New Delhi:
Author Amitav Ghosh, who has been at the forefront of raising awareness about environmental damage and climate change, called the California wildfires and especially the Los Angeles inferno “completely predictable.” He also pointed out the poorly understood idea of security amid the climate crisis, as “wealth and prosperity” alone cannot save people.
In an interview with Our, Mr Ghosh drew attention to the 'weird thing about climate change', a 'global phenomenon that manifests itself locally'.
Mr Ghosh, recipient of the Jnanpith Award and winner of the Erasmus Prize for his writings on the planetary crisis and climate change, told Our that the California case was completely predictable because it was in a kind of geographical zone where catastrophes were inevitable. “It has exactly that kind of climate.”
“It's in a desert. The problem with Los Angeles in particular is that all the water comes from very distant sources, and there's a lot of institutional corruption built into it. A few billionaires have diverted a lot of water to their farms,” he says. Ghosh told Our.
“What you'll see in all these disasters happening across the planet is that climate change is an intensification. But you can't understand any of these disasters without understanding their localization. Because this is the strange thing about climate change: it is a global phenomenon that manifests itself locally,” said the celebrated writer.
He said people need to be able to understand how climate change interacts with local settlement patterns and local development patterns.
“If you just take the case of Chennai, for example, where this rainbombing has happened repeatedly, the problem is that they built over an entire floodplain. Similarly, we have these very unsustainable patterns of urban development around Mumbai. And the same goes for Los Angeles. They should not be building along mountains where fires are known to happen, and have done so repeatedly over the years,” Mr Ghosh said.
Thousands of firefighters continue their efforts to extinguish hot spots in the 40,000 hectares that have burned – an area almost the size of Washington DC. Across Los Angeles, praise for first responders stood in stark contrast to the political bickering, with Republicans across the US rallying behind newly elected President Donald Trump as he bashed California's Democratic leadership.
Actor Eric Braeden, a mainstay of the American soap opera “The Young and the Restless,” lashed out Thursday at the politicization of the issue. American tennis star Pam Shriver called for the return of trophies stolen with her car after evacuating her luxury home. Dozens of people have been arrested in the aftermath of the disaster, and several have been charged with looting.
Mr Ghosh said the US could again withdraw from the Paris Agreement after newly-elected President Donald Trump takes charge, warning that such a decision would be wrong.
“…What's the thinking behind that [pulling out of Paris Agreement]? The idea is that climate change will mainly affect poor countries and poor people, and that rich countries will fare well. But this is a complete fantasy. I mean, what we see in California today are some of the richest and most famous people in the world. Wealth or prosperity as such will not protect them,” Ghosh said.
Referring to the COVID-19 crisis, the author said the pandemic was a precursor to the planetary crisis.
“The COVID pandemic did not proceed according to prosperity or wealth at all. Two of the countries worst affected were Britain and the US. So wealth is not really going to protect people from the consequences of the planetary crisis,” Mr Ghosh said.
About Donald Trump, the author said that the new president “is not entirely a climate [change] denial. In 2009, he even signed a petition asking the US government to take action on climate change because he has properties around the world that are now actually threatened by climate impacts,” the author told Our. “So at one point he made a very political decision to deny climate change. It's actually become part of a culture war.”