Author Amitav Ghosh, who is at the forefront of raising awareness about environmental damage and climate change, called the California wildfires, and especially the Los Angeles fires, “completely predictable.” He also pointed to the poorly understood idea of security amid the climate crisis as “wealth and prosperity” alone cannot save people.
In an interview with NDTV, Mr Ghosh drew attention to “the strange thing about climate change”, which is a “global phenomenon that manifests itself locally”.
Mr Ghosh, a Jnanpith Award recipient and winner of the Erasmus Prize for his writings on planetary crisis and climate change, told NDTV that the California case was completely predictable because it was in the kind of geographical area where catastrophe is bound to happen. “It has exactly the same climate.”
“It’s in a desert. The problem with Los Angeles in particular is that all its water comes from very distant sources, and there’s a lot of institutional corruption. A few billionaires have diverted a lot of the water to their farms, ” Mr Ghosh told NDTV.
“What you’ll see in all these disasters happening all over the planet is that climate change is intense. But you can’t understand any of this without understanding its locality. Because that’s the funny thing about climate change – It is a global phenomenon that manifests locally,” said the renowned author.
He said people need to be able to understand how climate change is interacting with local patterns of settlement and local patterns of development.
“For example, if you take the case of Chennai, where there have been repeated rain bomb incidents, the problem there is that they have built up on the entire flood zone. Similarly, we have urban development around Mumbai. These are very unsustainable patterns. And the same is true of Los Angeles where it is known that fires will occur, and that has happened repeatedly over the years,” Mr. Ghosh. Said.
Thousands of firefighters continued their efforts to extinguish the hotspot that has burned more than 40,000 acres — an area almost the size of Washington DC. Across Los Angeles, the praise for first responders stood in contrast to the political discord that saw Republicans across the US stand behind President-elect Donald Trump as he criticized California’s Democratic leadership.
Actor Eric Braeden, the lead actor of the American daytime soap opera ‘The Young and the Restless’, on Thursday attacked the politicization of the issue. American tennis great Pam Shriver has appealed for the return of trophies stolen from her car after vacating her luxurious home. Dozens of people have been arrested in the wake of the disaster, many of whom have been charged with looting.
Mr Ghosh said the US could again exit the Paris Agreement after President-elect Donald Trump takes office, and cautioned that such a decision would be wrong.
“…What is the thinking behind this (exiting the Paris Agreement)? The thinking is that climate change will mainly affect poor countries, poor people and rich countries will be fine. But this is completely a fantasy. I mean, what we see in California today, these are some of the richest and most famous people in the world, wealth or prosperity cannot protect them,” Mr. Ghosh said.
Referring to the COVID-19 crisis, the author said the pandemic was a harbinger of planetary crisis.
“The COVID pandemic did not play out in terms of affluence or wealth at all. The UK and the US were the two countries most affected. So wealth will not actually protect people from the effects of the planetary crisis.” ” Mr Ghosh said.
On Donald Trump, the author said the incoming president “is not going to be a complete climate (change) denier. In 2009, he actually signed a petition calling on the US government to take action on climate change Because they have assets around the world that are now really at risk from climate impacts,” the author told NDTV. “So at some point, they made a very political decision to deny climate change. It’s really become part of a culture war.”
