compass. Even if I was sometimes at odds with it, I respected it. It was close enough to mine that I could understand it. We didn’t need to say anything that time, I noted in bed. We trusted in each other’s goodness enough to know it was just about the yelling. I don’t understand how we got from then to now. Sleeping next to each other in a twin bed like only significant others and best friends can, we went to sleep cozy and loved. That’s gone now. No fight took place, but I must have done something morally unconscionable because I cannot imagine her having any other reason. I don’t know why it hurts so much, but I have a strange feeling it has something to do with how common it is. Other situations garner far more sympathy. The loss of a friendship is devastating—and banal. People talk about how time heals all wounds, but I am not a paper cut, I am not a severed salamander capable of regeneration, I am not a time-traveler with something other than now. Now, I am indicted for reasons I do not know, and I believe I never will. But Zoya’s right. I’m too old to pretend these things do not happen. I’m walking home as she tells me. There are times even the most romantic amongst us must master moderation. The air was misty when we started talking. It seemed so wispy and idyllic. But now it’s snowing quite heavily, and I must be more pragmatic. My jacket has a hole in the back, and there’s snow wedged near the bottom of my spine. There are more urgent concerns. There is no such guarantee against such losses. A moral compass is no match for the bigness of this world, its ability to keep us separated for the rest of our lives, and its agility with turning fickle decisions to certainties. How much of disaster resides here? In a lost friendship. In days and nights. In the anhedonia of the mind. Do people sit back and wait for the end of days because they’re afraid of losing things or because they already have? Always-Time. November 2019. I’m co-presenting in a session at an Environmental Humanities seminar on “Futurity.” At my suggestion, we've started with a clip of the cold open from the first episode of The Leftovers ’ final season. The clip shows 19th-century Millerites in white robes, standing on the roofs of their houses. They’ve been told a date for the apocalypse. On that day, a husband, wife, and their child climb up onto their roof and wait for it all to end. The day passes, and another date appears; one date after another, they wait, but the apocalypse never comes. The number of believers dwindles; only the wife continues to have faith, and still it does not come until finally, the crushing ignominy makes her a village pariah. The clip ends, and I want to say that now, all of a sudden, a scene I have cried over seems stupid. I’m struggling, really struggling, to figure out what to say next, to move past the Millerites, to find something to say about our future, let alone our “futurities.” Why did I suggest this clip? I’d felt it was relevant to faith, the apocalypse, disaster, change, something—but now I have no idea what I was thinking. Suddenly, I feel it’s a bit irresponsible to equate climate change with apocalypse when, instead, it’s just the same old disasters, except many more and faster. That contraction of time may make it feel like the same thing, but it most certainly is not. And what the fuck is “futurity” supposed to be? I start talking about death instead. About new historical literature on death in the Anthropocene. The collapse of the self in the face of climate change. This happens reflexively, desperately, because as luck would have it, I’m well-versed in the philosophy of death, and remixing snippets of my greatest hits fills up the necessary space. After, there’s a good minute or two of silence, and soon, we’re taking a break for food, piling hummus and tahini and pita onto disposable plates. I’m spending most of my days through gritted teeth. I’m quite exhausted. Look at us, Ivy-Leaguers reading esoteric expositions that are all different ways of saying how our children and grand-children will face the consequences of climate change if we let the Earth warm 3 degrees or more. Our children? If?! How can I emphasize this enough: I have zero idea what exactly I’m supposed to feel when anyone with half a mind knows that we careened off the face of a cliff a long time ago, but is finding ways to avoid admitting that they’re always looking down. Am I missing something here? Am I the only person stupid enough to feel this way? Greta Thunberg is sailing across the Atlantic. The Argentinian artist Nino Cobre—sponsored by an environmental nonprofit that seems to have nothing better to do with its money—paints a mural of her on the side of a building on Mason Street in San Francisco. A friend active in the Sunrise Movement tells me she’s exhausted, and her words are all collapsed together with the frustration of her novel-in-progress and the stress of medical bills. I walk out of a class and watch students marching across campus protesting Yale’s lack of action on divestment from the fossil fuel industry. Bernie Sanders details his Green New Deal, and it is the most ambitious set of policy proposals by any candidate. Along comes Jonathan Franzen. “You can keep on hoping,” he writes darkly, “that catastrophe is preventable, and feel ever more frustrated or enraged by the world’s inaction. Or you can accept that disaster is coming, and begin to rethink what it means to have hope.” Franzen writes that a kind of denial of climate change catastrophe is present in progressive politics and climate activism. He disparages the “climate activists [who] argue that if we publicly admit that the problem can’t be solved, it will discourage people from taking any ameliorative action at all. This seems to me not only a patronizing calculation but an ineffectual one, given how little progress we have to show for it to date.” This is the last straw. Here we have a writer who has put down in plain terms the defeatism I feel so often, and I dislike him for it. Luckily, everyone else seems to as well. Why? The easiest part of the answer is that Franzen belittles the Green New Deal with elitist disdain, thumbing his nose at people with bold plans of action. But beyond that, I struggle. Maybe we’re angry because, although there is more than a kernel of truth embedded within the argument, our cynicism and his are keeping us from the work. Sure, I can admit a lot of the work of idealism just isn’t needed. But nobody needs to hear that all we have left to do is to sit back and wait for the apocalypse either. In truth, what we’re all really annoyed by, I think, is the conflation of the affective response of defeatism with righteousness. I may be entitled to feel defeated, but that does not mean it is the right thing to be. Obviously, I’ve felt all along that there’s utility in not admitting what I really believe; why else would it be so much harder than admitting it? But let’s face facts. In a matter of a year or two, climate pessimism will be everywhere very soon, and though we’re fighting for mass action, we’ve really had no good antidote to climate pessimism while we wait. I feel like many of us like to think of climate catastrophe as wholly unique, a real apocalypse. Which it is, but it also isn’t. All the disasters in history have made it so that what we will get is not totally unique. Climate pessimism is what we get when we start to pretend as if nobody’s studied disasters at all. As if people haven’t witnessed them and lived to tell the tale. As if people from the Alaskan Arctic to earthquake-prone island-nations have not been preparing for decades. As if war hasn’t paralyzed peoples for generations, and armies and bombs haven’t obliterated them; as if drought didn’t spark the tinder box of civil war in Syria, and hurricanes haven’t already ravaged New Orleans and Puerto Rico and earthquakes haven’t already devastated Indonesia and Haiti and Kashmir—and oh look, Puerto Rico again too. Climate change isn’t one seismic wave that knocks us all out, and we all know this, but we talk like it is. It will be like it is : a patchwork of storms, floods, hurricanes, volcanoes, tsunamis, droughts, wars, genocides, civil wars; now here, then there, just much faster, then simultaneously, and many more at an unprecedented scale. Is that better or worse than the apocalypse? What I tell myself is: if humankind had never faced disasters before, then perhaps I could sit around being righteously defeated. It’s a very strange time to be a historian of disaster, which I’m beginning to think of as synonymous with the environmental historian. Yet somehow, alas, I am ardent that this is what I meant to do. I chose this, very actively, this second doctorate, which I realize everyone finds outrageous. And my choice is more confounding because what is it that I am doing ? Looking? Yes, looking. Looking at disaster is paralyzing. Hasn’t that always been the case? Would that be a good reason to stop doing it? Of course not. But the short answer is too short, and the long answer is too long. Sitting here, typing in Bass Library in the extremely peculiar town that is New Haven, inside an empire hell-bent on its own destruction, I want to say it outright: around the time an appropriate arrangement emerges, we will all be dead. But anyway. Simultaneity. November 2022. On a summer afternoon in Colombo, at one of the protests urging the ousting of Gotabaya Rajapaksa, I found out that Roe v. Wade had been definitively struck down. I avoided social media, for I was in another place just as afraid. The aragalaya in Sri Lanka had been ongoing for much of the year. With economic collapse came power cuts, inflation went rampant, making all essential goods unaffordable for most. At the same time, I was in the archives, poking my head out every so often for an oral history interview. I was speaking to one diver and reef biologist. At some point he discussed a particular site that has long been a tourist hotspot. His voice cracked, and he began to speak at a lower volume. That site in particular made him sad. I paused to ask him how it felt to be there. “Nothing’s there,” he said. “All white.” We parted ways. I mulled for a long time why it was that the death of coral reefs is often a synecdoche for climate change catastrophe, and not the far better one: sadness. Rajapaksa crept out of the country in the middle of the night. Ranil Wickremasinghe, an equally troublesome man, became President, cracking down on the aragalaya with an abrupt zeal. Something broke between the day before and the days immediately after Rajapaksa’s departure. Those days, people talked how it all now felt a bit pointless, if I asked. They had no fuel in their tuk-tuks, no electricity at home, food was being rationed, shops were shuttering. Then the floods in Pakistan began. Before anyone quite knew the scale of it, I had been on the phone with our co-worker in Karachi who apologized for not having gotten back to me; she’d had no internet or electricity for a week. I told her there was no need to apologize. A question sat momentarily in my mind before it slipped away. That was in July. It is now November in New Haven, and the simultaneity of crises continues to reverberate, as I assume it must for everyone. Recently, SAAG began fundraising for the Women Democratic Front in Pakistan. I read Ibrahim Buriro’s dispatch from his village of Sabu Khan Buriro in Sindh. I was ashamed, because the catastrophe he described sounded quieter than the din in my head, but it felt worse. I didn’t know how to picture it: what losing that many people looks like. There was none. Only centuries-old paintings of the deluge painted by those who predicted the end times. I read the late K Za Win’s poem , written in protest of the military coup in Myanmar, and tried to picture it. I could only see the first row of protesters at a march. Should we resist the urge to project our imagination onto such disasters, as long as we do not not fail to attend to them? The question that had popped into my head before I knew about the floods was: “How bad will it be?” It’s like wishing for the gift of prophecy, even though it would likely cripple us. I wish I could go back to other moments of writing my essay where I was less incredulous of the scale of disaster. Where I can sense myself searching to know what it feels like, to truly relate. I’d like to know if being a witness to the simultaneity of all this is at all useful. I want to know when I’m old enough to stop pretending such things do not happen. I want us to prepare better, together. I want it so badly. Today marks first snow. It’s snowing quite heavily, and I know I must be pragmatic. We may distract ourselves. We may take a moment, and only that. We may distance ourselves, and not only that. A Bunch of Plinys. May 2020. Why on earth did I turn to a second doctorate—to history? I get asked this almost every day. What all those faces say is: this is a crazy person. I answer truthfully. I knew this is what I wanted my life to be, to mean. It is what I want to do. But why? I’ve taken stabs at a number of answers over the past few weeks in this document. They became more and more obscure. Like a tawdry poet, I first went to the Romantics and the sublime. That ambivalence in the face of destruction: horrific, godly, cosmic, perhaps beautiful. But I don’t need any more fucking ambivalence, I am fat with it. I went to the Stoics. To Seneca and Epictetus; to Montaigne, who is not a canonical Stoic, but for me cannot be seen as anything but. But as comforted as I often feel by Stoics, they are revelatory to me almost entirely because of their rhetoric. They are patronizing. I went to Heidegger, with his grand notions of Dasein. Dasein is a human who can only be if they have the foresight to see death coming. Dasein orients towards death as it barrels towards them, with the knowledge of their past. Your futurity —to butcher Heideggerian ideas of “being”—is a state of being in which the future of you is not an unknown. It is not even in the future, really. It is already coming towards you. That was somewhat useful, but it also felt like an elevated version of the Marvel multiverse. I didn’t know what to do with him: emotionally, that is, not epistemologically. “Why does the history of disaster matter to me?” I ask, to explain “in my own words.” Well, perhaps because I feel that familiarizing destruction is key to understanding it. It’s an inexplicable moral sense. There’s a category of things I want to put my finger on, and it pivots on humans, on us; on me, and back on us. It matters because I am not special. Walter Benjamin is famous for his idea of the angel of history. The idea of the angel is simple: The angel looks back and sees catastrophe. A storm hits. The angel cannot help but be swept along into the future while his back is turned. The storm is progress. Benjamin’s oft-cited notion, shorn from context, often loses some of that ambivalent, essayistic quality that makes him so brilliant. The angel of history was a way for Benjamin to recognize what the human is; “to understand a humanity that proves itself by destruction.” Benjamin projected his ideas onto a Paul Klee painting in a rhetorical struggle, approaching history like a critic, or even a novelist (earlier in Theses , Benjamin used the more colorful metaphor of a chess-playing puppet to connote "historical materialism." The narrative arc of the angel is clean and thus, perhaps, more memorable). But he was insistent on a "secret agreement" between the past and the present. When people look upon destruction, what can seem feckless, even inhumane, can be the opposite. One needs to look back to move forward. I, too, found succor not in dictums but stories and images . They rang more new and true. For one thing, there’s something odd about the very sources of disaster history. I quickly began to suspect that humans have not historically been good at leaving first-hand traces of the horrors they’ve survived. Most of it happens via proxy. It seems sensible to think that some kind of “instinct,” visceral memory, or closeness would create our corpus of disaster stories, but strangely, none of it seems to push people towards storytelling. Not for that purpose, anyway. First-person accounts from survivors are often obtained, less so offered; often against their will and rarely in a setting of their choosing. Here's one story. The great naturalist Pliny the Elder was a man of his time: he ascribed devastation to providence. He saw Mount Vesuvius explode in 79 CE, and ventured into it. It was the first thoroughly-documented volcanic eruption, a watershed moment for volcanology. He died there. Years later, his nephew, Pliny the Younger, who was with Pliny the Elder earlier on the day of the eruption, related what he knew to the historian Tacitus. On the day of the eruption, the younger Pliny’s mother drew her father’s attention to a strange cloud. Pliny the Elder saw it and asked his nephew if he wanted to join him, but the younger Pliny refused (apparently, he needed to study). Pliny the Elder ventured by boat. “In likeness and form,” Pliny the Younger wrote in his letter, “[the eruption] more closely resembled a pine-tree than anything else… and then spread out into a number of branches.” "Pliny the Younger and his Mother at Misenum, 79 A.D." Angelica Kauffman (1785) Pliny the Elder, his nephew claimed, journeyed towards the volcano on a small ship. Before he arrived, a woman begged him to save her, and the old man instantly hopped into the role of rescuer. Having saved many other people as well, the older Pliny moved “towards the place whence others were fleeing, and steering a direct course… utterly devoid of fear.” Let’s pause here to note the implausible. Pliny the Elder was notably fat. Most likely, he dictated his observations to an amanuensis from the deck of his ship. Having witnessed presumably enough, Pliny the Elder dined, slept, and died soon thereafter. Pliny the Younger closed the letter with a self-pitying proclamation that his own experience, in Misenum, was of no import. It was an invitation, sort of an “Oh, don’t ask, it was terrible!” And Tacitus asked. So Pliny wrote another letter relating the post-eruption scene in Misenum, where the skies blackened, the streets overrun with “people crowding in masses upon us” to escape the city. Everybody feared death. Pliny’s mother begged of him to leave her to die, for she was old and she did not want to slow him down. He insisted he would not leave her. At nighttime, they returned to Misenum where everything was layered with ashes, in ruin. Pliny the Younger’s second letter is more emotional and evocative than his first. There is a sense that the details making up the knowledge of the eruption—the ash, smoke, the pine tree cloud, the wreckage, the ships, the woman who called for help, the amanuensis who noted what the naturalist saw—are veiling an emotional experience Pliny still shies away from. But he ends this second letter by warning Tacitus menacingly: “You will not read these details, which are not up to the dignity of history , as though you were about to incorporate them in your writings.” We don’t know if Pliny was writing from an impulse of ancient egotism or genuine self-deprecation. But I find an unsettling believability to his warning to Tacitus: even clear-headed observers who survive catastrophe and look back at it feel incapable of the act of doing history. There seems to be a too-authentic closeness that digs a trench, on one side of which a survivor will always be paralyzed, and the job will have to go to someone else. It is like, or perhaps is, post-traumatic stress disorder. Volcanoes took a long time to be figured out; time we do not have. Pliny’s letters about Mount Vesuvius brought volcanology into vogue for a time. And then it's almost as if there was an enormous gap in volcanology from the ancients till seemingly the sixteenth century. Vesuvius erupted again in 1631, and Etna in 1669. Suddenly everyone from Hooke to Newton, Cuvier to Goethe had some opinion. Controversies in volcanology bedeviled philosophers, natural historians, and geologists alike. Well into the nineteenth century, scientists debated ideas of volcanology that could be traced at least as far back as Lucretius. Of course, it's not as if volcanoes went on recess. I can't quite explain the gap, except by way of my own ignorance, but it seems to me that volcanoes, as a concept, are defined by modern science. Thus, perhaps for too many, Pliny the Younger's experience, and the ideas of many others, truly were not up to the "dignity of history." One scholar blames the many lost years squarely on the resurgence of Christian premillennialism, i.e., end-of-days thinking. But premillennialism also coincided with postmillennialism . What with Christian missionaries invading new lands for people to convert, there was also growing optimism for a great era for Christian prosperity; a Golden Age Millennium of greatness before the end was nigh. In this circuitous way, I ended up where I never wanted to be: Christian eschatology, where apocalypse writing always begins. I understand why. The stories are indelible. The Christian view of volcanoes for much of the early modern period does not seem too dissimilar to that of the ancients: both associated volcanoes with punishment and the fires of Hell. Just as Virgil proclaimed that the giant Enceladus was buried under the eruption of Etna by the goddess Athena for defying the gods, Christianity throughout the Middle Ages and beyond proclaimed the upswell of lava as the manifestation of the wrath of God and a damning indictment of the societies inflicted by them. Earthquakes and other disasters, even war, generated similar responses for much of recorded human history: they were all indicative of the wrath of one god or many. The ancient Greeks often blamed earthquakes on the god Poseidon. Japanese folklore blames a great catfish named Namazu. The Book of Revelation chronicles the “seven bowls” of God’s wrath, the bowls poured by angels, each one causing a catastrophic event foreseen in a vision. After the bowls of bodily sores, mass extinction in the oceans, the rivers turning to blood, a literal firebombing by the Sun, and more—finally, there is a giant, world-ending earthquake. “No earthquake like it has ever occurred since mankind has been on earth,” the Book of Revelation says, in one of its more modest moments. A rather anticlimactic denouement. Disasters have a way of creating vacancies for moral exhortations—though not necessarily theological ones. All that godsplaining needs somewhere to go. That is familiar to me. I was raised Muslim, and now whenever climate change comes up in the company of elders, all I hear about is qiyamat , or Judgment Day. It’s a busy day. Now that’s new. Growing up, people said all sorts of things were indications of qiyamat . A scandalous billboard. A particularly brazen female news anchor. On one baffling occasion, it was the way my friend’s cat meowed. Peevish uncles often used qiyamat as a nationalist, anti-India sentiment. But it’s so big now. Those uncles now know that the flood and the cat’s meow do not sit in the same category. Like scholars, they invoke human blunders. Qiyamat is a prophecy foretold centuries ago. It’s history; it’s up to the dignity of history. We may be up to the dignity of history. It depends on what we do with ourselves. I wish to dignify people through history; that is my only answer to explain my crazy decision to turn to it. That does not mean I am special. None of us are. The Ruin and the Volcano. November 2020. For Benjamin, “he who seeks to approach his own buried past must conduct himself like a man digging.” W.H. Sebald did that literally. I said earlier that environmental history may well be the history of disaster. But Benjamin and Sebald take this one step further. When the question is strictly material , one could rephrase it: is the history of the disaster the same thing as the history of the ruin? Sebald was born and grew up on the outskirts of the Bavarian Alps in 1944. His father, a prisoner of war until 1947, was part of the Nazi armed forces. Images of destruction and the ruins of postwar Germany were the first things he recalled when he felt like he was returning “home.” In a famous essay, Sebald the child and the adult, reveals himself to be totally confounded by just how little there was to see of all this destruction in the lives of people: It is true that the strategic-bombing surveys published by the Allies … show that the Royal Air Force alone dropped almost a million tons of bombs on enemy territory; it is true that of the hundred and thirty-one towns and cities attacked, some only once and some repeatedly, many were almost entirely flattened, that about six hundred thousand German civilians fell victim to the air raids and three and a half million homes were destroyed … but we do not grasp what it all actually meant … It seems to have left scarcely a trace of pain behind in the collective consciousness. So many people all just carried on as if nothing had ever happened. That so much of it occurred after Hitler was long gone, after war elsewhere had ended, did not matter. For Churchill, Solly Zuckerman, and Arthur Harris, the strategy of total destruction was to achieve “wholesale an annihilation of the enemy, with his dwellings, his history, and his natural environment, as can possibly be achieved.” Rendered by Sebald, it is devastating, perhaps even sublime, the extent to which the destroyed environment was just as much a part of the architecture of human habitation as a city or a dwelling. “How ought such a natural history of destruction to begin?” he asked. There is no answer, not in Sebald’s novels, not in his essays. There are simply things going on unfolding: things decaying, ruins existing. He walked along the millions of bricks left behind from the air-dropped ordnances and the fire-storms and the collapse of apartment buildings, surveying the postwar city landscape excavating brick-by-brick, and found no answer as to what need there was for such destruction except for the whims of a few men. What we should fear the most is not the hurricane but when people are failed. In his “nature-history” of Paris, Benjamin merges uncontrollable disaster with a proletarian mob—it’s a possibility of great potential. The potential wobbles, though, in his words. In some places, in many places, revolution may manifest as mindless destruction—what if it’s so boundless, there is not enough potential left? There are many who covet the safety provided to many of us; they’re not wrong. The very geography of disaster, we all know, is unjust. And to me, the white-hot anger of a people wronged is more terrifying than a volcano. It is conceivable that a situation arises where it won’t matter who is seen as culpable; it is conceivable that powerful actors make it so. If we remain paralyzed for too long, repeating mantras of anxiety or the denial of its existence, it will not be a hurricane that tears us limb from limb. My friend Meg recently wrote to me about this essay. “I think sometimes you use your brain as a way to step away from the most uncomfortable parts of yourself because you are more comfortable with the realities of global disaster than you are with the personal ones,” she wrote. She’s right, but that also describes most academics. They say to write the book you want to read. Unfortunately, I can’t, for this one cannot be written alone. Now-Time. August 2023. Now somehow, now somehow, the people in the worlds I inhabit most closely—that of academia, environmental humanities, global history, energy history—don’t actually look at apocalypticism, endism, whatever you may call it, straight in the face. Even though the works that define these fields, and those continually published, are painstaking in deepening the scale of the problems climate change poses, the problem of all this pessimism is not spoken aloud, and if it is, the responses are so very trite. There are exceptions—I admire the work of Bedour Alagraa and Anna Tsing, among others—but the hush is deafening. Over the years that I have brought up climate pessimism to various scholars, I have only ever received one answer, delivered in dismissive, patronizing fashion. It is always the same answer everyone has heard many times: about the necessity of hope, rarely justified in any real or specific terms insofar as having reason to hope, but simply an expression of it. As if we haven’t heard that old canard before. As if people are incapable of holding things simultaneously. As if ambivalence or serious engagement is a step too far for academia. Any other answers are mere quibbles disguised as serious responses: “It won’t be an apocalypse,” “We need to organize.” In the very vocation set out to define the problem, to demonstrate how we got here, the people populating it have no answer to how many are responding affectively to climate change, or to the many alarming cover stories and books and articles producing their doom-scroll, or even what all those alarmist signs are a symptom of. Here, in hallowed halls, climate pessimism is verboten. The most generous version of it I’ve heard is by AOC in a recent Instagram Live. After spending half an hour outlining how climate change impacts every aspect of human life, she was in a bit of a hurry. “I am a big believer in ‘climate optimism’, she said. “You ever notice that it's easier to imagine everything going to hell than it is things actually working out and getting better? People are reactive, and the challenges that the climate crisis presents to us are going to require a reorganization of the parts of our society. And people don't like being proactive… I just really believe that climate doomerism and cynicism in general leads you down a very dark path.” There’s the chastisement on moral grounds, and then there are things that, frankly, sound peakist. The chastisement is typical. The biggest part of it is the idea that cynical people are necessarily doing nothing. Then there are the things at odds with the core ideas AOC has long espoused. It’s not the fault of the vast majority of people. Individualistic action will not be enough. Power, capital, and political systems are resilient. The imminent collapse roars back. “[Systems] are simply going to collapse, and we can make a proactive decision about that,” AOC argues. “Certain things collapsing doesn't mean doom. It means we need to make space for a better way. … We should not have to move heaven and earth to save these things that are collapsing under their own weight because they never made sense.” What does this mean? What silent majority is moving heaven and earth to save systems, and what exactly is collapsing again? What proactive decisions were the vast majority of people on this planet supposed to but failed to make? Is the argument that there is some sort of absence of global protest, or do we, as usual, just mean America? There is no shortage of calls for revolution; there is so much uncertainty as to its imminence despite centuries of vociferous argument. But let's run with AOC's premise anyway. If all that is true, perhaps we should also not lose many things that are precious: lives, primarily. How can anyone be sure that “systems collapse” and “death” won’t happen simultaneously? They might! A Marxist education allowed me to understand that acceptance of lives lost is at the heart of the idea of revolution. Is climate optimism too shy to admit into its arena that horrible, uncertain trade-off? For me, climate optimism is denialism that there is logic to pessimism; a relegation of pessimism to the emotional, supposedly illogical. It requires recourse to very dubious things: that imagining utopia is difficult, that our imaginations can incite action, that our actions are sufficient, that doomers are uninformed, that systems are tottering. Climate optimists often directly contradict what they elsewhere preach—that the scale of the problem is pervasive—with a strange Pollyannaish turn to hope as a cure-all. At best, it is an unfinished thought. Like mine. The overwhelming majority of peakists express views that are far-left. And of course, it should be said that some of what peakists believe doesn’t justify their survivalist thinking. They’re largely anti-capitalists who believe capitalism is short-lived, and that oil production will peak soon, or it already has. To me, either of those seems like a reason to hope—I just don’t quite believe them. Different people take the same evidence to mean radically different things. The human brain is not internally consistent in its own logic, and in this peakists are not unlike climate optimists. Peakists also believe the state has not done anywhere near enough for racial minorities. They express the belief that the US is an oligarchy, they disdain both political parties, and electoral politics in general. They sound like almost everyone I’ve met in the US who identifies with the left. Doomers, as a group, may well be overrepresented on the left. They are many of the people we are looking to recruit. Some have been pathologized with “climate anxiety.” Climate optimism would have us shame it out of them. Validation of what another might be feeling cannot exist here. To which I must ask: are we trying to lose? Then, that canard—that being pessimistic is unethical and dangerous . It’s a slippery slope argument. Like most slippery slopes, it’s facetious and determinist. It’s a finger wag—one might say “~vibes~”—as a statement of belief based on illusory evidence. Lynne Segal in the Boston Review argues that “such pessimism can dangerously align us with a form of reactionary conservatism, merely gawping at the dire state of things, apparently helpless before impending disaster.” Segal mentions the dystopia of The Hunger Games as a fantasy that obliterates utopian visions. For Segal, what combats pessimism is collective action and solidarity which produce care and joy. It is a lovely thought, but again: we have and continue to do all of this, and there is no magic threshold Segal or any theorist can come up with. Which makes it all just hoary preaching to the choir. There is no reason to believe pessimism should necessarily make one a reactionary conservative. Emotions are not partisan objects. I’ve been a pessimist, and I persist with my work. I believe it very important. As I see it, most people who dedicate time to understanding and combating climate change feel a great deal of pessimism actually: it’s perfectly natural to feel several things all at once. And while solidarity is joyful, organizing is exhausting . Ask anyone organizing a union: most of the time, it feels like we’re on a giant hamster wheel. I see no reason why my most doomer self would spurn collective action in perpetuity. It feels strange, yes: why bother fighting when you feel so defeated? But that’s precisely it. So many things are not unique about this time. Humans fight unwinnable battles all the time; chastising pessimists with variations on the same cliché is not, in fact, a solution. And neither Logic nor Rhetoric have ever been the wisest antidotes for depression , though they’ve been deployed for much of recorded human history. And also: excuse you, The Hunger Games is excellent . There is no evidence that its audience slipped into reactionary conservatism upon its end. Why would it? It ends by dismantling the dystopia. My point in all this, my reason for vacillating so violently seems plain to me now. I want admission. Our own private disasters collide with global ones, and we feel terrible. If we want to organize, surely part of the “care” of solidarity is to recognize the thing climate activists and scholars seem loath to admit: we’re not feeling good about it. And that’s fine. Sure, it will make the slogans harder to write, but it’s better than deluding ourselves that our comrades truly believe that we can pull off fossil fuel divestment and break pipelines by the end of the year, and if we do so, we’re saved . But most of us don’t believe that’ll happen, any of it. Sign us up anyway. In 2017, Ashley Dawson argued that global capitalism now is not so much about uneven development but about uneven disaster, even if Western media scarcely covers disasters in developing countries. Spectacular, record-breaking heat waves struck the Pacific Northwest, on the heels of of all those elsewhere in the Americas. Then the catastrophic wildfires devastated Hawai’i, with thousands dead, injured, or missing. I suspect those were the things we all heard about. Meanwhile, Typhoon Khanun hit the Korean Peninsula, where there have only been five typhoon-level storms since 1945, and Russia, destroying farmland, killing and injuring hundreds. Typhoon Doksuri killed approximately sixty people in Fujian province, China. The El Niño phenomenon causing drought in much of East Asia has villagers in Indonesia digging up river beds. 8,000 evacuees are stranded as the wildfires in the Canary Islands continue to rage. Wildfires rage in Greece. These are just some natural disasters. I’d wager every country is plagued by problems we parcel as political or economic that are exacerbated by climate change or energy in some way. I intend this match-cut exposition to situate us, at the very end, not so much in time but in banality. None of us know how to simultaneously obtain the stories, persons, and sentences of disaster, let alone the planet. Disaster resides. In the now-time, as in the everywhere-time, always-time, and to-be-time. It seeps. It sets up house. The doomer is Cassandra. Some may suspect she is telling the truth. They all treat her as if she is insane. In John Cassavetes’ A Woman Under the Influence (1974), Gena Rowlands’ Mabel, supposedly a manic psychotic, is stranded in an aggressive family who do the opposite of what they say. They all keep insisting they must have a good time, but they never even try. All they do is caterwaul. Mabel knows how to have a good time. She reacts, she loves, she dances, she sings. She seems to know precisely what’s going on. She demands someone tell her the truth, but they never do. Six months pass in a mental hospital, where she is treated with electroshock therapy. When she returns, her husband asks her at the dinner table what the hospital was like, her eyes dart around. “Everybody’s here,” she says tentatively, like someone learning to speak. “Seems like a party.” Later, when she mentions the hospital routine, she is chastised. The cruelty of this fait accompli is immeasurable. The sane peck and pick away at you until you howl in pain. “Aha!” they’ll say in unison. Mabel asks tearfully of her father at the crowded table: “Dad, please stand up for me.” He stands up. She says no, not that, sit down. “Please stand up for me.” He stands again. “I don’t understand this game,” he says. “Good times from now on,” Mabel’s husband yells. “Things are gonna get better and better and better, and then they’ll get better than that and then they’ll get better.” I do not endorse this ridiculous notion that this is how we should treat pessimists. I do not endorse it because oftentimes, I agree. Oftentimes, I don’t. So what? What are we so afraid of that we can’t admit how afraid we are? What’s the worst that can happen? That with their last breath, the doomer turns to smirk and say: “Told you so”? At the Sentence. December 2022. It is the day before 2023. I don’t know what I was yesterday, but I am a pessimist today. Not so long ago, believing in climate change at all was the strangest kind of inversion: we, the believers, were equivalent to the Millerite pariah; the deniers the apocalypse-skeptics, all the people who rolled their eyes at religious zealots. Now it feels that axis has spun, bewilderingly pitting optimists and pessimists at opposite ends. Of course, we all have our reasons. We think they are good. But is there an axis at all if anyone can be of two minds? Recently, I pulled up my list on the impending apocalypse, and instead of alarm, I felt inadequate to actually work on climate change for a few reasons. The first is embarrassing. In the beginning of the 2020, I fell into a deep writing slump, and aside from the words on these pages—which I considered diary entries—I have written nothing since. That is until two days ago when my friend Sarah read this draft and forced me to complete it as an editorial. What’s worse, I’ve lured you into reading about disaster, but I still don’t know what it means. What is it? As far as I can tell, the disaster we chronicle does feel more like ruin. Like Sebald, that’s the only way I can really picture it, and the picture is after the fact. Not writing had an interesting effect on my brain. For the first time in my life, the closest I can come to original thought is in visual art. Six months ago, I bought some fancy artist papers and a canvas, acrylic paints, India ink, and I started to paint something I’d sketched out. I’d learned to embroider over the pandemic so every time I just didn’t know to make something, I’d correct it by using thread. Not to give anything form, just to fill space. I tell myself they’re supposed to be columns and I let the stitching falter, to make myself feel better. I’m making an old ruin. So, in other words, I learned how to embroider, paint, color, and flounder solely to attempt at making a point. Isn’t that something? "Untitled" Acrylic, india ink, thread. By the author (2022) Two things bubble out: aesthetics and death. In recent years, I’ve become a particular fan of Derrida, which is surprising, because for quite some time, he was more impenetrable to me than even Heidegger or Foucault were. Then just the other day, I read Brian Dillon on the subject of Derrida. Dillon writes: I see now why Theory was so attractive to a young man, a boy really, who had lost both parents within five years. These writings seemed to confirm not only that disaster was real, and general, and happened even at the smallest levels of language, but also that catastrophe could be turned. Art was nothing but an acknowledgment of this moment when you realized the cracks had been there all along… I fell in love with such moments of collapse. “Aestheticizing,” we’d learn to say of such love; I hate the word to this day. As if there was anything available, anything left, except aesthetics, except an effort to frame the wreckage in the aftermath, at the last. The way Dillon links Derrida’s personal history to disaster and language makes my heart skip a beat, as does the defense of the aesthetic. It would be wise to use every thinker or theorist in this crisis this way. Trying harder than we have before to humanize one another, a prosaic thing to say, but what tactic could be sounder? What is it about the aesthetic that can feel like it might just save us, save everything, even if not in the literal sense? In an earlier draft of this essay, I’d written: “Nobody, not even Greta Thunberg, needs a mural of Greta Thunberg.” I really believed that at the time, very deeply, like I believed all things. But whenever I’m sure, I begin to suspect myself more. The whole premise of my woes on disaster are linked to the aesthetic, particularly the avant-garde. I, too, hate the word “aestheticizing.” The aesthetic is the one realm instinct has yet to fail me. I cannot explain why I love something aesthetically: I do or I don’t. That’s how it is with language. The thing I’d missed about disaster for a long time was how banal it is. I’d failed to keep up with where it was—which was everywhere. When I stopped writing, for example, it was as if there was a crashing. A compaction of words occurred, and words began to slip away from me, as if a whole era’s trace in the geological record had just collapsed in on itself. That is a ludicrous analogy, but I wanted to make it, and so I did. Because I am not required to be equivalently important to the geological record. I did not sign a legal document or swear an oath, “I will never use language that may imply that two things are equal in importance even if I do not mean it.” I made the analogy because language and aesthetics are battlegrounds. They shift. We try to keep up. We fail. We try to specify them. We fail. And we will always fail because they make up the “we.” We fight this losing battle so hard. We even pretend we’re winning. We play with things that seem very real all the time. Right now, we’ve fixed time on terms that are wholly mine. The world outside is moving faster than us. It doesn’t care. That may lull you into thinking that what is happening does not matter, but we do this all the time. We fix borders, even though we know they do not exist, which is why what our brains somehow seem incapable at holding many things at once. We foreclose the simultaneity of disaster. For no good reason, and against our principles, even the best of us hold onto borders for dear life. Floods devastated villages, towns, cities, and peoples across Pakistan—and actually, Afghanistan, and this omission does actually matter. Border disputes and lynchings occurred so close to us that some of those killed may even have popped up on your Tinder at some point. In Sri Lanka, economic and political collapse may have seemed joyful in what it brought forth—the mass protests—but in truth, the disaster crippled the whole island-nation’s well-being, health, ability to work, to heal, to move. In the Maldives, an archipelago not far away from Sri Lanka, a brutal Islamist government has cracked down on the most benign of citizens, all whilst a drug epidemic and gendered violence continue unacknowledged. There are some luxuries some places have: its writers do not need to write anonymously, for instance, as I do not. It’s only occasionally even crossed my mind. But we know just how many places this is not true for. We all accept how little agency we have over the climate crisis individually. But we do have agency: over time, over our minds, over our language, over our aesthetics—all places disaster will reach into and hollow you out unless you grab ahold of it. My own agency is in these words; if there’s something other than ideas or a shoulder to cry on to offer, I haven’t found it yet. Has all this been about politics? That’s the wrong question. In The Origins of Dislike , Amit Chaudhuri writes: “That word, “about”, is a key term in Anglophone literary discourse, and is meant to enforce a dichotomy between creativity and thought, writing and event.” The “about”, he says, “may be dispensed with in a way that allows poetics and politics to flow into each other.” I want to return to the category: that question I asked myself many years ago. What is it that I have been writing for all these years? It reads like a diary. Slowly, it became an essay. Thankfully, I saved the original drafts because as I read back, I sensed continuity. It is being published as an editorial. It’s all a category problem I bring up because my insistence that this be seen as an essay, not a declamation, is characterized by doubt, by my inability to give you direct answers as a form of mimesis for the mind. The problem with doubt is the insolubility it creates with myself. On the one hand: I am not pertinent here. I am not at the center of the point I am making. None of this has anything to do with me. But maybe: I am pertinent here. I am at the center, and although I do not like it, I chose it. It is self-centered. It is all about me. And everyone’s pertinent here: the individual and the collective need not be at odds. Queen Bed. June 2023. I spent a few nights at my friend Nur’s place in Brooklyn just before I left for Colombo earlier this month. It was good for me. No, it was necessary. The night before I left, I awoke abruptly at 3am. I’d had a dream about my lost friend, the one I hadn’t heard from in years. I didn’t even know where she lived anymore, though I assumed she still lived in New York. On a lark, I searched on Instagram and came across a montage from a few months earlier. She’d gotten married. I watched it over and over. I sat up, elated, pausing the video to look at her face. She was happy. She was mid-laugh in every photo. I could hear it, that laugh that was like if Phoebe Buffay was a cartoon witch. I recognized other faces from college. They were adjusting her hem, holding her hands, or stiltedly smiling. I was so happy; she deserves nothing less than such joy. I didn’t even notice that I was crying. My simultaneous reactions were extreme. It felt so strange to catch myself in the process of feeling them. I felt guilty the next day when I asked Nur the next day as she got off a work call if I could talk to her. I told her how the two sentiments were completely separate: my genuine happiness for her and my self-pity. I remember them differently, even. I’d pored over every frame because I was desperate to know if she was happy, and she was. I’d cried for a long time, before I called Zoya. Whether I schedule my confiding or not, I feel guilty. Neither Zoya nor Nur had any advice for me; they just listened. Until this time, I thought I’d gotten quite good at letting my friend go. I thought of her now and then. When I read the melodramatic letters of Pliny the Younger, I remembered thinking how funny she would have found them. I remember this one time years ago when she, too, had gone somewhere alone: Paris. I don’t know if she “disappeared,” only that, as she told me later, secretively, that she’d had a grand time. I didn’t pry. Speaking to Zoya and Nur was an admission of defeat. Turns out, I’m still not good enough at letting people go. But it also turns out that nobody expected me to be. Maybe what Zoya had wanted to do was permit me to think I could. Maybe she changed her mind. Either way, she did not say, “told you so.” It was kind. Kinder still to admit that it doesn’t work. Then I knew something else. The problem was considered fixed. For some, it’s easier when a problem can be marked “complete.” I cannot control other people, only myself. A knot tied loose is two or more threads dangling in the wind. Different friends see different hues in us. Those hues don’t disappear just because they aren’t perceived. They’re still there, but it doesn’t feel like it, which is the problem. I hope to reunite with them my whole life. I’ll hold candles for them, like Kevin Garvey in The Leftovers . “People hold candles, Nora,” he tells an old lover, presumed dead for decades. It’s unfathomable to me that people live with regrets they know they will carry. Kindnesses were done. Then they were over. Things were accepted, and with yet more friends, I receded into the black. Which is nowhere at all, or so it feels. This time I’ll tie a different knot. ∎ I am sorry for every mistake I have made in my life. I’m sorry I wasn’t wiser sooner. I’m sorry I ever spoke of myself as lonely. Mary Oliver Just once in my life—oh, when have I ever wanted anything just once in my life? Amy Hempel Rapture. July 2017. Some months back, at work, I daydreamed about disappearing. I felt invisible regardless, and the world did not seem quite right for me. It seemed not quite right because it rarely isn’t for anyone at all. A plot hatched. A plot to be raptured. It was something of a lark, but not really. At the time, the final season of The Leftovers was airing, and I found Evie Murphy’s hoax to be aspirational. It was easy to imagine. My friend Chris would ordinarily be the most likely to notice my absence, but we’d fought months earlier and had since been avoiding each other. My roommate would probably assume—if he wondered—that I was sleeping at some boy’s place. “I think I’m coming down with something,” I said out loud in lab the next day. Everybody in the lab told me to go home, as expected. Once home, I booked an Airbnb for two weeks. I’d considered Milwaukee, which I’d passed by once, but landed elsewhere. It was a house overlooking the lake. It was cheap. It was beautiful. I’d have it all to myself. It was meant for four or more. I packed lightly. I bought a new toothbrush and razor, split my medications into separate bottles, and put unread books on my nightstand. I did the dishes, threw out the trash, folded my clothes, and got to the train station early. All on my own! It was the first time I’d been punctual in months. See, for the past two years or so, I’ve tried to kill myself several times. Some were not at all intended as cries for attention, but it was fine. I made peace with them being seen as such. Thrice, I stockpiled an increasing number of benzos, along with increasing amounts of alcohol, and went to sleep. Each time, I woke up in the afternoon, befuddled. The third time, I could no longer make sense of my body’s ability to metabolize a month’s worth of prescription pills. And that was that. Others were indeed intended for attention, and I reliably got caught. I became good at pretending I meant it, at the tearful apology administered while thinking unspeakable things. But what I never said—because no one wanted to hear it—was that though my friends and family did a great deal for me, they also greatly exaggerated their importance. And, honestly, how could sixty 2 milligram pills of clonazepam be so unsatisfactory? Then when I was gone, they never found out. I wanted to keep up the disappearance, like a character in a spy novel you let yellow in your bathroom. I’d fake my identity! Become the ghost of some much-lauded novel! I knew, of course, that any such story would end with deportation, but still. It was a nice daydream. Things were different on the train back home, two weeks later. Everyone who wanted me alive had gotten lucky, they wouldn’t know just how much. I knew that most ways of narrating the story would elicit some proclamation that I was “burned out!” and I needed to get away. Which was fine. But it wasn’t true. A strange new axis of time snuck in. Any time before, I would’ve gotten caught. Once, years ago, my sister had called the police when my flight didn’t land on time. Now, I was perfectly capable of life in whatever narrow sense it meant. The day after I got home, Chris walked over to my desk in lab, frowningly. “Where have you been?” he asked. “Just seeing someone,” I said. “Probably not anymore. Why? What’s up?” “So you weren’t sick?” “No. Well, I was, but nothing major. I needed a break.” I don’t think he bought it, but he didn’t push it. I’d missed him, he’d missed me. The following Sunday we watched the new episode of The Leftovers , as we had the two years before. Laurie Garvey went scuba-diving, possibly to commit suicide. It was marvelous. I spent two weeks at that lakefront house, armed with Diet Cokes, pre-made deli sandwiches, cookies, and a carton of cigarettes. I watched old seasons of The Leftovers . Then Lost . Then The OC . I kept my phone on silent. I didn’t hear from anyone. My greatest act of attention-seeking got none at all. I slept till mid-afternoon each day. After a week, I thought I had bedsores. Then I got restless. I fumed, as I still do, about society’s extreme moral judgment of suicide, which I consider—if I’m honest—just as much a human right as any other. We cannot, we must not, ask anyone to live if they do not wish to. We mustn’t ask for them to relinquish that right, no matter how terrible it may be for the living. It was odd, I thought later, how the future returned. Privately, reflexively fuming about moral beliefs much bigger than me was an old sensation, but more than that it was a new one. An idea whose absence I had not noticed rustled back to me. A knot tied loose. Passively, I began to make decisions. A sprinkling of the still “so much to see, so much to do, so much to read.” For a little bit there, I remember thinking very hard about time and the world in the way I imagine Bill Bryson must, like an unfinished picture book freshly encountered. It was chronological. That’s one way of narrating it, which makes it sound very triumphalist, if it weren’t for how funny it was. Forced solitude cures suicidal ideation—hurrah! But then there was something else too. I learned about a very strange people. During my little Eat, Disappear, Bon Iver retreat, I read only one book I’d pulled from the bottom of my to-read pile that I assume I bought because I used to have a morbid fascination with libertarian culture: Matthew Schneider-Mayerson’s Peak Oil: Apocalyptic Environmentalism and Libertarian Political Culture . A suicidal person and a peakist walk into a bar. Someday, there’ll be an audience for a very niche joke. Between 2005 and 2011, the particular subculture of “peakism” emerged in American society. Peakists believe that global oil production, in particular, had either already peaked or was about to. So is everything: food supply, energy, topsoil. Things are about to get dire. The global economy is on the brink of collapse, as is capitalism itself. As a group, peakists are left-leaning and white; they hold graduate degrees; they’re pessimistic about the possibility of political change. Peakists are survivalists, but ordinary. They stockpile resources, grow their own food, ride bicycles, compost, and try unsuccessfully to convince their friends and family to buy into this impending doom and gloom. They make fringe websites, write books, and become YouTube stars: like “Oily Cassandra,” who preached peakist dictums while performing a striptease. They do not often meet : they become hermits. The more pessimistic amongst them foresee apocalyptic scenarios, like in The Day After Tomorrow, The Happening, and Mad Max . Warfare over scarce resources. Famine. Epidemics. Billions dead. The slightly less pessimistic see a post-peak world with more self-sufficient communities. Yet, they live, despite having all the makings of a suicide cult. These are people who had seemingly answered Camus’ famous dictum that “there is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide.” On the heels of the Great Recession, the burst of the housing bubble, Occupy Wall Street, peakists are, by their own definitions, convinced not of the resilience of capitalism but its imminent collapse. Perhaps the strangest thing is that very few of them (28 percent) have ever been involved in formal or political activities related to energy or environmentalism (most who made up this figure had only attended a meeting or so). They see the apocalypse coming not by way of radical Christian millenarianism or eschatology but as an extrapolation of what we all know. To foresee the end of American imperialism or global capitalism: if only. And, of course, of course: it’s a shame to have so little hope—which must be what their friends tell them, making them want to gouge their eyes out. But at the same time: how much evidence do we really have, at that guttural, searching level, that peakists are irrational? I can’t imagine believably pathologizing such beliefs or compartmentalizing them into “religious fervor.” If a peakist dies by suicide tomorrow, won’t we do what we always do—ascribe it to mental illness instead of seeing it as a reasonable conclusion of their own ideology? I can’t say why, but peakists have been crowding my head, fuming in it, ever since. I found the forums, the books, and Oily Cassandra. I want to hold onto that. They’re in this “category” I can’t quite name, a resolution that I know has many more forms. I want to find enough things to fill this category, to figure out what it really is. I won’t be trying to kill myself again anytime soon. I’ve been reassuring my friends and family that I’m no longer suicidal for a while now. I reassure them that I’m no longer suicidal because I sense that the things that feel suicidal seem to be expanding. They don’t yet know I actually mean it now. Which is fine. Chronology still matters little to me. Even the possibility of all this newness peakists see coming feels woeful. But there is something about this time, in forward motion, that feels unanswered. Into this computer screen bubbles the thought, I know these people, don’t I? Team Sweet Meteor of Death. May 2023. If this is dying, death sure is noisy. It’s all gotten a bit much, see. All this anticipation of extinction. Almost as if we’ve all signed some collective suicide pact, waiting in the wings to be euthanized. Almost none of us have any ability to change things, which has ossified into an excuse for some very loud resignation. Almost as if Stoicism has finally prevailed as the most wise tradition in moral philosophy. Montaigne once praised the tranquil nature of peasants who had been ravaged for war, plague, and destruction, and remained stoic above it all. Perfect little saints, those peasants. The ones who paid no mind to the horrors they endured. They accepted it all willingly, and quietly. But we’re not those peasants. We’re certainly not quiet. We seem perhaps a little too willing. I’m talking, of course, about the apocalypse and that all who anticipate it do so with such wildness. Despairing with such hedonism, we herald autumn upon a single fallen leaf. Every moment in time brings cultural affirmation of an infinite number of responses to climate change ranging from the gleefully optimistic to the pessimistic, and now we are at its most abyssal ebb. Everywhere, there is a feverish variation of that Larkin verse: Most things may never happen: this one will. And that faint hint of the absurd , an inner voice insists, for the sake of completeness. More than a faint hint. Recently I spotted an issue of Harper’s in an airport harboring a cover story about the apocalypse. Subtitled “The Sense of an Ending,” which I reckon is less of an editorial choice than the wave of a white flag to imagination, the story is mostly a long list of apocalyptic trends. One could conclude that it is about reaffirming Giovanni Arrighi’s idea of late capitalism’s impending “systems collapse,” but mostly, it’s a lengthy primer of, and thus more about, Christiandom’s long history of thinking about the end times. I couldn’t say. It’s horribly imprecise. In the most recent editorial of the Real Review : “If every summer is the worst on record, then all summers are one summer, an identical experience; disaster as inevitability.” Alas, alack: we are going to die. Mark Bould’s The Anthropocene Unconscious deconstructs apocalyptic tropes in culture: the match cut montages in films and television shows, the attempts towards making the apocalypse ridiculous, the consumer demand for hours upon hours of television shows about the world after the Big Thing happens. At some point in the early days of The Pandemic, I realized just how homogenous my to-read pile of books, recently or imminently published, really was. Disaster. Catastrophe. Death. Precarity. Crisis. Extinction. Apocalypse. We could quibble all day about each of their different meanings, but boy, do they blur together nowadays. I started keeping a list of all this apocalyptic stuff when the pandemic began (like Riley on Buffy the Vampire Slayer , I feel an urge for the plural—unhappy with the real one and doomed by all possible choices, I proffer a gluttony of apocalypses). The list kept me from feeling too useless, but soon it became so long I started using tally marks. Before I stopped counting entirely, I had a tally of seven pieces in the New Yorker , with the annotation “somehow mostly about Trump?!” I do not recall any of them, but the note sounds plausible. I did, however, write a generous paragraph on Amanda Hess’ piece “Apocalypse When? Global Warming’s Endless Scroll” in the Times. Then other lists of lists. Philip Lehmann wrote about climate engineering: he began by listing recently-published books Generation Dread , The World as We Knew It , and Global Burning . As I read, I got caught up in a series of semantic dilemmas. Has the meaning of “late capitalism” changed, I wondered. Late capitalism today seems to mean the phenomenon of a system going extinct because humanity is too. It’s not just a pyramid scheme anymore. It’s not just about the gig economy. It’s just late, as if to a party. There was also Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All , a technocratic tract that put me off reading for weeks. Climate Change Apocalypse: A Young Engineer’s Travels into the Science and Politics Behind Global Warming , of which I received two advance copies. There was The Apocalypse and the End of History , which I did not read and did not seem to me to be about climate change at all, but the title reminded me of Rancière's idea of “endism,” a phrase used to describe the post-Soviet trend for historians and philosophers to declare something major had ended : whole eras of history or culture. There was a truly startling number of opinion pieces on climate depression, a mental health issue to which I’ve become quite indifferent because it seems to depend on “bad news”, of which we’ve never had a shortage. I begrudgingly watched The Last of Us . Bella Ramsey’s thirteen-year-old Ellie quipped: “People are making apocalypse jokes like there’s no tomorrow.” I chuckled, then thought: if only. Used to be that whenever I read the testimony of survivors of tragedy, I retracted in anguish: accounts from bushfires in Australia, post-nuclear Japan, witness accounts from genocide in 1971 in Bangladesh, or the numerous accounts in Truth and Reconciliation Commissions reports from South Africa, El Salvador, and many other countries after years of unspeakable horror. People who have befallen no such tragedies talk like that now; they use millennial therapy-speak. Why bother calling it “climate anxiety”? Let’s call it what it is: climate nihilism. Usually, when a friend needs to vent and starts with the disclaimer that it’s “not that bad/first world problems,” I reassure them that nobody will be ranking their problems. But in this case, scale really is the nub of the issue. Whose climate nihilism are we hearing from nowadays? Who comprises all these storied authorial voices? The survivor of a flood that’s claimed countless lives writes an obligatory column or two. Quasi-simultaneously, American East Coasters, in presumably their first heat wave, tie themselves up in knots, and that’s all one hears or reads about until it’s over. Climate nihilism is very de rigueur . Like buccal fat removal and crop tops in the men’s section. With the apocalypse all around us, it's hard not to keep thinking of Rancière. Endism was not about climate change, but that tendency he saw—to proclaim an end to History or Politics or Ideology—is easily extended to Humanity. On endism, Kristin Ross wrote in 2009 that “philosophical activity undertaken under the sign of urgency is a new version of an old phenomenon: the heroicizing of the philosopher’s voice, the philosopher as prophet who can see ‘the end’ that others cannot see.” Endism is a viral meme now. There are TikTok stars who may as well all be named Francis Fukuyama. But, I insist, if we’re going to die, let’s at least take a moment to find the right words. The placement of the stress matters. We are going to die. We are going to die . We are going to die. (We are going to die. Too far?) Or we could defer to a YouTube commenter who wrote, on the partially unrelated subject of social media: “I’ve been on Team Sweet Meteor of Death for at least six years.” It’s a bit derivative, but it sounds fun! Apocalypse jokes like there’s no tomorrow, indeed. Climate Psychiatric Alliance. July 2023. In the New Yorker , Jia Tolentino writes about “climate anxiety” and how psychology and psychiatry conduct “climate therapy.” Her sources are in unison that “climate anxiety” is a legitimate pathology peculiar to our time. “Climate anxiety,” writes Tolentino, “differs from many forms of anxiety a person might discuss in therapy—anxiety about crowds, or public speaking, or insufficiently washing one’s hands—because the goal is not to resolve the intrusive feeling and put it away.” It’s an awfully pedestrian way to think of anxiety: there are any number of things that are unresolvable, but sure, I suppose, we can sigh and pretend this “new” pathology, too, is believable. Halfway through the piece, Tolentino pivots, pondering her own luxury to pontificate about climate change. It's a welcome pivot, to be sure, but it seems designed to be surprising . A young Filipino woman, Isabella, skewers the Western tendency to be “thinking about the Earth, and journaling about it.” Isabella survived Typhoon Ulysses; she experienced more immediate emotions of panic and grief, with little time to process them. Later, a Native American fisherman impacted by the Exxon Valdez oil spill confesses to living and organizing through a sense of vengeance. None of this is surprising, of course, but it allows Tolentino to end ambivalently. For whatever reason, the story’s surprise element is conveyed most through Tim, a Floridian millennial with whom the piece begins, a man whose journey is meant to seem epiphanic. Tim majored in mechanical engineering. He later traveled to Indonesia, where he felt “dazed by grief” upon the news that orangutans were going extinct. He traipsed around the Sumatran jungle, returning unable to stop thinking about polluted water and carbon footprints, and with a viral case of climate anxiety. He went through a breakup during the pandemic and spiraled into a deep malaise. He then improved through therapy through the Climate Psychiatry Alliance. When we return to Tim at the end of the story, we discover that he had undiagnosed A.D.H.D. “He’d come to suspect,” Tolentino writes conspiratorially, “that he’d sometimes used climate anxiety as a container for his own, more intimate problems.” Well, duh. That’s obvious for the same reason this essay may feel obvious: humans are self-indulgent. That is fucking banal. Not so for Tolentino. Save the global pandemic, Tim suffered no natural disaster. He did, like many of us, suffer more prosaic disasters. Breakups. Intense isolation. An undiagnosed condition. In the meantime, psychiatry constructed a whole new pathology to ascribe to his fixating mind. Tolentino unfurls it like some freshly discovered ancient scribe. I may be a formerly suicidal person, but I’d like to think I’ve never thought of myself as uniquely grappling with anything at all. This is what everyone deals with. Isn’t climate anxiety, or even active crisis, always simultaneously in the domain of the intimate and the global? The notion of “climate anxiety” can support a plausible story of a fixating mind. But it cannot support a plausible story of disaster-induced anxiety: a brand-new thing! The neat story can ascribe anxiety to climate change, even pathologize it. An unrelated diagnosis can undo it entirely. Pathologies are often fragile and fictitious. And that’s fine to admit! My own woe led me, rather inexplicably, to study the very thing breeding peakists and nihilists—climate change—and I insist it’s fine to admit to all the conflation. The Climate Psychiatric Alliance cannot possibly be “holistic”; there will always be something greater one will attempt to perceive. And that’s fine! It would not be cruel to deny its categorization, which, I suspect, might be what the Climate Psychiatric Alliance might argue. Yes, I find the pathologizing of “climate anxiety” simplistic and ahistorical. That doesn’t mean that I dismiss the psychic toll of impending disaster. Relationships or careers crumbling as orangutans go extinct? Depressed because you lost your job at the same time as islands far from you are sinking? Therapy’s great for that. Disaster is always personal, always omnipresent. It’s a given. Not the apocalypse— disaster . The kind that reaches into our lives. The kind that is never unique because it lives in skies, seas, selves, and cheap similes. It patiently grows until we can see it. Like any life lived, it aches. Elsewhere, it blazes across scales. In every part of our being and everything else too. Disaster, like life, is all-encompassing; let it be so. Carbon footprints cannot assess pain, for pain is comorbid with far too much. So is disaster. Twin Bed. October 2017. I’ve just realized that I’ve lost another of my closest friends, a friend from college. I’ve sent her so many texts I feel like I’m in a Taylor Swift song. She loves Taylor Swift. I hope she listens to more of her music and gets back to me. “You will lose people!” Zoya is telling me very gravely. Zoya is one of my childhood best friends. She does not tolerate self-sabotage. “And you need to grow up about it,” she continues, because, of course, she does. “I know you’re really bad at letting people go, but you need to get better because this shit happens. People lose friends.” My friend hasn’t gotten back to me. She never will. I’m really not quite sure why the end of a friendship is so much more emotionally gutting than most everything else in life. It’s confounding. Once, my mother didn’t speak to me for six months, and I spent them with no knowledge of how long it would last. I have lost romantic partners. Friends, though—those are some real disasters. They have so little cultural weight. You can’t use them as excuses. The last time I met my friend, I was staying at her apartment in New York. As usual, we shared the bed. One night, halfway to sleep, she told me about the moment she was certain we’d be in each other’s lives forever. A year or two earlier, we’d had a very big fight on Christmas in Chicago. Drunk, we went to a CVS together because we needed to pee. Outside the bathroom, we happened upon a corkboard where the store’s staff had pinned wish lists for a Secret Santa party. That’s so sad, I said. That’s so fucking condescending, she said. It was a glorious fight. I argued that it was really sad because the things they asked for were really cheap and for family members: "$7 airplane model for my son,” “$4 bar of chocolate for my mom.” Wasn’t it enough that they had to work till 2 AM over the holidays? She argued that regardless of my insistence on some sort of solidarity, I was looking down on them. We yelled at each other for twenty minutes, fumed all the way back to my place, and didn’t speak for two days. Neither of us apologized, and then one day, I needed her help, as the only fellow biologist, for an important presentation, and without noting what had happened, we were friends again. Such things happened with many of my friends. But she and I rarely fought because when we did, it was terrible. We once cleared a roomful of drunken partiers dancing to EDM music. Our fights required resolution, or else. The night she recounted our sole unresolved fight, she told me that that was when she realized that no matter how angry she got with me, I was too much like family to her. When I remember that fight and its desperate need for resolution, I return to something about respect. I still think I had a point in that fight, but she did, too, because she has a strong moral compass. Even if I was sometimes at odds with it, I respected it. It was close enough to mine that I could understand it. We didn’t need to say anything that time, I noted in bed. We trusted in each other’s goodness enough to know it was just about the yelling. I don’t understand how we got from then to now. Sleeping next to each other in a twin bed like only significant others and best friends can, we went to sleep cozy and loved. That’s gone now. No fight took place, but I must have done something morally unconscionable because I cannot imagine her having any other reason. I don’t know why it hurts so much, but I have a strange feeling it has something to do with how common it is. Other situations garner far more sympathy. The loss of a friendship is devastating—and banal. People talk about how time heals all wounds, but I am not a paper cut, I am not a severed salamander capable of regeneration, I am not a time-traveler with something other than now. Now, I am indicted for reasons I do not know, and I believe I never will. But Zoya’s right. I’m too old to pretend these things do not happen. I’m walking home as she tells me. There are times even the most romantic amongst us must master moderation. The air was misty when we started talking. It seemed so wispy and idyllic. But now it’s snowing quite heavily, and I must be more pragmatic. My jacket has a hole in the back, and there’s snow wedged near the bottom of my spine. There are more urgent concerns. There is no such guarantee against such losses. A moral compass is no match for the bigness of this world, its ability to keep us separated for the rest of our lives, and its agility with turning fickle decisions to certainties. How much of disaster resides here? In a lost friendship. In days and nights. In the anhedonia of the mind. Do people sit back and wait for the end of days because they’re afraid of losing things or because they already have? Always-Time. November 2019. I’m co-presenting in a session at an Environmental Humanities seminar on “Futurity.” At my suggestion, we've started with a clip of the cold open from the first episode of The Leftovers ’ final season. The clip shows 19th-century Millerites in white robes, standing on the roofs of their houses. They’ve been told a date for the apocalypse. On that day, a husband, wife, and their child climb up onto their roof and wait for it all to end. The day passes, and another date appears; one date after another, they wait, but the apocalypse never comes. The number of believers dwindles; only the wife continues to have faith, and still it does not come until finally, the crushing ignominy makes her a village pariah. The clip ends, and I want to say that now, all of a sudden, a scene I have cried over seems stupid. I’m struggling, really struggling, to figure out what to say next, to move past the Millerites, to find something to say about our future, let alone our “futurities.” Why did I suggest this clip? I’d felt it was relevant to faith, the apocalypse, disaster, change, something—but now I have no idea what I was thinking. Suddenly, I feel it’s a bit irresponsible to equate climate change with apocalypse when, instead, it’s just the same old disasters, except many more and faster. That contraction of time may make it feel like the same thing, but it most certainly is not. And what the fuck is “futurity” supposed to be? I start talking about death instead. About new historical literature on death in the Anthropocene. The collapse of the self in the face of climate change. This happens reflexively, desperately, because as luck would have it, I’m well-versed in the philosophy of death, and remixing snippets of my greatest hits fills up the necessary space. After, there’s a good minute or two of silence, and soon, we’re taking a break for food, piling hummus and tahini and pita onto disposable plates. I’m spending most of my days through gritted teeth. I’m quite exhausted. Look at us, Ivy-Leaguers reading esoteric expositions that are all different ways of saying how our children and grand-children will face the consequences of climate change if we let the Earth warm 3 degrees or more. Our children? If?! How can I emphasize this enough: I have zero idea what exactly I’m supposed to feel when anyone with half a mind knows that we careened off the face of a cliff a long time ago, but is finding ways to avoid admitting that they’re always looking down. Am I missing something here? Am I the only person stupid enough to feel this way? Greta Thunberg is sailing across the Atlantic. The Argentinian artist Nino Cobre—sponsored by an environmental nonprofit that seems to have nothing better to do with its money—paints a mural of her on the side of a building on Mason Street in San Francisco. A friend active in the Sunrise Movement tells me she’s exhausted, and her words are all collapsed together with the frustration of her novel-in-progress and the stress of medical bills. I walk out of a class and watch students marching across campus protesting Yale’s lack of action on divestment from the fossil fuel industry. Bernie Sanders details his Green New Deal, and it is the most ambitious set of policy proposals by any candidate. Along comes Jonathan Franzen. “You can keep on hoping,” he writes darkly, “that catastrophe is preventable, and feel ever more frustrated or enraged by the world’s inaction. Or you can accept that disaster is coming, and begin to rethink what it means to have hope.” Franzen writes that a kind of denial of climate change catastrophe is present in progressive politics and climate activism. He disparages the “climate activists [who] argue that if we publicly admit that the problem can’t be solved, it will discourage people from taking any ameliorative action at all. This seems to me not only a patronizing calculation but an ineffectual one, given how little progress we have to show for it to date.” This is the last straw. Here we have a writer who has put down in plain terms the defeatism I feel so often, and I dislike him for it. Luckily, everyone else seems to as well. Why? The easiest part of the answer is that Franzen belittles the Green New Deal with elitist disdain, thumbing his nose at people with bold plans of action. But beyond that, I struggle. Maybe we’re angry because, although there is more than a kernel of truth embedded within the argument, our cynicism and his are keeping us from the work. Sure, I can admit a lot of the work of idealism just isn’t needed. But nobody needs to hear that all we have left to do is to sit back and wait for the apocalypse either. In truth, what we’re all really annoyed by, I think, is the conflation of the affective response of defeatism with righteousness. I may be entitled to feel defeated, but that does not mean it is the right thing to be. Obviously, I’ve felt all along that there’s utility in not admitting what I really believe; why else would it be so much harder than admitting it? But let’s face facts. In a matter of a year or two, climate pessimism will be everywhere very soon, and though we’re fighting for mass action, we’ve really had no good antidote to climate pessimism while we wait. I feel like many of us like to think of climate catastrophe as wholly unique, a real apocalypse. Which it is, but it also isn’t. All the disasters in history have made it so that what we will get is not totally unique. Climate pessimism is what we get when we start to pretend as if nobody’s studied disasters at all. As if people haven’t witnessed them and lived to tell the tale. As if people from the Alaskan Arctic to earthquake-prone island-nations have not been preparing for decades. As if war hasn’t paralyzed peoples for generations, and armies and bombs haven’t obliterated them; as if drought didn’t spark the tinder box of civil war in Syria, and hurricanes haven’t already ravaged New Orleans and Puerto Rico and earthquakes haven’t already devastated Indonesia and Haiti and Kashmir—and oh look, Puerto Rico again too. Climate change isn’t one seismic wave that knocks us all out, and we all know this, but we talk like it is. It will be like it is : a patchwork of storms, floods, hurricanes, volcanoes, tsunamis, droughts, wars, genocides, civil wars; now here, then there, just much faster, then simultaneously, and many more at an unprecedented scale. Is that better or worse than the apocalypse? What I tell myself is: if humankind had never faced disasters before, then perhaps I could sit around being righteously defeated. It’s a very strange time to be a historian of disaster, which I’m beginning to think of as synonymous with the environmental historian. Yet somehow, alas, I am ardent that this is what I meant to do. I chose this, very actively, this second doctorate, which I realize everyone finds outrageous. And my choice is more confounding because what is it that I am doing ? Looking? Yes, looking. Looking at disaster is paralyzing. Hasn’t that always been the case? Would that be a good reason to stop doing it? Of course not. But the short answer is too short, and the long answer is too long. Sitting here, typing in Bass Library in the extremely peculiar town that is New Haven, inside an empire hell-bent on its own destruction, I want to say it outright: around the time an appropriate arrangement emerges, we will all be dead. But anyway. Simultaneity. November 2022. On a summer afternoon in Colombo, at one of the protests urging the ousting of Gotabaya Rajapaksa, I found out that Roe v. Wade had been definitively struck down. I avoided social media, for I was in another place just as afraid. The aragalaya in Sri Lanka had been ongoing for much of the year. With economic collapse came power cuts, inflation went rampant, making all essential goods unaffordable for most. At the same time, I was in the archives, poking my head out every so often for an oral history interview. I was speaking to one diver and reef biologist. At some point he discussed a particular site that has long been a tourist hotspot. His voice cracked, and he began to speak at a lower volume. That site in particular made him sad. I paused to ask him how it felt to be there. “Nothing’s there,” he said. “All white.” We parted ways. I mulled for a long time why it was that the death of coral reefs is often a synecdoche for climate change catastrophe, and not the far better one: sadness. Rajapaksa crept out of the country in the middle of the night. Ranil Wickremasinghe, an equally troublesome man, became President, cracking down on the aragalaya with an abrupt zeal. Something broke between the day before and the days immediately after Rajapaksa’s departure. Those days, people talked how it all now felt a bit pointless, if I asked. They had no fuel in their tuk-tuks, no electricity at home, food was being rationed, shops were shuttering. Then the floods in Pakistan began. Before anyone quite knew the scale of it, I had been on the phone with our co-worker in Karachi who apologized for not having gotten back to me; she’d had no internet or electricity for a week. I told her there was no need to apologize. A question sat momentarily in my mind before it slipped away. That was in July. It is now November in New Haven, and the simultaneity of crises continues to reverberate, as I assume it must for everyone. Recently, SAAG began fundraising for the Women Democratic Front in Pakistan. I read Ibrahim Buriro’s dispatch from his village of Sabu Khan Buriro in Sindh. I was ashamed, because the catastrophe he described sounded quieter than the din in my head, but it felt worse. I didn’t know how to picture it: what losing that many people looks like. There was none. Only centuries-old paintings of the deluge painted by those who predicted the end times. I read the late K Za Win’s poem , written in protest of the military coup in Myanmar, and tried to picture it. I could only see the first row of protesters at a march. Should we resist the urge to project our imagination onto such disasters, as long as we do not not fail to attend to them? The question that had popped into my head before I knew about the floods was: “How bad will it be?” It’s like wishing for the gift of prophecy, even though it would likely cripple us. I wish I could go back to other moments of writing my essay where I was less incredulous of the scale of disaster. Where I can sense myself searching to know what it feels like, to truly relate. I’d like to know if being a witness to the simultaneity of all this is at all useful. I want to know when I’m old enough to stop pretending such things do not happen. I want us to prepare better, together. I want it so badly. Today marks first snow. It’s snowing quite heavily, and I know I must be pragmatic. We may distract ourselves. We may take a moment, and only that. We may distance ourselves, and not only that. A Bunch of Plinys. May 2020. Why on earth did I turn to a second doctorate—to history? I get asked this almost every day. What all those faces say is: this is a crazy person. I answer truthfully. I knew this is what I wanted my life to be, to mean. It is what I want to do. But why? I’ve taken stabs at a number of answers over the past few weeks in this document. They became more and more obscure. Like a tawdry poet, I first went to the Romantics and the sublime. That ambivalence in the face of destruction: horrific, godly, cosmic, perhaps beautiful. But I don’t need any more fucking ambivalence, I am fat with it. I went to the Stoics. To Seneca and Epictetus; to Montaigne, who is not a canonical Stoic, but for me cannot be seen as anything but. But as comforted as I often feel by Stoics, they are revelatory to me almost entirely because of their rhetoric. They are patronizing. I went to Heidegger, with his grand notions of Dasein. Dasein is a human who can only be if they have the foresight to see death coming. Dasein orients towards death as it barrels towards them, with the knowledge of their past. Your futurity —to butcher Heideggerian ideas of “being”—is a state of being in which the future of you is not an unknown. It is not even in the future, really. It is already coming towards you. That was somewhat useful, but it also felt like an elevated version of the Marvel multiverse. I didn’t know what to do with him: emotionally, that is, not epistemologically. “Why does the history of disaster matter to me?” I ask, to explain “in my own words.” Well, perhaps because I feel that familiarizing destruction is key to understanding it. It’s an inexplicable moral sense. There’s a category of things I want to put my finger on, and it pivots on humans, on us; on me, and back on us. It matters because I am not special. Walter Benjamin is famous for his idea of the angel of history. The idea of the angel is simple: The angel looks back and sees catastrophe. A storm hits. The angel cannot help but be swept along into the future while his back is turned. The storm is progress. Benjamin’s oft-cited notion, shorn from context, often loses some of that ambivalent, essayistic quality that makes him so brilliant. The angel of history was a way for Benjamin to recognize what the human is; “to understand a humanity that proves itself by destruction.” Benjamin projected his ideas onto a Paul Klee painting in a rhetorical struggle, approaching history like a critic, or even a novelist (earlier in Theses , Benjamin used the more colorful metaphor of a chess-playing puppet to connote "historical materialism." The narrative arc of the angel is clean and thus, perhaps, more memorable). But he was insistent on a "secret agreement" between the past and the present. When people look upon destruction, what can seem feckless, even inhumane, can be the opposite. One needs to look back to move forward. I, too, found succor not in dictums but stories and images . They rang more new and true. For one thing, there’s something odd about the very sources of disaster history. I quickly began to suspect that humans have not historically been good at leaving first-hand traces of the horrors they’ve survived. Most of it happens via proxy. It seems sensible to think that some kind of “instinct,” visceral memory, or closeness would create our corpus of disaster stories, but strangely, none of it seems to push people towards storytelling. Not for that purpose, anyway. First-person accounts from survivors are often obtained, less so offered; often against their will and rarely in a setting of their choosing. Here's one story. The great naturalist Pliny the Elder was a man of his time: he ascribed devastation to providence. He saw Mount Vesuvius explode in 79 CE, and ventured into it. It was the first thoroughly-documented volcanic eruption, a watershed moment for volcanology. He died there. Years later, his nephew, Pliny the Younger, who was with Pliny the Elder earlier on the day of the eruption, related what he knew to the historian Tacitus. On the day of the eruption, the younger Pliny’s mother drew her father’s attention to a strange cloud. Pliny the Elder saw it and asked his nephew if he wanted to join him, but the younger Pliny refused (apparently, he needed to study). Pliny the Elder ventured by boat. “In likeness and form,” Pliny the Younger wrote in his letter, “[the eruption] more closely resembled a pine-tree than anything else… and then spread out into a number of branches.” "Pliny the Younger and his Mother at Misenum, 79 A.D." Angelica Kauffman (1785) Pliny the Elder, his nephew claimed, journeyed towards the volcano on a small ship. Before he arrived, a woman begged him to save her, and the old man instantly hopped into the role of rescuer. Having saved many other people as well, the older Pliny moved “towards the place whence others were fleeing, and steering a direct course… utterly devoid of fear.” Let’s pause here to note the implausible. Pliny the Elder was notably fat. Most likely, he dictated his observations to an amanuensis from the deck of his ship. Having witnessed presumably enough, Pliny the Elder dined, slept, and died soon thereafter. Pliny the Younger closed the letter with a self-pitying proclamation that his own experience, in Misenum, was of no import. It was an invitation, sort of an “Oh, don’t ask, it was terrible!” And Tacitus asked. So Pliny wrote another letter relating the post-eruption scene in Misenum, where the skies blackened, the streets overrun with “people crowding in masses upon us” to escape the city. Everybody feared death. Pliny’s mother begged of him to leave her to die, for she was old and she did not want to slow him down. He insisted he would not leave her. At nighttime, they returned to Misenum where everything was layered with ashes, in ruin. Pliny the Younger’s second letter is more emotional and evocative than his first. There is a sense that the details making up the knowledge of the eruption—the ash, smoke, the pine tree cloud, the wreckage, the ships, the woman who called for help, the amanuensis who noted what the naturalist saw—are veiling an emotional experience Pliny still shies away from. But he ends this second letter by warning Tacitus menacingly: “You will not read these details, which are not up to the dignity of history , as though you were about to incorporate them in your writings.” We don’t know if Pliny was writing from an impulse of ancient egotism or genuine self-deprecation. But I find an unsettling believability to his warning to Tacitus: even clear-headed observers who survive catastrophe and look back at it feel incapable of the act of doing history. There seems to be a too-authentic closeness that digs a trench, on one side of which a survivor will always be paralyzed, and the job will have to go to someone else. It is like, or perhaps is, post-traumatic stress disorder. Volcanoes took a long time to be figured out; time we do not have. Pliny’s letters about Mount Vesuvius brought volcanology into vogue for a time. And then it's almost as if there was an enormous gap in volcanology from the ancients till seemingly the sixteenth century. Vesuvius erupted again in 1631, and Etna in 1669. Suddenly everyone from Hooke to Newton, Cuvier to Goethe had some opinion. Controversies in volcanology bedeviled philosophers, natural historians, and geologists alike. Well into the nineteenth century, scientists debated ideas of volcanology that could be traced at least as far back as Lucretius. Of course, it's not as if volcanoes went on recess. I can't quite explain the gap, except by way of my own ignorance, but it seems to me that volcanoes, as a concept, are defined by modern science. Thus, perhaps for too many, Pliny the Younger's experience, and the ideas of many others, truly were not up to the "dignity of history." One scholar blames the many lost years squarely on the resurgence of Christian premillennialism, i.e., end-of-days thinking. But premillennialism also coincided with postmillennialism . What with Christian missionaries invading new lands for people to convert, there was also growing optimism for a great era for Christian prosperity; a Golden Age Millennium of greatness before the end was nigh. In this circuitous way, I ended up where I never wanted to be: Christian eschatology, where apocalypse writing always begins. I understand why. The stories are indelible. The Christian view of volcanoes for much of the early modern period does not seem too dissimilar to that of the ancients: both associated volcanoes with punishment and the fires of Hell. Just as Virgil proclaimed that the giant Enceladus was buried under the eruption of Etna by the goddess Athena for defying the gods, Christianity throughout the Middle Ages and beyond proclaimed the upswell of lava as the manifestation of the wrath of God and a damning indictment of the societies inflicted by them. Earthquakes and other disasters, even war, generated similar responses for much of recorded human history: they were all indicative of the wrath of one god or many. The ancient Greeks often blamed earthquakes on the god Poseidon. Japanese folklore blames a great catfish named Namazu. The Book of Revelation chronicles the “seven bowls” of God’s wrath, the bowls poured by angels, each one causing a catastrophic event foreseen in a vision. After the bowls of bodily sores, mass extinction in the oceans, the rivers turning to blood, a literal firebombing by the Sun, and more—finally, there is a giant, world-ending earthquake. “No earthquake like it has ever occurred since mankind has been on earth,” the Book of Revelation says, in one of its more modest moments. A rather anticlimactic denouement. Disasters have a way of creating vacancies for moral exhortations—though not necessarily theological ones. All that godsplaining needs somewhere to go. That is familiar to me. I was raised Muslim, and now whenever climate change comes up in the company of elders, all I hear about is qiyamat , or Judgment Day. It’s a busy day. Now that’s new. Growing up, people said all sorts of things were indications of qiyamat . A scandalous billboard. A particularly brazen female news anchor. On one baffling occasion, it was the way my friend’s cat meowed. Peevish uncles often used qiyamat as a nationalist, anti-India sentiment. But it’s so big now. Those uncles now know that the flood and the cat’s meow do not sit in the same category. Like scholars, they invoke human blunders. Qiyamat is a prophecy foretold centuries ago. It’s history; it’s up to the dignity of history. We may be up to the dignity of history. It depends on what we do with ourselves. I wish to dignify people through history; that is my only answer to explain my crazy decision to turn to it. That does not mean I am special. None of us are. The Ruin and the Volcano. November 2020. For Benjamin, “he who seeks to approach his own buried past must conduct himself like a man digging.” W.H. Sebald did that literally. I said earlier that environmental history may well be the history of disaster. But Benjamin and Sebald take this one step further. When the question is strictly material , one could rephrase it: is the history of the disaster the same thing as the history of the ruin? Sebald was born and grew up on the outskirts of the Bavarian Alps in 1944. His father, a prisoner of war until 1947, was part of the Nazi armed forces. Images of destruction and the ruins of postwar Germany were the first things he recalled when he felt like he was returning “home.” In a famous essay, Sebald the child and the adult, reveals himself to be totally confounded by just how little there was to see of all this destruction in the lives of people: It is true that the strategic-bombing surveys published by the Allies … show that the Royal Air Force alone dropped almost a million tons of bombs on enemy territory; it is true that of the hundred and thirty-one towns and cities attacked, some only once and some repeatedly, many were almost entirely flattened, that about six hundred thousand German civilians fell victim to the air raids and three and a half million homes were destroyed … but we do not grasp what it all actually meant … It seems to have left scarcely a trace of pain behind in the collective consciousness. So many people all just carried on as if nothing had ever happened. That so much of it occurred after Hitler was long gone, after war elsewhere had ended, did not matter. For Churchill, Solly Zuckerman, and Arthur Harris, the strategy of total destruction was to achieve “wholesale an annihilation of the enemy, with his dwellings, his history, and his natural environment, as can possibly be achieved.” Rendered by Sebald, it is devastating, perhaps even sublime, the extent to which the destroyed environment was just as much a part of the architecture of human habitation as a city or a dwelling. “How ought such a natural history of destruction to begin?” he asked. There is no answer, not in Sebald’s novels, not in his essays. There are simply things going on unfolding: things decaying, ruins existing. He walked along the millions of bricks left behind from the air-dropped ordnances and the fire-storms and the collapse of apartment buildings, surveying the postwar city landscape excavating brick-by-brick, and found no answer as to what need there was for such destruction except for the whims of a few men. What we should fear the most is not the hurricane but when people are failed. In his “nature-history” of Paris, Benjamin merges uncontrollable disaster with a proletarian mob—it’s a possibility of great potential. The potential wobbles, though, in his words. In some places, in many places, revolution may manifest as mindless destruction—what if it’s so boundless, there is not enough potential left? There are many who covet the safety provided to many of us; they’re not wrong. The very geography of disaster, we all know, is unjust. And to me, the white-hot anger of a people wronged is more terrifying than a volcano. It is conceivable that a situation arises where it won’t matter who is seen as culpable; it is conceivable that powerful actors make it so. If we remain paralyzed for too long, repeating mantras of anxiety or the denial of its existence, it will not be a hurricane that tears us limb from limb. My friend Meg recently wrote to me about this essay. “I think sometimes you use your brain as a way to step away from the most uncomfortable parts of yourself because you are more comfortable with the realities of global disaster than you are with the personal ones,” she wrote. She’s right, but that also describes most academics. They say to write the book you want to read. Unfortunately, I can’t, for this one cannot be written alone. Now-Time. August 2023. Now somehow, now somehow, the people in the worlds I inhabit most closely—that of academia, environmental humanities, global history, energy history—don’t actually look at apocalypticism, endism, whatever you may call it, straight in the face. Even though the works that define these fields, and those continually published, are painstaking in deepening the scale of the problems climate change poses, the problem of all this pessimism is not spoken aloud, and if it is, the responses are so very trite. There are exceptions—I admire the work of Bedour Alagraa and Anna Tsing, among others—but the hush is deafening. Over the years that I have brought up climate pessimism to various scholars, I have only ever received one answer, delivered in dismissive, patronizing fashion. It is always the same answer everyone has heard many times: about the necessity of hope, rarely justified in any real or specific terms insofar as having reason to hope, but simply an expression of it. As if we haven’t heard that old canard before. As if people are incapable of holding things simultaneously. As if ambivalence or serious engagement is a step too far for academia. Any other answers are mere quibbles disguised as serious responses: “It won’t be an apocalypse,” “We need to organize.” In the very vocation set out to define the problem, to demonstrate how we got here, the people populating it have no answer to how many are responding affectively to climate change, or to the many alarming cover stories and books and articles producing their doom-scroll, or even what all those alarmist signs are a symptom of. Here, in hallowed halls, climate pessimism is verboten. The most generous version of it I’ve heard is by AOC in a recent Instagram Live. After spending half an hour outlining how climate change impacts every aspect of human life, she was in a bit of a hurry. “I am a big believer in ‘climate optimism’, she said. “You ever notice that it's easier to imagine everything going to hell than it is things actually working out and getting better? People are reactive, and the challenges that the climate crisis presents to us are going to require a reorganization of the parts of our society. And people don't like being proactive… I just really believe that climate doomerism and cynicism in general leads you down a very dark path.” There’s the chastisement on moral grounds, and then there are things that, frankly, sound peakist. The chastisement is typical. The biggest part of it is the idea that cynical people are necessarily doing nothing. Then there are the things at odds with the core ideas AOC has long espoused. It’s not the fault of the vast majority of people. Individualistic action will not be enough. Power, capital, and political systems are resilient. The imminent collapse roars back. “[Systems] are simply going to collapse, and we can make a proactive decision about that,” AOC argues. “Certain things collapsing doesn't mean doom. It means we need to make space for a better way. … We should not have to move heaven and earth to save these things that are collapsing under their own weight because they never made sense.” What does this mean? What silent majority is moving heaven and earth to save systems, and what exactly is collapsing again? What proactive decisions were the vast majority of people on this planet supposed to but failed to make? Is the argument that there is some sort of absence of global protest, or do we, as usual, just mean America? There is no shortage of calls for revolution; there is so much uncertainty as to its imminence despite centuries of vociferous argument. But let's run with AOC's premise anyway. If all that is true, perhaps we should also not lose many things that are precious: lives, primarily. How can anyone be sure that “systems collapse” and “death” won’t happen simultaneously? They might! A Marxist education allowed me to understand that acceptance of lives lost is at the heart of the idea of revolution. Is climate optimism too shy to admit into its arena that horrible, uncertain trade-off? For me, climate optimism is denialism that there is logic to pessimism; a relegation of pessimism to the emotional, supposedly illogical. It requires recourse to very dubious things: that imagining utopia is difficult, that our imaginations can incite action, that our actions are sufficient, that doomers are uninformed, that systems are tottering. Climate optimists often directly contradict what they elsewhere preach—that the scale of the problem is pervasive—with a strange Pollyannaish turn to hope as a cure-all. At best, it is an unfinished thought. Like mine. The overwhelming majority of peakists express views that are far-left. And of course, it should be said that some of what peakists believe doesn’t justify their survivalist thinking. They’re largely anti-capitalists who believe capitalism is short-lived, and that oil production will peak soon, or it already has. To me, either of those seems like a reason to hope—I just don’t quite believe them. Different people take the same evidence to mean radically different things. The human brain is not internally consistent in its own logic, and in this peakists are not unlike climate optimists. Peakists also believe the state has not done anywhere near enough for racial minorities. They express the belief that the US is an oligarchy, they disdain both political parties, and electoral politics in general. They sound like almost everyone I’ve met in the US who identifies with the left. Doomers, as a group, may well be overrepresented on the left. They are many of the people we are looking to recruit. Some have been pathologized with “climate anxiety.” Climate optimism would have us shame it out of them. Validation of what another might be feeling cannot exist here. To which I must ask: are we trying to lose? Then, that canard—that being pessimistic is unethical and dangerous . It’s a slippery slope argument. Like most slippery slopes, it’s facetious and determinist. It’s a finger wag—one might say “~vibes~”—as a statement of belief based on illusory evidence. Lynne Segal in the Boston Review argues that “such pessimism can dangerously align us with a form of reactionary conservatism, merely gawping at the dire state of things, apparently helpless before impending disaster.” Segal mentions the dystopia of The Hunger Games as a fantasy that obliterates utopian visions. For Segal, what combats pessimism is collective action and solidarity which produce care and joy. It is a lovely thought, but again: we have and continue to do all of this, and there is no magic threshold Segal or any theorist can come up with. Which makes it all just hoary preaching to the choir. There is no reason to believe pessimism should necessarily make one a reactionary conservative. Emotions are not partisan objects. I’ve been a pessimist, and I persist with my work. I believe it very important. As I see it, most people who dedicate time to understanding and combating climate change feel a great deal of pessimism actually: it’s perfectly natural to feel several things all at once. And while solidarity is joyful, organizing is exhausting . Ask anyone organizing a union: most of the time, it feels like we’re on a giant hamster wheel. I see no reason why my most doomer self would spurn collective action in perpetuity. It feels strange, yes: why bother fighting when you feel so defeated? But that’s precisely it. So many things are not unique about this time. Humans fight unwinnable battles all the time; chastising pessimists with variations on the same cliché is not, in fact, a solution. And neither Logic nor Rhetoric have ever been the wisest antidotes for depression , though they’ve been deployed for much of recorded human history. And also: excuse you, The Hunger Games is excellent . There is no evidence that its audience slipped into reactionary conservatism upon its end. Why would it? It ends by dismantling the dystopia. My point in all this, my reason for vacillating so violently seems plain to me now. I want admission. Our own private disasters collide with global ones, and we feel terrible. If we want to organize, surely part of the “care” of solidarity is to recognize the thing climate activists and scholars seem loath to admit: we’re not feeling good about it. And that’s fine. Sure, it will make the slogans harder to write, but it’s better than deluding ourselves that our comrades truly believe that we can pull off fossil fuel divestment and break pipelines by the end of the year, and if we do so, we’re saved . But most of us don’t believe that’ll happen, any of it. Sign us up anyway. In 2017, Ashley Dawson argued that global capitalism now is not so much about uneven development but about uneven disaster, even if Western media scarcely covers disasters in developing countries. Spectacular, record-breaking heat waves struck the Pacific Northwest, on the heels of of all those elsewhere in the Americas. Then the catastrophic wildfires devastated Hawai’i, with thousands dead, injured, or missing. I suspect those were the things we all heard about. Meanwhile, Typhoon Khanun hit the Korean Peninsula, where there have only been five typhoon-level storms since 1945, and Russia, destroying farmland, killing and injuring hundreds. Typhoon Doksuri killed approximately sixty people in Fujian province, China. The El Niño phenomenon causing drought in much of East Asia has villagers in Indonesia digging up river beds. 8,000 evacuees are stranded as the wildfires in the Canary Islands continue to rage. Wildfires rage in Greece. These are just some natural disasters. I’d wager every country is plagued by problems we parcel as political or economic that are exacerbated by climate change or energy in some way. I intend this match-cut exposition to situate us, at the very end, not so much in time but in banality. None of us know how to simultaneously obtain the stories, persons, and sentences of disaster, let alone the planet. Disaster resides. In the now-time, as in the everywhere-time, always-time, and to-be-time. It seeps. It sets up house. The doomer is Cassandra. Some may suspect she is telling the truth. They all treat her as if she is insane. In John Cassavetes’ A Woman Under the Influence (1974), Gena Rowlands’ Mabel, supposedly a manic psychotic, is stranded in an aggressive family who do the opposite of what they say. They all keep insisting they must have a good time, but they never even try. All they do is caterwaul. Mabel knows how to have a good time. She reacts, she loves, she dances, she sings. She seems to know precisely what’s going on. She demands someone tell her the truth, but they never do. Six months pass in a mental hospital, where she is treated with electroshock therapy. When she returns, her husband asks her at the dinner table what the hospital was like, her eyes dart around. “Everybody’s here,” she says tentatively, like someone learning to speak. “Seems like a party.” Later, when she mentions the hospital routine, she is chastised. The cruelty of this fait accompli is immeasurable. The sane peck and pick away at you until you howl in pain. “Aha!” they’ll say in unison. Mabel asks tearfully of her father at the crowded table: “Dad, please stand up for me.” He stands up. She says no, not that, sit down. “Please stand up for me.” He stands again. “I don’t understand this game,” he says. “Good times from now on,” Mabel’s husband yells. “Things are gonna get better and better and better, and then they’ll get better than that and then they’ll get better.” I do not endorse this ridiculous notion that this is how we should treat pessimists. I do not endorse it because oftentimes, I agree. Oftentimes, I don’t. So what? What are we so afraid of that we can’t admit how afraid we are? What’s the worst that can happen? That with their last breath, the doomer turns to smirk and say: “Told you so”? At the Sentence. December 2022. It is the day before 2023. I don’t know what I was yesterday, but I am a pessimist today. Not so long ago, believing in climate change at all was the strangest kind of inversion: we, the believers, were equivalent to the Millerite pariah; the deniers the apocalypse-skeptics, all the people who rolled their eyes at religious zealots. Now it feels that axis has spun, bewilderingly pitting optimists and pessimists at opposite ends. Of course, we all have our reasons. We think they are good. But is there an axis at all if anyone can be of two minds? Recently, I pulled up my list on the impending apocalypse, and instead of alarm, I felt inadequate to actually work on climate change for a few reasons. The first is embarrassing. In the beginning of the 2020, I fell into a deep writing slump, and aside from the words on these pages—which I considered diary entries—I have written nothing since. That is until two days ago when my friend Sarah read this draft and forced me to complete it as an editorial. What’s worse, I’ve lured you into reading about disaster, but I still don’t know what it means. What is it? As far as I can tell, the disaster we chronicle does feel more like ruin. Like Sebald, that’s the only way I can really picture it, and the picture is after the fact. Not writing had an interesting effect on my brain. For the first time in my life, the closest I can come to original thought is in visual art. Six months ago, I bought some fancy artist papers and a canvas, acrylic paints, India ink, and I started to paint something I’d sketched out. I’d learned to embroider over the pandemic so every time I just didn’t know to make something, I’d correct it by using thread. Not to give anything form, just to fill space. I tell myself they’re supposed to be columns and I let the stitching falter, to make myself feel better. I’m making an old ruin. So, in other words, I learned how to embroider, paint, color, and flounder solely to attempt at making a point. Isn’t that something? "Untitled" Acrylic, india ink, thread. By the author (2022) Two things bubble out: aesthetics and death. In recent years, I’ve become a particular fan of Derrida, which is surprising, because for quite some time, he was more impenetrable to me than even Heidegger or Foucault were. Then just the other day, I read Brian Dillon on the subject of Derrida. Dillon writes: I see now why Theory was so attractive to a young man, a boy really, who had lost both parents within five years. These writings seemed to confirm not only that disaster was real, and general, and happened even at the smallest levels of language, but also that catastrophe could be turned. Art was nothing but an acknowledgment of this moment when you realized the cracks had been there all along… I fell in love with such moments of collapse. “Aestheticizing,” we’d learn to say of such love; I hate the word to this day. As if there was anything available, anything left, except aesthetics, except an effort to frame the wreckage in the aftermath, at the last. The way Dillon links Derrida’s personal history to disaster and language makes my heart skip a beat, as does the defense of the aesthetic. It would be wise to use every thinker or theorist in this crisis this way. Trying harder than we have before to humanize one another, a prosaic thing to say, but what tactic could be sounder? What is it about the aesthetic that can feel like it might just save us, save everything, even if not in the literal sense? In an earlier draft of this essay, I’d written: “Nobody, not even Greta Thunberg, needs a mural of Greta Thunberg.” I really believed that at the time, very deeply, like I believed all things. But whenever I’m sure, I begin to suspect myself more. The whole premise of my woes on disaster are linked to the aesthetic, particularly the avant-garde. I, too, hate the word “aestheticizing.” The aesthetic is the one realm instinct has yet to fail me. I cannot explain why I love something aesthetically: I do or I don’t. That’s how it is with language. The thing I’d missed about disaster for a long time was how banal it is. I’d failed to keep up with where it was—which was everywhere. When I stopped writing, for example, it was as if there was a crashing. A compaction of words occurred, and words began to slip away from me, as if a whole era’s trace in the geological record had just collapsed in on itself. That is a ludicrous analogy, but I wanted to make it, and so I did. Because I am not required to be equivalently important to the geological record. I did not sign a legal document or swear an oath, “I will never use language that may imply that two things are equal in importance even if I do not mean it.” I made the analogy because language and aesthetics are battlegrounds. They shift. We try to keep up. We fail. We try to specify them. We fail. And we will always fail because they make up the “we.” We fight this losing battle so hard. We even pretend we’re winning. We play with things that seem very real all the time. Right now, we’ve fixed time on terms that are wholly mine. The world outside is moving faster than us. It doesn’t care. That may lull you into thinking that what is happening does not matter, but we do this all the time. We fix borders, even though we know they do not exist, which is why what our brains somehow seem incapable at holding many things at once. We foreclose the simultaneity of disaster. For no good reason, and against our principles, even the best of us hold onto borders for dear life. Floods devastated villages, towns, cities, and peoples across Pakistan—and actually, Afghanistan, and this omission does actually matter. Border disputes and lynchings occurred so close to us that some of those killed may even have popped up on your Tinder at some point. In Sri Lanka, economic and political collapse may have seemed joyful in what it brought forth—the mass protests—but in truth, the disaster crippled the whole island-nation’s well-being, health, ability to work, to heal, to move. In the Maldives, an archipelago not far away from Sri Lanka, a brutal Islamist government has cracked down on the most benign of citizens, all whilst a drug epidemic and gendered violence continue unacknowledged. There are some luxuries some places have: its writers do not need to write anonymously, for instance, as I do not. It’s only occasionally even crossed my mind. But we know just how many places this is not true for. We all accept how little agency we have over the climate crisis individually. But we do have agency: over time, over our minds, over our language, over our aesthetics—all places disaster will reach into and hollow you out unless you grab ahold of it. My own agency is in these words; if there’s something other than ideas or a shoulder to cry on to offer, I haven’t found it yet. Has all this been about politics? That’s the wrong question. In The Origins of Dislike , Amit Chaudhuri writes: “That word, “about”, is a key term in Anglophone literary discourse, and is meant to enforce a dichotomy between creativity and thought, writing and event.” The “about”, he says, “may be dispensed with in a way that allows poetics and politics to flow into each other.” I want to return to the category: that question I asked myself many years ago. What is it that I have been writing for all these years? It reads like a diary. Slowly, it became an essay. Thankfully, I saved the original drafts because as I read back, I sensed continuity. It is being published as an editorial. It’s all a category problem I bring up because my insistence that this be seen as an essay, not a declamation, is characterized by doubt, by my inability to give you direct answers as a form of mimesis for the mind. The problem with doubt is the insolubility it creates with myself. On the one hand: I am not pertinent here. I am not at the center of the point I am making. None of this has anything to do with me. But maybe: I am pertinent here. I am at the center, and although I do not like it, I chose it. It is self-centered. It is all about me. And everyone’s pertinent here: the individual and the collective need not be at odds. Queen Bed. June 2023. I spent a few nights at my friend Nur’s place in Brooklyn just before I left for Colombo earlier this month. It was good for me. No, it was necessary. The night before I left, I awoke abruptly at 3am. I’d had a dream about my lost friend, the one I hadn’t heard from in years. I didn’t even know where she lived anymore, though I assumed she still lived in New York. On a lark, I searched on Instagram and came across a montage from a few months earlier. She’d gotten married. I watched it over and over. I sat up, elated, pausing the video to look at her face. She was happy. She was mid-laugh in every photo. I could hear it, that laugh that was like if Phoebe Buffay was a cartoon witch. I recognized other faces from college. They were adjusting her hem, holding her hands, or stiltedly smiling. I was so happy; she deserves nothing less than such joy. I didn’t even notice that I was crying. My simultaneous reactions were extreme. It felt so strange to catch myself in the process of feeling them. I felt guilty the next day when I asked Nur the next day as she got off a work call if I could talk to her. I told her how the two sentiments were completely separate: my genuine happiness for her and my self-pity. I remember them differently, even. I’d pored over every frame because I was desperate to know if she was happy, and she was. I’d cried for a long time, before I called Zoya. Whether I schedule my confiding or not, I feel guilty. Neither Zoya nor Nur had any advice for me; they just listened. Until this time, I thought I’d gotten quite good at letting my friend go. I thought of her now and then. When I read the melodramatic letters of Pliny the Younger, I remembered thinking how funny she would have found them. I remember this one time years ago when she, too, had gone somewhere alone: Paris. I don’t know if she “disappeared,” only that, as she told me later, secretively, that she’d had a grand time. I didn’t pry. Speaking to Zoya and Nur was an admission of defeat. Turns out, I’m still not good enough at letting people go. But it also turns out that nobody expected me to be. Maybe what Zoya had wanted to do was permit me to think I could. Maybe she changed her mind. Either way, she did not say, “told you so.” It was kind. Kinder still to admit that it doesn’t work. Then I knew something else. The problem was considered fixed. For some, it’s easier when a problem can be marked “complete.” I cannot control other people, only myself. A knot tied loose is two or more threads dangling in the wind. Different friends see different hues in us. Those hues don’t disappear just because they aren’t perceived. They’re still there, but it doesn’t feel like it, which is the problem. I hope to reunite with them my whole life. I’ll hold candles for them, like Kevin Garvey in The Leftovers . “People hold candles, Nora,” he tells an old lover, presumed dead for decades. It’s unfathomable to me that people live with regrets they know they will carry. Kindnesses were done. Then they were over. Things were accepted, and with yet more friends, I receded into the black. Which is nowhere at all, or so it feels. This time I’ll tie a different knot. ∎ SUB-HEAD ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: Clare Patrick (Our) Worlds and (Plant) Wisdoms Kareen Adam · Nazish Chunara A Dhivehi Artists Showcase The Ruin. Acrylic and gouache. By the author (2021). SHARE Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Essay The Editors Disaster History Environmental History The Leftovers Matthew Schneider-Mayerson Peak Oil Apocalyptic Environmentalism Libertarian Culture Peakists Affect Stoicism Montaigne Late Capitalism Giovanni Arrighi Endism Mark Bould Anthropocene Literature Rancière Kristin Ross Environmental Disaster Jia Tolentino Climate Psychiatric Alliance Climate Anxiety Avant-Garde Form Apocalypse Disaster & Faith Banality Martin Heidegger Jacques Derrida Philosophy Nino Cobre Green New Deal Chicago New Haven Lahore Karachi Gotabhaya Rajapaksa Aragalaya Ranil Wickremasinghe Floods in Pakistan Romanticism Seneca Dasein Walter Benjamin W.H. Sebald Pliny the Elder Pliny the Younger Vesuvius Volcanology Christian Eschatology The Book of Revelation Earthquakes Qiyamat Ruins Nature-History Geography of Disaster Bedour Alagraa Anna Tsing Environmental Humanities Energy History Popular Culture Nihilism Climate Pessimism Climate Optimism Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Doomers Oil Production Lynne Segal Ethics The Hunger Games Fossil Fuel Divestment Ashley Dawson The Local and Global Intimacy & Disaster Friendship John Cassavetes A Woman Under the Influence Gena Rowlands Visual Art Brian Dillon Disaster & Language Greta Thunberg Simultaneity Agency Amit Chaudhuri Anglophone Literary Discourse Mary Oliver Amy Hempel Doubt Essay Form Climate Change KAMIL AHSAN is an environmental historian at Yale, a Franke Fellow in Science and the Humanities, as well as the founder and former Chief Editor of SAAG. He is an essayist and critic currently based in Toronto, Lahore, and New York. 12 Mar 2024 Essay The Editors 12th Mar 2024 Dispatch from a Village Near Hamal Lake, Sindh, in August Ibrahim Buriro 12th Mar Whiplash and Contradiction in Sri Lanka’s aragalaya Harshana Rambukwella 27th Feb Dukkha Sumana Roy 4th Jul It's Only Human Furqan Jawed 26th Apr FLUX · A Panel on SAAG, So Far Shreyas R Krishnan · Kartika Budhwar · Nur Nasreen Ibrahim · Aishwarya Kumar 5th Dec On That Note:

WRITER Tarfia Faizullah TARFIA FAIZULLAH is the author of two poetry collections, Registers of Illuminated Villages (Graywolf, 2018) and Seam (SIU, 2014). Tarfia’s writing appears widely in the U.S. and abroad in the Daily Star, Hindu Business Line, BuzzFeed, PBS News Hour, Huffington Post, Poetry Magazine, Ms. Magazine, the Academy of American Poets, Oxford American, the New Republic, the Nation, Halal If You Hear Me (Haymarket, 2019), and has been displayed at the Smithsonian, the Rubin Museum of Art, and elsewhere. Tarfia is currently based in Dallas. WRITER WEBSITE INSTAGRAM TWITTER Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 LOAD MORE

Facing the jarring revival of chauvinist storylines in mainstream motion pictures, a new era of feminist film is cleaving its way into festival and global acclaim. Two such films—Don’t Cry, Butterfly (2024) and Santosh (2024)—debuted at the Toronto International Film Festival to a welcome reception. Celebrated for showcasing revelatory Asian women’s narratives from distinct perspectives, the features ebb and flow artfully between absurdity and reality, demarcating their respective protagonists’ experiences reclaiming autonomy, dignity, and justice in spaces and psyches consumed by patriarchy. Facing the jarring revival of chauvinist storylines in mainstream motion pictures, a new era of feminist film is cleaving its way into festival and global acclaim. Two such films—Don’t Cry, Butterfly (2024) and Santosh (2024)—debuted at the Toronto International Film Festival to a welcome reception. Celebrated for showcasing revelatory Asian women’s narratives from distinct perspectives, the features ebb and flow artfully between absurdity and reality, demarcating their respective protagonists’ experiences reclaiming autonomy, dignity, and justice in spaces and psyches consumed by patriarchy. Iman Ifthikhar, Untitled (2025). Digital painting. Artist · BOOKS & ARTS REPORTAGE · LOCATION A Man's World LOCATION AUTHOR . AUTHOR . AUTHOR . 2 Mar 2025 nd . Letter from our columnist . “What can one do, Geetanjali? Sadly, it’s a man’s world,” roared Ranbir Kapoor’s quasi-alpha, male avenger in Sandeep Reddy Vanga’s blockbuster picture Animal (2023) . The film’s problematic psyche enveloped by an uber-massy exterior invigorated the pen of many critics. Several of them deciphered—in accordance with Vanga’s implied admissions—the film’s intrinsic toxicity as an attempt by the director to double down on his ethically-questionable brand of filmmaking, in response to those who questioned the philosophies of his previous films. His contempt towards his critics, the Hindi film industry, and its audiences is effectively ventriloquized through Animal’s glossy protagonist’s several loud, misplaced outbursts directed at society’s collective failure in recognizing the importance of the “ alpha male” —a stand-in metaphor for Vanga’s bratty brand of manchild protagonists. Following the shattering acclaim that Animal has enjoyed, the rhetorical question that Kapoor’s character screams at his wife, also becomes one that the film mocks the industry with. What can the audience, the critics, or the filmmakers do? Unfortunately, it is a man’s world. The answer presents itself in two films which screened at the Toronto International Film Festival this year. One Vietnamese and one Indian, both helmed by two distinct debutante women directors , where the protagonists are two distinct women holding their own against the patriarchy, while cleverly counteracting genre expectations (in essence, the opposite of Animal ). Dương Diệu Linh’s Don’t Cry, Butterfly (2024) and Sandhya Suri’s Santosh (2024) had triumphantly traveled the festival circuit before arriving at TIFF. Both films are equally poignant in their portrayal of patriarchy as an infestation: Linh’s quite literal and Suri’s more metaphorical, allowing for novel insights into the extent to which ours is, in fact, unfortunately, a man’s world. Still from Don't Cry Butterfly (2024). Image Courtesy of TIFF. Dương Diệu Linh’s Don’t Cry, Butterfly Linh’s fascination with the domestic and emotional perils of middle-aged Vietnamese women neatly threads through her filmography . Her debut feature follows a similar syntax as it documents the desperation of a wedding planner, Tam (Lê Tú Oanh), after she catches her husband philandering with a much younger woman during the broadcast of a nationally televised soccer game. This peculiar predicament sends Tam down an introspective spiral, forcing her to consult the services of a feng-shui master who advises her to make several lifestyle and appearance changes to save her decaying marriage, much to her daughter Ha’s (Nguyen Nam Linh) chagrin. An unwelcome companion to this crisis is a leak in Tam’s bedroom ceiling which persists endlessly, eventually metamorphosing into a tar-like sentient substance only visible to the women in the building, growing in size as Tam’s marriage gradually becomes comatose. The film’s quirky comedic overtone is thus assisted in willful contrast by a reliance on the supernatural, which cleverly conveys the thesis to the audience without conscribing to pre-existing genre tropes. Linh’s hyper-fixation on the specificity of Tam’s situation underscores the culturally informed mechanism through which Don’t Cry, Butterfly addresses the broader issue of patriarchy. The infestation, standing in as a symbol for patriarchal ambivalence, mimics the toxic phallocentric culture which allows Tam’s husband, Thanh ( Le Vu Long ), to slog around the house sans accountability or apology. There is a distilled direction in Linh’s style of storytelling which allows her to effectively sashay between the dry humor dominating the film’s dialogue and gripping moments of supernatural terror. While she employs the fantastical elements quite sparingly, she ensures their effect is well-informed, creating a horror-comedy that delivers across both departments. Linh also infuses the film with welcome observations about Vietnamese customs and society, creating a work that is global despite (or perhaps, because of) its nuances. “If we chop the dicks off of all cheating men, the whole country will be filled with eunuchs,” remarks Tam’s friend, in a statement where the ethos transcends borders. Don’t Cry, Butterfly is a stellar showcase of independent cinema, intelligently employing form and fiction to serve something beyond its broad thesis. You are reminded to trust the tale as told by the teller, absorbing all that the story has to offer you. Sandhya Suri’s Santosh Suri ’s Santosh, albeit not as creatively fluid, still effectively upturns expectations in pursuit of a grander purpose. Her previous narrative short, The Field (2018) , also produced by the British Film Institute (BFI) , functioned similarly, exploiting the beats of a conventional thriller to highlight the innocence of an extramarital affair in rural India. Her debut feature, Santosh , is centered around the eponymous character (Shahana Goswami) who, through a government scheme aimed at helping widows, replaces her deceased husband in the local police force. The “khaki” uniform adds heft to Santosh’s identity, which was previously reduced to doomed daughter-in-law and hapless widow. There is a purpose to her step in this new job where she operates in service of a greater truth. Her occupational idyll, however, is shattered when the murder of a Dalit girl exposes her to the malignance of those in power. Inaction by her superiors in addressing the victim’s family's concerns causes major uproar in the media, and a female inspector ( Sunita Rajwar ) is brought in to placate the situation. Suri, much like Linh, posits the primary crisis not as a means of tackling the problem, but as a portrayal of its entrenchedness, while branching out with equal enthusiasm towards subsidiary issues. The extent to which caste-based discrimination penetrates the fabric of Indian society rests at the forefront of the film’s ideas. But nestled within are communalism, patriarchy, police negligence, and an overall decay in India’s legislative, executive, and judicial institutions. The labored pacing, especially in the chase sequences and the static positioning of the camera, works in service of such multi-layered messaging, as the film delicately explores its ideas in lieu of arguing for them. This attributes a documentary quality to the film, where it presents the events in a rather quotidian manner, allowing for a measured confrontation with reality, rather than an exploitation of the events for contrived emotion. Still from Santosh (2024). Image courtesy of India Currents. The premise, which is reminiscent of Anubhav Sinha’s social thriller Article 15 (2019), avoids conscribing to the showmanship of cop films as idealized by those like Sinha’s but more prominently by those of Rohit Shetty in Hindi cinema. There is no euphoric release where Santosh batters the villains to a pulp. There is no “gotcha!” moment where Santosh wields the law to best the killer, locking them up for life. There is no monologue about the oppressive caste system or the abysmal statistics regarding women’s safety in India. Santosh trusts the viewer with its messaging, reinforcing the grim subject matter with an equally grim portrayal. The closest the film comes to giving us a heroic smash-the-patriarchy moment is a measured but revolting scene in which Santosh spits out her barely chewed meal to discomfort the gaze of a man staring at her. Despite its aspirations and twists in emotion and notion, the story eventually becomes predictable towards the end. The casting of an otherwise lovable Sunita Rajwar as a domineering inspector also falters in places owing to the relatively harmless characters she has taken up recently. Regardless of its shortcomings, however, Santosh stands out as a testament to a fearless brand of filmmaking that exhibits a flawed India, where the only thing separating the cop and the crook is a “khaki” uniform and a government-issued firearm. A refreshing deviation from the mainstream The meticulousness of both Don’t Cry, Butterfly and Santosh stands in stark contrast to the populist, pulpy, and policed cinema that is mass-produced in their respective countries, and in the absence of a commercially successful precedent, it becomes a monumental task to fund films like these. It thus becomes extremely crucial that films like Don’t Cry, Butterfly and Santosh , and filmmakers like Linh and Suri, who have been nurtured by Western institutions like Berlinale and the BFI, get this recognition in front of international audiences as it paves the way for such an “arthouse” brand of cinema to exist alongside the mainstream. The inter-continental efforts required to produce these films also stands as testament to the idea of global filmmaking, which is helping amplify regional voices, and preventing them from being strangled by the rigidity of their national cinemas and governments. Now, it remains to be seen whether either of Linh’s or Suri’s films are received with as much domestic fanfare as they were internationally. With both having been picked up by mid-size primary distributors, there is still hope that non-festival audiences get to enjoy these truly novel films. Nevertheless, there is a lot to be done: after all, it is, sadly, a man’s world. ∎ SUB-HEAD Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. 1 Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Review Toronto Chauvinism Motion Picture Film Cinema Feminism Film Festival Dont Cry Butterfly Santosh Toronto International Film Festival Art Criticism Absurdity Autonomy Rhetoric Duong Dieu Linh Sandhya Suri TIFF Indian Currents Filmography Vietnamese Indian Independent Cinema British Film Institute Caste-based Discrimination Arthouse Berlinale A Mans World Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 On That Note:

In the Karoonjhar mountains—a region of ancient hills and rock formations amidst salt marshes and other ecosystems—local activists are fighting to protect the region from mining companies. For years, private corporations in Sindh have mined the mountains for granite, marble, and minerals. Despite court bans, illicit—and, as of a week ago, licit—mining continues. FEATURES Save Karoonjhar AUTHOR AUTHOR AUTHOR In the Karoonjhar mountains—a region of ancient hills and rock formations amidst salt marshes and other ecosystems—local activists are fighting to protect the region from mining companies. For years, private corporations in Sindh have mined the mountains for granite, marble, and minerals. Despite court bans, illicit—and, as of a week ago, licit—mining continues. SHARE Facebook ↗ Twitter ↗ LinkedIn ↗ ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: AUTHOR Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 AUTHOR Heading 5 Photo-Essay Sindh Climate Karoonjhar Mountains Nangarparkar Reportage Pakistan Environment Environmental Disaster Mining Granite Sindh Provincial Government PPP PML-N Pakistan Party Politics Rann of Kutch Salt Marshes Hills Mountains Mountain Range Tharparkar Allah Rakhio Akash Hamirani Hindu Communities Jain Communities Multi-Faith Sites Indigeneity Indigenous Activism Groundwater Delicate Ecosystems Sindh High Court Supreme Court Heritage Site Protected Site Extractionism Extraction Ancient Chachro Sardharo India-Pakistan Border Borders Translation Sindhi Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. DISPATCH Photo-Essay Sindh 19th Jul 2024 The lore of the Karoonjhar mountains contains many tales. During Partition, for instance, a farmer, Kasu Bha Sodho, chose to stay in Nangarparkar while his family moved to India. Then, his family dispatched the infamous dacoit Balvand to bring Kasu Bha to them. Confronting Balvand, Kasu Bha declared, “If you want to take me to India, then take Karoonjhar along.” The Karoonjhar mountains rest on the northern edge of the Rann of Kutch, in Sindh's eastern Tharparkar district, and southwest of Nangarparkar. The rock formations in the area are at least 3.5 billion years old. The hills were present when prokaryotes appeared, the atmosphere oxygenated, and multicellular life evolved. They were there when the Cambrian explosion occurred, dinosaurs roamed, and Homo sapiens emerged. But for decades, this range—which spans 19 kilometers, with granite rocks that extend approximately 305 meters below the surface—has been a battleground between the forces of extractionism and the region's indigenous communities. It also continues to be the source of political dust-ups involving provincial governments, national ruling parties, dissenting MNAs and MPAs, rural petitioners , and the residents of Nangarparkar—even after the Sindh High Court ruled to ban extraction. At the national level, it is something of a cudgel between the PPP and PML-N. In February, Bilawal Bhutto, in a public meeting in Chachro, accused the PML-N of scheming to establish a puppet government in Karachi to exploit the mountains. “They think if their government is formed, they will exploit granite and mineral resources of Karoonjhar,” he told the crowd. But at the local level, all this seems irrelevant. Indigenous activists have long fought for the designation of the mountains as world heritage sites, and for compliance with court rulings against extraction. Precious little has prevented the Sindh Cabinet from allowing or even encouraging extraction in the past—aside from local activists and the public. A week ago, the Sindh Cabinet approved mining in part of the region. Today, a local activist appealed to fight back. When I gazed upon these peaks in early February, my mind was far from the conflicts of cabinet halls. In truth, I couldn't help but reflect on the irony of the mountains' extraction by those whose existence is a mere blip in time. The relationship people have with the mountains is evident in the words of the political activist Akash Hamirani, who said: “Oh beloved mountains! You are the land of our dreams, you are a deity, you are strength, no one can cut you.” Encircled by the salt marshes and dunes of the Rann of Kutch, the Karoonjhar Mountains are a natural refuge and sanctuary for thousands of humans, millions of birds, insects, plants, trees, animals, herbs, and mushrooms–all nourished by the waters flowing from the mountains’ sacred heights. Karoonjhar is a psychedelic world full of colors, music—and silence. Many religious and cultural sites are nestled in the mountains' folds. The mountains are also many peoples’ sole economic source, encompassing approximately 108 ancient temples dedicated to Hindu and Jain beliefs . Sardharo, a religious site of Lord Shiva. Since the 1980s, Karoonjhar has been exploited for its decorative stones. “The eyes of a capitalist see expensive and unique marble and minerals in stones, but the eyes of an indigenous person see their god in them…,” says Allah Rakhio Khoso, an indigenous elder and the leader of Karoonjhar Sujag Forum who has been fighting against their extraction for three decades. Allah Rakhio Khoso Laying on a Sindhi Cot in Nagarparkar. Beginning in 1980, powerful companies like Millrock, Pak Rock, Kohinoor Marbles Industries, Haji Abdul Qudoos Rajer, and the Frontier Works Organization (FWO) were granted contracts and leases by the Sindh Government for mining the granite rock of the mountains with dynamite. For decades, Allah Rakhio has organized protests and made many speeches whilst facing numerous challenges and death threats. “Karoonjhar is our life,” Rakhio says. “How can we let them snatch it?” In 2011, the Supreme Court halted the mining of granite using dynamite blasting by Kohinoor Marbles on the heels of public protests. Mining continued, nonetheless, accelerating in 2018, led by the FWO. This prompted an advocate from Mithi, Tharparkar, to file a petition in the Sindh High Court , Hyderabad, in the public interest for the protection of the range and designation as a heritage site. The court ruled against the mining and extraction of the mountain range. Still, mining has persisted illegally. Karoonjhar’s natural springs and stones are also a natural defense against the salinity of the salt marshes of Rann of Kutch. “If Karoonjhar is plundered, this entire region will wither into the salt desert of Rann of Kutch,” warns Akash Hamirani, a climate activist involved in the protests against mining. Groundwater wells supply potable water for the people in the villages and towns near the range. Extraction threatens to dry up these wells. One day, Imam Ali Jhanjhi penned a poem that swiftly spread across social media. Jhanjhi is a former government official, but his poems about the Karoonjhar mountains are the prime source of his popularity. In his poem, بُک وطن کي ڀيلي ويندي, (Hunger Will Claim Our Lives), Jhanjhi reveals how the extraction of Karoonjhar will affect us: They shattered Karoonjhar's bones, They silenced all my moans. When the great disaster arrives, Hunger will claim our lives. After Karoonjhar's demise, Desolation will arise. No more rivers from Naryasar will flow, Villages will vanish, row by row. Fetching water from a dry pitcher, Eyes will thirst, a painful ache, No drops left in the dams to take, Wells will turn to salty lakes. Looking up from the foothills On May 29th, I found myself once more amidst the Karoonjhar mountains, visiting the Rama Pir Mander in Kasbu, Nangharparkar. It was there that I heard Khalil Kumbhar's poem, resonant with the voice of a faqeer. With the words of the poem, he sang: Only the trader will sell, be it sister or mother, Don't cut and sell the mountain, for it is my brother. Can someone tell these sellers, the motherland is not for sale, I've tied a Rakhi to the mountain, for it is my brother. Khalil wrote this poem while imagining the Kolhi women: shepherdesses who peel onions. To them, Karoonjhar is father, brother, honour, and a beloved. “We crossed so many deserts to convey one message,” Khalil Kumbhar said, “but this one song made things easier for us. Not only did our message reach every home, but this song also connected every individual to us, and the people embraced their mountains.” He continued, “Karoonjhar is a Watan (Homeland) for the trees, birds, insects, humans, animals, and all living beings. For a businessman, Karoonjhar is wealth. For us, it is Watan.” Even from the outside, such a perspective makes sense. After all, Karoonjhar contains many delicate ecosystems, supplies water for crops, drinking, and even fills the Rampur Dam (below). Extractionist logic would extend the aridity of the nearby deserts. In 2021, Allah Rakhio, along with two advocates, Teerath Jhanjhi and Faqeer Munwar Sagar, filed another petition in the Hyderabad High Court, appealing for compliance with the Sindh High Court's prior decision and the designation of a heritage site. By 2023, no decision had been made. The extraction of granite and other precious elements from the mountains continued. On July 20, 2023, newspaper advertisements invited bids for the auction of approximately 5,928 acres spread over 17 slots near Nagarparkar in the Karoonjhar Mountains. Public protests erupted. Soon, #SaveKaroonjhar was trending on social media sites across Pakistan. Advocate Shankar Meghwar, who drafted the previous petitions, filed a third petition against the auction, declaring Karoonjhar a heritage site. The decision to auction was successfully reversed due to public pressure. On August 22, Shankar Meghwar succeeded in getting all mining leases on Karoonjhar canceled and merged his petition with that of Allah Rakhio and others. With the leases canceled, the court issued orders to clear all mining sites , asking the district administration to report back within 24 hours. The sites were cleared. “On the evening of August 30, I was targeted by these mafias you know well. They threatened me to withdraw the petition; they started with calls from unknown numbers, followed by personal meetings with life-threatening messages, and forcing me to change locations,” Shankar Meghwar told me. In the months of February and March, the mountains were set on fire more than five times. Locals believed that it was not by chance but preplanned. Fire in Karoonjhar Mountains, photographed by Dileep Parmar, a photographer in Nagarparkar who has been documenting and resisting extraction. Imam Janjhi—in the same poem—addresses those who sell Karoonjhar: Those who sold the soil for gain, Exchanged their mother for wealth and fame, Sold the pots of worshippers' pray, On peacocks' cry, they gave away, With no religion or faith to claim, What shame can touch their name? To auction off generations old and young, A business crowd has come along. The entire land on scales will lie, Hunger will claim our lives. Due to their depth, granite deposits spread far beyond the visible mountain range. Do definitions of forests justify political decisions to allow mining when they simultaneously validate the range of Karoonjhar? From the depths of the waters to the heights of the hills, people chant, “Karoonjhar is not for sale.” These hills are their past, their present, and their future. If this masterpiece of nature, forever carved in their hearts and souls, is looted, they will continue to fight, resist, and protect. But the rest is a long night of terror and displacement. On October 19, a 15-page judgment written by Justice Mohammad Shafi Siddiqui declared that the Karoonjhar Mountains cannot be excavated for any purpose other than the discovery of historical monuments, and even then, only in accordance with international guidelines. “The Mines and Minerals Department has no jurisdiction over it since it is a protected heritage site and not available for mining or excavation,” the court stated. But just a week ago, the Sindh Cabinet approved the Karsar area—25 kilometers from Nangarparkar—for granite mining, pending approval from the Forest & Wildlife Department. The Cabinet committee argues that Karsar does not overlap with forest territory. Simultaneously, the Cabinet designated the Karoonjhar mountains as cultural and heritage sites, forests, and a wildlife sanctuary/Ramsar Site. The contradictory logic seems designed to enable future extraction while attempting to appease the public. Shankar Meghwar argues, “Karoonjhar mountains have their own range, and wherever such stones are found within that jurisdiction, including areas like Karsar, they should be considered part of it and should not be separated based on distance.” Just today, he challenged the government’s decision in the court of Mirpurkhas, calling for the Cabinet's decision to be ruled to be in contempt of court based on previous decisions. On the other hand, the case of the Sindh provincial government's appeal to the Supreme Court to overturn a prior decision protecting the mountain range remains. Meghwar, Allah Rakhio, and others continue to face death threats.∎ Poetry translated from Sindhi by Lutif Ali Halo. Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Next Up:

Over nearly two decades, the opulence of the Jaipur Literature Festival has only grown and the prestige of attendance has attained unparalleled heights. Yet Torsa Ghosal, of Kaya Press’s imprint Kulhar Books, returned in 2025 with critical realizations about JLF’s core agenda. Reflecting not only on the nationalistic undertones celebrated but also on what was conspicuously absent, Ghosal points to the festival’s failure to meaningfully represent Muslim and Arab voices, and to a troubling insincerity in engaging with the moral crises of our time. BOOKS & ARTS Spiritually Chic Over nearly two decades, the opulence of the Jaipur Literature Festival has only grown and the prestige of attendance has attained unparalleled heights. Yet Torsa Ghosal, of Kaya Press’s imprint Kulhar Books, returned in 2025 with critical realizations about JLF’s core agenda. Reflecting not only on the nationalistic undertones celebrated but also on what was conspicuously absent, Ghosal points to the festival’s failure to meaningfully represent Muslim and Arab voices, and to a troubling insincerity in engaging with the moral crises of our time. Torsa Ghosal Since launching in 2006, Jaipur Literature Festival (JLF) has been repeatedly called the “Kumbh Mela” of literature festivals. Kumbh Mela is a Hindu religious event held every six to twelve years at the confluence of the three rivers: Ganga, Yamuna, and the mythical Saraswati, where devotees convene in numbers unmatched by any other religious gathering in the world. The Kumbh analogy signals JLF’s massive scale and popularity. Indeed, the book festival is a mela, a social spectacle, that brings anywhere between three to five hundred speakers to Jaipur, shuttles them between the venue and the various four- and five-star hotels lodging them, and swishes them off to party in the city’s gorgeous palaces and forts. 400,000 visitors and around 4000 vendors thronged the festival grounds in 2024 according to estimates. Until recently, the staunch religious underpinnings of Kumbh had no direct equivalent in a festival that branded itself as an international “literary show,” and that has hosted a diverse assortment of luminaries such as Margaret Atwood, Orhan Pamuk, Kamila Shamsie, Oprah Winfrey, and the Dalai Lama. But over the last few decades, Hindu religious identity has increasingly defined national belonging and nationalist policies in India. This year’s Maha Kumbh Mela was attended by 4 times as many people as the previous iteration of the event, blazing proof of the upthrust in religious fervour among Indians and diasporic Hindus. JLF’s programming was not immune to the pulls of religious nationalism. The festival kept the crowds sated on pageantry and celebrations which often obscured the ways in which panels and talks questioned the nationalist agenda. Supported by a SALT travel grant , I was at JLF to scout authors in my role as an acquiring editor for Kaya Press’s brand new South Asian imprint, Kulhar Books . Working with Kaya’s managing editor Neelanjana Banerjee and the rest of the Kaya team, Kulhar editors—Rajiv Mohabir, Jhani Randhawa, and I—aspire to publish stylistically and politically imaginative literature; works that unsettle formulaic expectations caging and sanitizing South Asian literary expressions in America. Courtesy of the author. My first afternoon at JLF I heard the British author Sheena Patel speak about her desire for “the now to be captured” in her writing rather than telling a “timeless story,” and in a similar vein, my intention was to get a sense of “the now” of the literary-cultural scene in South Asia, intuiting that the festival would offer some—even if narrow—opening into the ideas and themes dominating the space. Flipping through the festival program, I tried to locate sessions on literary writings from and about South Asia with a focus on contemporary translated literature and newer voices, a task that proved to be somewhat at odds with JLF’s broad-ranging, political establishment- and celebrity-friendly slate of events, a host of which staged flaccid conversations on Hindu mythology, Hindu national and political identities, excitement about the potentials of AI and digital technology, corporate and startup success, even wellness practices. The festival has a “flashy, dazzling quality,” notes Mrinalina Chakravarty in her 2014 book, In Stereotype , which examines the hackneyed tropes found in literary representations of South Asia. At this year’s edition, social media influencers, Bollywood celebrities, and politicians predictably clinched the largest platform—the front lawn. Educator-philanthropist-billionaire Sudha Murthy’s talk in the lawn was attended by her son-in-law, U.K.’s former Prime Minister Rishi Sunak. Sunak went viral for greeting the lawn’s audience with folded hands in a “namaste,” obeying the nudges of an elderly woman whom Indian media variously identified as his mother and aunt-in-law. A forty-five-minute session on the same stage was allocated to politician and author Shashi Tharoor unpacking the experience of living as Shashi Tharoor. Influencer Prajakta Koli blurted unprompted that her rom com novel contains “discrepancies” that she hoped readers would not pick up. JLF is often “a theatre of the absurd,” as Chakravarty observes, and the “incongruous juxtapositions of the bizarre and serious” raise questions about whether the festival coheres. JLF does not cohere— purposefully so. Vendors selling gorgeous brass jhumkas, wooden handicrafts, linen quilts and clothes form the backdrop of high-spirited debates and book launches. It is a carnival, almost in the Bakhtinian sense, a heteroglossia boasting of eclectic interests and priorities, but without the revolutionary zing Bakhtin associates with carnivalesque entertainment. JLF makes no pretence of renouncing hierarchies among speakers, vendors, volunteers, media persons, and spectators. There is a distinctly feudal quality to the “royal” warmth the green vest-wearing volunteers and interns shower on the invitees, riffing on the grand, luxurious image of Rajasthan in both the global and desi imagination. Rajasthan is after all the province where celebrities like Liz Hurley and Priyanka Chopra have hosted their weddings. Like crazy rich desi weddings, the happy hodge podge at JLF trades in stereotypes about South Asia’s mystique and splendour. JLF has a controversial history with respect to free speech, which Amitav Ghosh points out , shows how literature has become “embedded within a wider culture of public spectacles and performances…overtaking, and indeed overwhelming writing itself as the primary end of a life in letters.” As far as frenzied public spectacles in India go, none in recent times can compete with the individual and collective performances of the Hindu religious identity at the Mahakumbh, and the book festival arena is a porous zone. The five-day programming at JLF, what speakers thought permissible to say or not say, the audience questions, the popularity of sessions were all rooted within a broader cultural sphere that in 2025 was flooded with giant billboards starring the tight-lipped smiles of India’s Prime Minister alongside his brother in arms, the ascetic-politician Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh. Both their portraits were pasted onto scenes showing millions on the banks of a river, coloured a shade of blue so rich that I could tell it could only have been achieved after going through layers of digital filters, if the raw photograph was ever of the muddied brown Ganges I have known and swum in. The hoardings carried taglines like “Message from Kumbh, The Nation Must Unify” and “Sanatan Pride, Maha Kumbh Edition.” Courtesy of the author. Desi internet was trending Kumbh news and memes, minting new viral heartthrobs—hot Sadhus and Sadhvis—through WhatsApp forwards and Instagram reels, plus supplying shock and cringe content, that I and surely other festival attendees dutifully consumed. Young people are showing interest in scriptures, Malashri Lal remarked at a session launching mythologist Sunita Pant Bansal’s A Comprehensive Guide to Indian Scriptures . The slim book introduces Hindu sacred texts like the Puranas, Vedas, and the epics “as it is,” the author insisted, “without my opinion.” The aim is to demystify and correct beliefs about Hindu religious texts. Why, then, does the jacket say “Indian scriptures” rather than Hindu scriptures? A young audience member asked after admitting he was “nervous and worried” to raise the question. And if the book is on Hinduism, have texts from Nepal been included? The publisher Dipankar Mukherjee, who was also on stage, chivalrously swooped in to field the question, rationalizing that they were “trying to be somewhat politically correct to ensure the book reaches the right audience…Where they [the scriptures] started to become codified, recorded that’s part of current India.” He subsequently plugged the festival co-director William Dalrymple’s latest book, crediting Dalrymple for completing “half our work” tracing the influence of Indian traditions and philosophy on other cultures. Mukherjee’s blithe verbal acrobatics for swapping Hindu with India not only aligns with the religion-nation nexus the country’s government has openly adopted in the last decade but also follows the money as it were. Writing for New York Times, Anupreeta Das claims that book festivals are all the rage among India’s youth. On the surface, the hipness of literary festivals bodes well. Das notes young people “are increasingly reading literature in their native tongues alongside books written in English. For these readers, books open worlds that India’s higher education system, with its focus on time-consuming preparation for make-or-break examinations, often does not.” But what are the young people reading in these various languages? What kinds of worlds are books unlocking? The answers are not straightforward. Trapped in a long, slow-moving queue formed in front of a toilet in Amer Clarks, women were commiserating about the shortage of bathrooms at the venue. Interrupting this communal bonding, a woman in her early twenties started to hype up her novel that retells the Hindu epic Ramayana. Ramayana has become something of a foundational text in the Hindu nationalist imagination. The woman pitching her retelling to a captive, pee-holding audience explained that her book followed the love story of the Hindu demigod Lakhsman whom “feminism” has unfairly sidelined. Her pithy spiel echoed a pervasive cultural sentiment wherein Hindu culture and Hindu Gods need constant protection from the evil eyes of liberals and heretics. Another young woman asked for the book’s title to order on Amazon. Some days later, while looking up the book, I stumbled upon the author’s public Instagram grid that featured side-by-side photos of her in JLF and at Mahakumbh. Completing the spiritual chic circuit of JLF-Mahakumbh, she follows in the illustrious footsteps of others like Sudha Murty who took a holy dip at Kumbh days ahead of her JLF session. Browsing the aisles of bookstores and catalogues of Indian publishers gives an impression that pop spirituality is booming in India. OMTV, an “Indic storytelling” app, surveyed its users and found that around 80% of those consuming spiritual content are aged between 18 and 30. At the same time, The Crossword Bookstore on JLF festival grounds had eager customers crowding pretty much every corner, picking up new and old titles, not just the spirituality laced ones. And in an offline and online public sphere dominated by Maha Kumbh , JLF still managed to hold some conversations offering critical and nuanced perspectives on political Hinduism. Courtesy of the author. But among the nearly three-hundred delegates, the festival included just a handful of Indian Muslim speakers. Bollywood celebrities like the director Imtiaz Ali, Huma Qureshi, and Javed Akhtar were part of this roster. Mujibur Rehman, who used a comparative framework drawn from histories of Black resistance to talk about the political marginalization and de-Islamization of Indian Muslims in Shikwa-e-Hind (2024), was challenged by a middle-aged, ostensibly Hindu, ponytailed thought leader among the audience. “I have lots of confusion about the premise of your book…Should we continue to call Muslims minorities with twenty percent population?” the man asked. Rehman told the man his book answers the question and supplemented his response with analogies underscoring how minority identity and minority rights are not simply pegged on numbers or even the success and visibility of a select few. India’s constitution despite its secular promises is inherently majoritarian, he argued, which informs the cultural landscape where Indians clapping at America’s flag do not invite suspicion, but an Indian Muslim boy clapping at Pakistan’s flag is interpreted as sedition. Kashmiri Muslim, Pakistani, and Bangladeshi literary authors were largely absent from this edition. Some absences can be blamed on logistics—Pakistan passport holders have immense difficulty procuring Indian visas at present, unless of course they are Maha Kumbh enthusiast Hindus. Then they are handed Indian visas swiftly . State rules force compliance but even state policies cannot explain all erasures. Theatre actor and director MK Raina who comes from a Kashmiri Pandit family, spoke about owing his career to the state of Kashmir’s policy of allowing free education right from the 1940s, commented on inequities in contemporary India, and criticized the unrealistic portrayals of Kashmir in Bollywood. He left the stage when his co-panelist, the Rajasthani singer and thespian Ila Arun, started enacting a lengthy sequence from an Ibsen play she adapted and partly set in Kashmir, where a character “hurts the mother” and “hurts the motherland.” Raina’s abrupt departure was first extrapolated as resulting from his frustration about the supposed misrepresentation of Kashmir and later as following from his irritation with Ila Arun for hogging stage time. Multiple sessions addressed Israel’s war on Gaza, but the sessions recycled a small group of speakers that included the Indian American author Pankaj Mishra, Palestinian author Selma Dabbagh, Pulitzer-winning American journalist Nathan Thrall, and Israeli British historian Avi Shlaim. The number of Arab authors featured was in the low single digits. A JLF official reportedly interrupted an interview between the Press Trust of India and the Palestinian envoy to India Abed Elrazeg Abu Jazer on the grounds that the festival’s PR team hadn’t sanctioned it. JLF’s speaker lineup suffers from issues common in invite-only prestige events. The curators turn to the same authors and cultural delegates year after year, and even each year, the same names reappear across sessions. The festival seems to be battling two opposing drives: an impulse to represent a diversity of relevant ideas and a desire to wring the most out of a trusted clique of speakers, resulting in conversations that sometimes feel repetitive, sometimes tokenistic. Although the festival is held in the state of Rajasthan and makes decorative use of Rajasthan’s crafts and colours to create Instagrammable corners, Rajasthani authors and Rajasthani literature are not at the forefront. The festival is a shimmery tamasha that, like high-budget high-gloss Bollywood films, is fun to dip in, so long as one is willing to forgo critical questions. The scale of the festival remains something to marvel at. But other literature festivals that have cropped up in India after Jaipur, such as the Kerala Literature Festival and Mizoram Literature Festival , have made more emphatic attempts at grounding their events in their local cultures. JLF, on the other hand, is happy to remain the Chicken Tikka Masala of festivals, palatable to a wide-ranging, somewhat international audience, seemingly representative of South Asia, with a desi man and a Scottish one claiming credits for its origins. Courtesy of the author. Since launching in 2006, Jaipur Literature Festival (JLF) has been repeatedly called the “Kumbh Mela” of literature festivals. Kumbh Mela is a Hindu religious event held every six to twelve years at the confluence of the three rivers: Ganga, Yamuna, and the mythical Saraswati, where devotees convene in numbers unmatched by any other religious gathering in the world. The Kumbh analogy signals JLF’s massive scale and popularity. Indeed, the book festival is a mela, a social spectacle, that brings anywhere between three to five hundred speakers to Jaipur, shuttles them between the venue and the various four- and five-star hotels lodging them, and swishes them off to party in the city’s gorgeous palaces and forts. 400,000 visitors and around 4000 vendors thronged the festival grounds in 2024 according to estimates. Until recently, the staunch religious underpinnings of Kumbh had no direct equivalent in a festival that branded itself as an international “literary show,” and that has hosted a diverse assortment of luminaries such as Margaret Atwood, Orhan Pamuk, Kamila Shamsie, Oprah Winfrey, and the Dalai Lama. But over the last few decades, Hindu religious identity has increasingly defined national belonging and nationalist policies in India. This year’s Maha Kumbh Mela was attended by 4 times as many people as the previous iteration of the event, blazing proof of the upthrust in religious fervour among Indians and diasporic Hindus. JLF’s programming was not immune to the pulls of religious nationalism. The festival kept the crowds sated on pageantry and celebrations which often obscured the ways in which panels and talks questioned the nationalist agenda. Supported by a SALT travel grant , I was at JLF to scout authors in my role as an acquiring editor for Kaya Press’s brand new South Asian imprint, Kulhar Books . Working with Kaya’s managing editor Neelanjana Banerjee and the rest of the Kaya team, Kulhar editors—Rajiv Mohabir, Jhani Randhawa, and I—aspire to publish stylistically and politically imaginative literature; works that unsettle formulaic expectations caging and sanitizing South Asian literary expressions in America. Courtesy of the author. My first afternoon at JLF I heard the British author Sheena Patel speak about her desire for “the now to be captured” in her writing rather than telling a “timeless story,” and in a similar vein, my intention was to get a sense of “the now” of the literary-cultural scene in South Asia, intuiting that the festival would offer some—even if narrow—opening into the ideas and themes dominating the space. Flipping through the festival program, I tried to locate sessions on literary writings from and about South Asia with a focus on contemporary translated literature and newer voices, a task that proved to be somewhat at odds with JLF’s broad-ranging, political establishment- and celebrity-friendly slate of events, a host of which staged flaccid conversations on Hindu mythology, Hindu national and political identities, excitement about the potentials of AI and digital technology, corporate and startup success, even wellness practices. The festival has a “flashy, dazzling quality,” notes Mrinalina Chakravarty in her 2014 book, In Stereotype , which examines the hackneyed tropes found in literary representations of South Asia. At this year’s edition, social media influencers, Bollywood celebrities, and politicians predictably clinched the largest platform—the front lawn. Educator-philanthropist-billionaire Sudha Murthy’s talk in the lawn was attended by her son-in-law, U.K.’s former Prime Minister Rishi Sunak. Sunak went viral for greeting the lawn’s audience with folded hands in a “namaste,” obeying the nudges of an elderly woman whom Indian media variously identified as his mother and aunt-in-law. A forty-five-minute session on the same stage was allocated to politician and author Shashi Tharoor unpacking the experience of living as Shashi Tharoor. Influencer Prajakta Koli blurted unprompted that her rom com novel contains “discrepancies” that she hoped readers would not pick up. JLF is often “a theatre of the absurd,” as Chakravarty observes, and the “incongruous juxtapositions of the bizarre and serious” raise questions about whether the festival coheres. JLF does not cohere— purposefully so. Vendors selling gorgeous brass jhumkas, wooden handicrafts, linen quilts and clothes form the backdrop of high-spirited debates and book launches. It is a carnival, almost in the Bakhtinian sense, a heteroglossia boasting of eclectic interests and priorities, but without the revolutionary zing Bakhtin associates with carnivalesque entertainment. JLF makes no pretence of renouncing hierarchies among speakers, vendors, volunteers, media persons, and spectators. There is a distinctly feudal quality to the “royal” warmth the green vest-wearing volunteers and interns shower on the invitees, riffing on the grand, luxurious image of Rajasthan in both the global and desi imagination. Rajasthan is after all the province where celebrities like Liz Hurley and Priyanka Chopra have hosted their weddings. Like crazy rich desi weddings, the happy hodge podge at JLF trades in stereotypes about South Asia’s mystique and splendour. JLF has a controversial history with respect to free speech, which Amitav Ghosh points out , shows how literature has become “embedded within a wider culture of public spectacles and performances…overtaking, and indeed overwhelming writing itself as the primary end of a life in letters.” As far as frenzied public spectacles in India go, none in recent times can compete with the individual and collective performances of the Hindu religious identity at the Mahakumbh, and the book festival arena is a porous zone. The five-day programming at JLF, what speakers thought permissible to say or not say, the audience questions, the popularity of sessions were all rooted within a broader cultural sphere that in 2025 was flooded with giant billboards starring the tight-lipped smiles of India’s Prime Minister alongside his brother in arms, the ascetic-politician Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh. Both their portraits were pasted onto scenes showing millions on the banks of a river, coloured a shade of blue so rich that I could tell it could only have been achieved after going through layers of digital filters, if the raw photograph was ever of the muddied brown Ganges I have known and swum in. The hoardings carried taglines like “Message from Kumbh, The Nation Must Unify” and “Sanatan Pride, Maha Kumbh Edition.” Courtesy of the author. Desi internet was trending Kumbh news and memes, minting new viral heartthrobs—hot Sadhus and Sadhvis—through WhatsApp forwards and Instagram reels, plus supplying shock and cringe content, that I and surely other festival attendees dutifully consumed. Young people are showing interest in scriptures, Malashri Lal remarked at a session launching mythologist Sunita Pant Bansal’s A Comprehensive Guide to Indian Scriptures . The slim book introduces Hindu sacred texts like the Puranas, Vedas, and the epics “as it is,” the author insisted, “without my opinion.” The aim is to demystify and correct beliefs about Hindu religious texts. Why, then, does the jacket say “Indian scriptures” rather than Hindu scriptures? A young audience member asked after admitting he was “nervous and worried” to raise the question. And if the book is on Hinduism, have texts from Nepal been included? The publisher Dipankar Mukherjee, who was also on stage, chivalrously swooped in to field the question, rationalizing that they were “trying to be somewhat politically correct to ensure the book reaches the right audience…Where they [the scriptures] started to become codified, recorded that’s part of current India.” He subsequently plugged the festival co-director William Dalrymple’s latest book, crediting Dalrymple for completing “half our work” tracing the influence of Indian traditions and philosophy on other cultures. Mukherjee’s blithe verbal acrobatics for swapping Hindu with India not only aligns with the religion-nation nexus the country’s government has openly adopted in the last decade but also follows the money as it were. Writing for New York Times, Anupreeta Das claims that book festivals are all the rage among India’s youth. On the surface, the hipness of literary festivals bodes well. Das notes young people “are increasingly reading literature in their native tongues alongside books written in English. For these readers, books open worlds that India’s higher education system, with its focus on time-consuming preparation for make-or-break examinations, often does not.” But what are the young people reading in these various languages? What kinds of worlds are books unlocking? The answers are not straightforward. Trapped in a long, slow-moving queue formed in front of a toilet in Amer Clarks, women were commiserating about the shortage of bathrooms at the venue. Interrupting this communal bonding, a woman in her early twenties started to hype up her novel that retells the Hindu epic Ramayana. Ramayana has become something of a foundational text in the Hindu nationalist imagination. The woman pitching her retelling to a captive, pee-holding audience explained that her book followed the love story of the Hindu demigod Lakhsman whom “feminism” has unfairly sidelined. Her pithy spiel echoed a pervasive cultural sentiment wherein Hindu culture and Hindu Gods need constant protection from the evil eyes of liberals and heretics. Another young woman asked for the book’s title to order on Amazon. Some days later, while looking up the book, I stumbled upon the author’s public Instagram grid that featured side-by-side photos of her in JLF and at Mahakumbh. Completing the spiritual chic circuit of JLF-Mahakumbh, she follows in the illustrious footsteps of others like Sudha Murty who took a holy dip at Kumbh days ahead of her JLF session. Browsing the aisles of bookstores and catalogues of Indian publishers gives an impression that pop spirituality is booming in India. OMTV, an “Indic storytelling” app, surveyed its users and found that around 80% of those consuming spiritual content are aged between 18 and 30. At the same time, The Crossword Bookstore on JLF festival grounds had eager customers crowding pretty much every corner, picking up new and old titles, not just the spirituality laced ones. And in an offline and online public sphere dominated by Maha Kumbh , JLF still managed to hold some conversations offering critical and nuanced perspectives on political Hinduism. Courtesy of the author. But among the nearly three-hundred delegates, the festival included just a handful of Indian Muslim speakers. Bollywood celebrities like the director Imtiaz Ali, Huma Qureshi, and Javed Akhtar were part of this roster. Mujibur Rehman, who used a comparative framework drawn from histories of Black resistance to talk about the political marginalization and de-Islamization of Indian Muslims in Shikwa-e-Hind (2024), was challenged by a middle-aged, ostensibly Hindu, ponytailed thought leader among the audience. “I have lots of confusion about the premise of your book…Should we continue to call Muslims minorities with twenty percent population?” the man asked. Rehman told the man his book answers the question and supplemented his response with analogies underscoring how minority identity and minority rights are not simply pegged on numbers or even the success and visibility of a select few. India’s constitution despite its secular promises is inherently majoritarian, he argued, which informs the cultural landscape where Indians clapping at America’s flag do not invite suspicion, but an Indian Muslim boy clapping at Pakistan’s flag is interpreted as sedition. Kashmiri Muslim, Pakistani, and Bangladeshi literary authors were largely absent from this edition. Some absences can be blamed on logistics—Pakistan passport holders have immense difficulty procuring Indian visas at present, unless of course they are Maha Kumbh enthusiast Hindus. Then they are handed Indian visas swiftly . State rules force compliance but even state policies cannot explain all erasures. Theatre actor and director MK Raina who comes from a Kashmiri Pandit family, spoke about owing his career to the state of Kashmir’s policy of allowing free education right from the 1940s, commented on inequities in contemporary India, and criticized the unrealistic portrayals of Kashmir in Bollywood. He left the stage when his co-panelist, the Rajasthani singer and thespian Ila Arun, started enacting a lengthy sequence from an Ibsen play she adapted and partly set in Kashmir, where a character “hurts the mother” and “hurts the motherland.” Raina’s abrupt departure was first extrapolated as resulting from his frustration about the supposed misrepresentation of Kashmir and later as following from his irritation with Ila Arun for hogging stage time. Multiple sessions addressed Israel’s war on Gaza, but the sessions recycled a small group of speakers that included the Indian American author Pankaj Mishra, Palestinian author Selma Dabbagh, Pulitzer-winning American journalist Nathan Thrall, and Israeli British historian Avi Shlaim. The number of Arab authors featured was in the low single digits. A JLF official reportedly interrupted an interview between the Press Trust of India and the Palestinian envoy to India Abed Elrazeg Abu Jazer on the grounds that the festival’s PR team hadn’t sanctioned it. JLF’s speaker lineup suffers from issues common in invite-only prestige events. The curators turn to the same authors and cultural delegates year after year, and even each year, the same names reappear across sessions. The festival seems to be battling two opposing drives: an impulse to represent a diversity of relevant ideas and a desire to wring the most out of a trusted clique of speakers, resulting in conversations that sometimes feel repetitive, sometimes tokenistic. Although the festival is held in the state of Rajasthan and makes decorative use of Rajasthan’s crafts and colours to create Instagrammable corners, Rajasthani authors and Rajasthani literature are not at the forefront. The festival is a shimmery tamasha that, like high-budget high-gloss Bollywood films, is fun to dip in, so long as one is willing to forgo critical questions. The scale of the festival remains something to marvel at. But other literature festivals that have cropped up in India after Jaipur, such as the Kerala Literature Festival and Mizoram Literature Festival , have made more emphatic attempts at grounding their events in their local cultures. JLF, on the other hand, is happy to remain the Chicken Tikka Masala of festivals, palatable to a wide-ranging, somewhat international audience, seemingly representative of South Asia, with a desi man and a Scottish one claiming credits for its origins. Courtesy of the author. SUB-HEAD ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: Clare Patrick (Our) Worlds and (Plant) Wisdoms Kareen Adam · Nazish Chunara A Dhivehi Artists Showcase "Year of the Snake" (2020), digital drawing by Chaaya Prabhat. SHARE Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Review Jaipur Jaipur Literature Festival JLF Kumbh Mela Hindu Nationalism religious nationalism Religion Contemporary Literature Literature & Liberation Pop Spirituality Elitist elitism tokenism Representational Space representation suppression TORSA GHOSAL is the author of a book of literary criticism, Out of Mind (Ohio State University Press), and an experimental novella, Open Couplets (Yoda Press, India). Her fiction, essays, and interviews have appeared in Berkeley Fiction Review, Catapult, Los Angeles Review of Books, Literary Hub, Bustle , and elsewhere. She is an assistant professor of English at California State University, Sacramento, and a host of the Narrative for Social Justice podcast. 1 Aug 2025 Review Jaipur 1st Aug 2025 CHAAYA PRABHAT is an illustrator from India currently working out of Goa. She’s previously worked with several clients such as Penguin, Hachette, Meta and Google on digital illustration projects, stickers and book projects. She enjoys the using pattern and colour in her illustrations, and has previously won awards for her work from Behance and Cosmopolitan magazine. Ritwik's Trees Sumana Roy 12th Mar Provocations on Empathy Clare Patrick 13th Aug A Man's World Nidhil Vohra 2nd Mar Lights Out in Kinshasa Vrinda Jagota 17th Feb Dissident Kid Lit Saira Mir · Shelly Anand · Vashti Harrison · Simran Jeet Singh 20th Dec On That Note:

POETRY EDITOR Palvashay Sethi Palvashay Sethi is a writer and teacher based in Islamabad. POETRY EDITOR WEBSITE INSTAGRAM TWITTER Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 LOAD MORE

Photojournalist NayanTara Gurung Kakshapati in conversation with Shubhanga Pandey COMMUNITY Photo Kathmandu & Public History in Nepal Photojournalist NayanTara Gurung Kakshapati in conversation with Shubhanga Pandey VOL. 1 INTERVIEW AUTHOR AUTHOR AUTHOR Watch the interview on YouTube or IGTV. ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: AUTHOR Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 AUTHOR Heading 5 Watch the interview on YouTube or IGTV. SHARE Facebook ↗ Twitter ↗ LinkedIn ↗ Interview Nepal 25th Nov 2020 Interview Nepal Archiving Photojournalism Photo Circle Photo Kathmandu International Festival Nepal Picture Library Library Archival Practice Exhibitions Pedagogy People's Movement II Skin of Chitwan Indigeneity Indigenous Art Practice Indigeneous Spaces Dalit Histories Anthropocene Journalism Jana Andolan II Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) Insurgency Public History Public Space Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. The archive of Nepal Picture Library is there to diversity our narratives of the past and begin to look at historically marginalized histories of specific communities, whether that be along the lines of caste or ethnicity or gender. More Fiction & Poetry: Date Authors Heading 5 Date Authors Heading 5 Date Authors Heading 5 Date Authors Heading 5 Date Authors Heading 5 Date Authors Heading 5

“When I say that language has failed us, I mean that there is no amount of information you can give a society that necessarily means it will be compelled to act.” COMMUNITY On the Relationship between Form & Resistance AUTHOR AUTHOR AUTHOR “When I say that language has failed us, I mean that there is no amount of information you can give a society that necessarily means it will be compelled to act.” SHARE Facebook ↗ Twitter ↗ LinkedIn ↗ ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: AUTHOR Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 AUTHOR Heading 5 Panel Language Solidarity Films Film-Making Capital Investigative Journalism Criminal Justice Abolitionism Solidarity: Across the Disaster-Verse Prisons Police Personal History The Petty Self Kashmiri Struggle Translation India Anti-Colonialism Two Refusals Goa Hybrid Multimedia Sham-e-Ali Nayeem Portuguese Nationalism Afro-Asianism Bandung Conference Angola Mozambique Sita Valles Portuguese Communist Party Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola Angolan Liberation Youth/Police Project Act of Listening Stop and Frisk Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. DISPATCH Panel Language 17th Apr 2024 The second panel from our event on 30th March 2024, "Solidarity: Beyond the Disaster-Verse," at ShapeShifter Lab in Brooklyn, New York, which marked the close of Volume 2 Issue 1 of SAAG. Here, Iman Iftikhar, Sharmin Hossain, Maira Khwaja, Kalpana Raina, and Suneil Sanzigir discuss how the varied forms of storytelling they use inform and are informed by their politics, resistance, and solidarity and how they feel it is most useful. This panel picks up from where Panel 1, "What do we mean when we talk about Solidarity?" ends. What follows is a discussion of form & storytelling with: Iman Iftikhar, a researcher, educator, co-founder and manager of Kitab Ghar, an Associate Editor at SAAG, and an editor at Folio Books. Maira Khwaja, a journalist, multimedia producer, and researcher at the Invisible Institute . She is also an Associate Producer of We Grown Now dir. Minhal Baig, April 2024, Stage 6 Films & Sony Pictures Classics. Kalpana Raina, a co-translator of For Now, It is Night: Stories by Hari Krishna Kaul (Archipelago Books, February 2024) Sharmin Hossain, an abolitionist organizer, artist, and the Organizing Director at 18 Million Rising that organizes Asian Americans. Suneil Sanzgiri, a filmmaker, researcher, artist, whose first solo exhibition, Here the Earth Grows Gold , opened at the Brooklyn Museum in October 2023. Photographs courtesy of Josh Steinbauer. SOLIDARITY: BEYOND THE DISASTER-VERSE Panel 1: What do we mean when we talk about Solidarity? SOLIDARITY: BEYOND THE DISASTER-VERSE Quintet Performance Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Next Up:

For decades, Kashmiri women have charted holy ground in the hidden crannies of otherwise patriarchal spaces of worship. As verandas sit bare and prostrations disappear, their presence teeters on the edge of erasure, vulnerable to the slow forgetting of time. Yet many women remain resolute: as long as memory endures, so too will the spaces they carved that never called for recognition. · FEATURES Photo Essay · Kashmir For decades, Kashmiri women have charted holy ground in the hidden crannies of otherwise patriarchal spaces of worship. As verandas sit bare and prostrations disappear, their presence teeters on the edge of erasure, vulnerable to the slow forgetting of time. Yet many women remain resolute: as long as memory endures, so too will the spaces they carved that never called for recognition. Untitled (2025), photograph, courtesy of Zainab. Devotion by Design Just before the adhan , the Jamia Masjid in Srinagar falls silent. It’s a kind of alive stillness: dust caught in thin shafts of light, pigeons tracing circles above carved wooden beams, the scent of rosewater clinging to the air. A grandmother slips off her shoes, adjusts her scarf, and finds her place behind a screen. She doesn’t speak, she doesn’t need to. She is present. There are corners few will notice—small, improvised spaces, where women have long made room for their faith. A balcony, a stairwell, a curtained-off alcove. Not designed officially for them, but quietly claimed. Presence is shown in the architecture: evidence in memory, use, and need. Often engulfed in enforced silence. Jamia Masjid, Srinagar. Courtesy of Zainab. Now, many of those spaces are dissipating. Not with drama, but with a quiet inevitability. They are being renovated, restricted, and forgotten. As they go, much more goes with them: a sacred closeness, a map of devotion embedded into spaces that never needed to be drawn. What happens when these corners vanish—slowly, without notice? What remains, and what do we lose, when the unseen are no longer there to hold us? For generations, women in Kashmir have prayed in spaces not exactly meant for them. There are no signs pointing the way. No architectural plans name them. And yet, they have existed: a narrow balcony overlooking the men’s hall, a partitioned corner behind a curtain, a small side room warmed by years of whispered prayer. These spaces emerged out of necessity, shaped by repetition, softened by devotion. A woman stepping quietly into the same corner her mother once did. A rug folded and stored in the same place. There is a lingering scent of attar left behind after someone leaves. To call these spaces makeshift misses the point. They were not oversights or design flaws. They were formed as quiet forms of agency. Women marking sacred ground where none had been offered. Through repetitive use, these praying women carved out a spiritual geography in physical presence, even if it was never named on paper. This “soft architecture”—made of cloth, memory, and movement—held emotion, belonging, and belief. It was never grand yet it was deeply felt, and that made it sacred. “I’ve been coming here since I was a girl,” Khalida, 62, says, settling her shawl as she looks toward the old wooden veranda. “We didn’t ask where to go. We just came, Taeher hot-pot in one hand and prayer in the other.” Women in prayer, Jamia Masjid, Srinagar. Courtesy of Zainab. Prayers at Khanqah-e Moula, Srinagar. Courtesy of Zainab. She remembers the quiet corner where women sat, shaded and separate, behind a rug gently hung like a veil. They would whisper duas , share warmth, and provide a hot-pot of yellow rice to men and women emerging from the prayer hall. This is no duty, but an offering, as presence. “They knew we were there.” Now, she says, the rug is gone. The veranda feels emptier. “I still bring the Taeher sometimes. But fewer women join. Fewer remember. And the ones who come now… no one tells them where we used to sit.” Her voice lowers. “It’s like the prayer still wants to happen, but the place for it has been folded away.” Women in prayer, Jamia Masjid, Srinagar. Courtesy of Zainab. What Was Quietly Taken In recent years, something has quietly shifted in Kashmir’s mosques and shrines. Renovations arrive with good intentions—modern tiles, repainted walls, new security protocols. But somewhere in that process, the delicate architecture of women’s prayer has begun to disappear. Spaces that were never formally named are now unwittingly removed. A balcony closed. A staircase sealed. A corner now considered “not appropriate .” The change didn’t come from malice. Many men don’t even know what’s been lost. These spaces were inherited, almost invisible. And that’s exactly why they vanished so easily. In the name of order, safety, or religious propriety, these deeply intimate spaces and all they hold continue to slip away. This isn’t just about bricks or curtains. It’s about memory, and how softly it can be erased when decisions are made from above, by institutions that speak of faith but forget the textures of it. In Kashmir, where both men and women carry centuries of devotion, such forgetting doesn’t feel neutral. It feels like an inflicted absence. An empty silence that once held meaning. Outside the city, in the shrines of Kashmir’s valleys and hills, something still lingers. At Baba Reshi, the mood is less structured, less policed. Here, women walk freely, light lamps, tie threads to latticework, and stir food in sacred kitchens. Their presence is visible—not formal, but felt. There’s a small, designated space marked “for women,” in which they move with familiarity. Women sweep the floors, offer prayers aloud, and tend to the rituals that anchor belief. These gestures are often seen as care rather than acts of worship, but it is worship too. Unlike the city’s polished mosques, rural shrines seem to breathe with memory. The freedom they offer, however, is fragile. It survives because it is overlooked, rather than because it has been protected. Space for women’s religious practice can be claimed, precisely because it remains informal, invisible, almost domestic. The erosion is uneven. In these peripheral places, the edge holds on to what the center forgets. And yet, even here, one wonders—what happens when these quiet practices no longer go unacknowledged, but become regulated? Echoes of a time gone by. Jamia Masjid, Srinagar. Courtesy of Zainab. Sadiya, 27, walks through the narrow lane leading to Jamia Masjid with ease. She has been coming here since she was a child, led by her mother’s hand. She doesn’t pray in the main courtyard, but she doesn’t mind. The women’s section—tucked to the side, with the mounted TV broadcasting the Mirwaiz’s sermon—still feels sacred to her. “It’s quiet. Sometimes too quiet,” she says with a small smile, “but when the waaz begins, something shifts. It feels like we’re part of it, even if we’re not seen.” She acknowledges that the space isn’t perfect. It’s separate. Small. Often unseen. But she doesn’t see it as absence. “We’re still here,” she says. “We still listen. We still feel.” What keeps her coming is the sense of continuity. Her mother sat here, and maybe one day, her daughter will too. “I know it could be better. But I also know it’s not lost. Not yet. And as long as we come, it won’t be.” At the Threshold of Memory I have never stepped into these rooms. Not because I wasn’t curious, but because I know I shouldn’t. My place, as a man, is not inside. Listening, watching, remembering what is said and what is not. These spaces—drawn in cloth, carved into routine—were never mine. And yet they’ve shaped the way I understand prayer, presence, and the politics of space. I have learned to read absence, to hear what disappears without announcement. In a culture where so much is held in gesture, to stand at the threshold is not passive. It’s a kind of responsibility. In the shadowed alcove of a shrine, a woman lights a stick of incense. The smoke rises slowly, curling into the dimness. Its scent—rose, ash, something older—fills the air. Behind her, a small child leans against her mother’s shoulder, half-asleep, her breath matching the rhythm of the prayer whispered beside her. Nothing is said aloud. But something sacred passes between them: tender, private, deeply alive. These are not moments most people would record. They don’t fit neatly into architectural plans or ideological doctrines. Instead they carry what no institution can replace: faith that lives in touch, in memory, in the soft persistence of presence. Even as walls are rebuilt and policies redraw the shape of sacred life, these quiet devotions continue. A rug tucked behind a staircase. A prayer whispered behind a curtain. What disappears from sight won’t always vanish. Some spaces move inward. Into memory, into gesture, into breath. Writing may be a way to resist forgetting. Because even when a room is gone, what it once held can still remain—in scent, in story, in the hush that follows prayer. I write about these corners with careful attention. To me, this means knowing the difference between witnessing and claiming. I carry these stories not as evidence, but as echoes of things fading not yet gone. In Kashmir, where so much has already been taken, documenting is more than just recording. In writing, I honour what remains, to make space for memory when physical space no longer allows it. … Every Friday, Shabir takes a break from his carpenter work—like many self-employed men in Kashmir—and drives with his wife and two daughters, Azra and Ajwa, to the Baba Reshi shrine on his scooter. It’s not just routine; it’s a rhythm of devotion, held in the quiet folds of family life. “Friday is for slowing down,” he says. “For prayer. For being together.” When they arrive, Shabir takes Azra, the younger one, with him into the shrine. “She’s still small,” he smiles. “She watches me closely, tries to copy every movement.” Ajwa, now nine, goes with her mother to the courtyard, to tie threads, to pray, to go into the small women’s prayer room when they find it open. “I’ve never gone in, and I won’t. But I know it’s a place of peace…for them.” He doesn’t speak of fairness or rights. Just presence, and memory. “My daughters will remember this. That they belonged here. That faith wasn’t something they had to find. It was already waiting for them.” ∎ Woman with a Tasbeeh , Jamia Masjid, Srinagar. Shared faith, Jamia Masjid, Srinagar. Courtesy of Zainab. Friday prayers, Jamia Masjid, Srinagar. Courtesy of Zainab. Making presence, Babareshi, Baramullah. Courtesy of Zainab. At Khanqah Urs, Khanqah-e Moula, Srinagar. Courtesy of Zainab. A child’s whisper, Aishmuqam Shrine, Islamabad. Courtesy of Zainab. Woman praying at Chrar, Budgam. Courtesy of Zainab. Daan Levun, Babareshi, Baramullah. Devotees perform age-old ritual of coating a stone oven with clay soil, believing that their prayers shall be fulfilled. Courtesy of Zainab. Making presence II, Babareshi, Baramullah. Courtesy of Zainab. The walls that stood the testament of time. Courtesy of Zainab. Walk by faith, Hazratbal Shrine, Srinagar. Courtesy of Zainab. Testament of a collective history, Charar-i Sharif, Budgam. Courtesy of Zainab. Inherited resilience. Zoya with a friend, Jamia Masjid, Srinagar. Courtesy of Zainab. SUB-HEAD Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Photo Essay Kashmir Mosque Worship Devotion Femininity Prayer Ritual Sacred Space Future Generations Generational Legacy Memory Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. 9th Oct 2025 AUTHOR · AUTHOR Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. 1 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 On That Note: