As world leaders participate in the UN Climate Change Conference, hosted by the U.K. and Italy, from October 31 to November 12, in Glasgow and initiate steps to mitigate global warming, we profile five books, which urge the world to listen to nature.
In Half-Earth, Our Planet’s Fight for Life (W.W. Norton & Company, 2016), the final book of his trilogy on the environment, noted biologist Edward O. Wilson proposed that “only by committing half of the planet’s surface to nature can we hope to save the immensity of life-forms that compose it”. Unless humanity learns a great deal more about global biodiversity and moves quickly to protect it, we will soon lose most of the species composing life on Earth, he writes. “The Half-Earth proposal offers a first, emergency solution commensurate with the magnitude of the problem: I am convinced that only by setting aside half the planet in reserve, or more, can we save the living part of the environment and achieve the stabilization required for our own survival.” The Pulitzer Prize-winning Wilson said setting a goal of protecting half the earth is necessary because “people understand and prefer goals”.
In her 2021 book, Under the White Sky (PRH), Elizabeth Kolbert is critical of technological interventions to bring nature back. She blames the human species of the Anthropocene epoch of having an unprecedented power over the planet and yet doing everything to take ecosystems to the brink of collapse. The book, written at a time when the average global temperature is over a degree Celsius above pre-industrial temperature, is a result of field trips Kolbert took to places where the situation is calamitous. The only option in these places is a technological intervention, which Kolbert is uneasy about. The question she asks after each trip is whether, after doing so much damage, we can change nature to save it.
Amitav Ghosh has tackled the climate question in two books, the just-released The Nutmeg’s Curse (Penguin) where he links global warming to colonial policies, and The Great Derangement( Chicago University Press, 2016), where he examines our inability to grasp the scale of the problem at the level of literature, history and politics. “My ancestors,” he writes, “were ecological refugees long before the term was invented.” Ghosh narrates a story he heard from his father: one day in the mid-1850s, the great Padma river [now in Bangladesh] suddenly changed course drowning the village and forcing the inhabitants to move west. He says he later realised that an energy surrounds us, an all-encompassing presence that may have its own purposes about which we know nothing. As he researched for a book on the Sundarbans, he jotted down in his notebook: “I do believe it to be true that the land here is demonstrably alive…” Portents of change could be seen in receding shorelines and a steady intrusion of sea water into lands that used to be cultivated.” If you travel around the islands of Sundarbans, the villagers always point towards a receding river or at a village which was either nearer or further away.
In The Nutmeg’s Curse, Ghosh uses a common spice – nutmeg, believed to cure plague – to link violent colonial ambitions which erased languages and a way of life to ecological devastation.
“It is worse, much worse, than you think,” warns David-Wallace Wells in his 2019 book, The Uninhabitable Earth: Life after Warming (PRH) . “We are currently adding carbon to the atmosphere at a considerably faster rate, by most estimates, at least ten times faster.”
