When a tragedy would implicate us, we find ways not to name its cause. We will discuss everything around it and leave the one central cause unsaid, because to say it plainly is to stand answerable for it. A whole society can keep that silence together, and then what has really happened is given away not by what is said, but by the one word that is missing.
Read the coverage of the disaster in Nepal, and it is that missing word you notice first. More than six hundred people are dead, and more than a thousand are missing; and you can travel far through the papers and the channels before the one word that explains it is spoken plainly, and meant. The bad luck is named, and the lost pilgrims, and the ruined border post, and the sheer size of the water; only the cause is left out. A few reports reach for the word and set it down again at once, a label filed in the margin. The rest step around it. And this is not because the cause is hidden. It is because the cause is us.
What happened was not, in the ordinary sense, a flood. Not a drop of rain reached that valley that morning; the sky was clear. The water came off the mountain as ice, a great slab of it shearing away from a warming glacier and blocking a river until the river burst through what had held it back. It will take the scientists months to establish what set off the collapse on that exact morning. But the fact that the heating made a collapse of this kind steadily more likely, year upon year, is already beyond dispute. This was a climate catastrophe, and not the first; the very same valley was struck in almost this way a year ago, and the whole Himalayan arc now does this two and three times a season. The word, then, is available, and it is accurate, and still it is the one word we will not say plainly. That refusal deserves more attention than the flood itself, because the refusal is the disease, and the flood only its symptom.
Why We Look Away
Say “climate,” and you have said something about yourself. You have said that these hundreds did not die of bad weather or bad luck, that their deaths were no accident, and that the ordinary business of ordinary lives brought them on: the flight, the second car, the endless upgrade, the appetite we call a normal standard of living. The people of Nepal did not earn this; they burned almost nothing, and the dead of two dozen other nationalities were not being punished for a crime. The carbon that warmed the ice was put there by every decent, unremarkable person emitting quietly at home, and every emitter has a hand in this. That is the sentence no one wants to hear said of himself, and so the coverage is built to avoid it. You would rather guard the flattering picture you keep of yourself, the good family man who would never harm a soul, than look at what that same man does on any ordinary day. To keep the self-image, you keep the silence.
And it is not guilt over something done once, long ago; it is our way of living now, and what we mean to go on doing. Our idea of a good life, our ambitions, the future we save for, all of it comes down to one wish: more to have, and more to burn. That, at bottom, is the climate crisis; it is appetite wearing the face of progress. The earth is not even asking for abstinence; most of
the world, nine in ten Indians among them, still lives within the little room it leaves. The ones who live far above it, who are drowning the rest, are not the ones dying in the rivers. They are, very often, the ones who own the microphone.
The Machinery of the Silence
That is the first reason the word stays unsaid. The people with the largest footprints are often the same people who own the media, and who have put their money into the very hotels and dams and hill roads that this melting will one day take. No owner wants the story to reach his investors that the ground beneath his resort is coming apart; that would only spook the money. So the coverage is careful. It shows you the collapsing slope, because a collapse makes a good reel, and not the quiet breaking behind it, the glacier that had been failing for thirty years before it fell in seconds, because a wall that cracks slowly has no footage. It shows you the weeping family and invites you to feel, so that under your sympathy nobody asks how this happened. Grief is real and deserves respect. But grief is also the softest ground in which to bury a question.
The language itself is enlisted. “The river swept them away,” we read, as though the river had a will, as though the water were the guilty party; the sentence is built to remove the doer and leave only the deed. Even honesty is turned to the purpose: science will not call a thing certain while a doubt remains, so the scientist says a disaster was probably the warming and must study it further, and that honest “probably” becomes a door out, a reason to wait for a certainty that arrives when the story is already cold. Around these stand the ones with a plainer stake. The insurer, who owes nothing for what can be called an act of God. The politician, for whom the rebuilding is a rise in GDP, a fresh demand for steel and cement and the same dams thrown up in the same doomed places. The comfortable faith that whatever comes is the will of heaven, so that catastrophe becomes a thing to accept, not a thing we caused. And running through it, the flattery of the flag, that China gave no warning, and each nation counts only its own dead. Follow the silence out far enough and it is not the conspiracy of a few; it is a quiet agreement among almost all of us not to say the thing that would ask us to change.
And it is worth asking what, precisely, the silence keeps from you, because the buried facts are not small. Warming does three things to a mountain at once. It thins the glaciers until they fracture; it thaws the permafrost, the frozen ground that had cemented these young and still loose mountains for millennia, so the slopes begin to shed their rock; and it turns the snow that once fell and settled into rain that runs straight off as flood. The same melt has filled the high valleys with thousands of new lakes that did not exist a generation ago, dammed by loose rubble and buried ice, sitting directly above villages, and any one of them can let go at the nudge of a tremor. This is the Third Pole, the largest store of ice outside the poles, some sixty thousand glaciers feeding the rivers of two billion people, and it warms faster than the plains below.
The arithmetic that follows is worse, and it too goes unsaid. For now the great rivers run fuller than in living memory, because the ice is being spent faster than it forms; around 2050 that flow will crest and then fall, year on year, until the same rivers swing between fiercer floods and drier springs, and the holiest of them thin toward the seasonal. On the present course, as much as eighty per cent of this ice will be gone by 2100, and even at the gentlest warming the world has promised, 1.5 degrees Celsius, a third of it still goes. A Nepali puts into the air about half a tonne of carbon in a year and an American fourteen, so the dead had emitted almost nothing while those who emitted most were nowhere near the water. And none of this is the mountains merely doing what mountains have always done; measure the frequency of these disasters and it has multiplied several times over in a single generation. This is a sixth great extinction, and three of the five that came before it were driven by the very thing we are making now: too much carbon in the air. It has climbed in a single century from about 280 parts per million to over 420, while species vanish between ten and a hundred times faster than the earth’s ordinary rate. Nor is it a foreign tragedy: the river that flooded becomes the Gandak, and then the Ganga, and Bihar’s worst floods already come down these very rivers from Nepal.
A Crisis of the Heart
This crisis defeats the answers that worked before, and the reason is worth being exact about, because the exactness is the whole of the hope. Once already we faced a wound in the sky, the thinning of the ozone, and we closed it. But that trouble touched life at a single point, the coolant of a refrigerator and an air conditioner, and so we changed the chemical, banned the compound, and were done. This is not a trouble of that kind. Carbon is not one molecule in one corner of life; it is in every step of the life we have chosen. We emit when we are happy and celebrate, and when we are sad and shop to feel better; at every birth and every death we burn a little more. A crisis that lives in the way a human being wants can be answered by nothing but a change in the human being. This is why the cleaner technology and the wiser policy, real as their uses are, will not be enough this time; they treat the appliance, and the trouble is in the heart.
So the outward remedies keep missing, and I have said as much for twenty years. The protest is outward; it is always against some object standing over there, some government to be pulled down, and here there is no object but ourselves. A man with a disease inside him does not march against it in the street; he treats it. The single campaign is the same error made smaller: the one tree saved, the one project stopped, the anger that leaves a person feeling good and the cause untouched, because the cause was never in that one place. The carbon molecule is not local; the heat belongs to the whole of the air, and no local remedy will ever reach it. To touch any of it, you must reach the one thing common to all of it: the human being who wants without end, and the disorder in him that has mistaken consuming for living.
That disorder is the real subject, and attending to it, a mass education of the self, is the last environmentalism there is, and in truth the only one. The earth needs no saving; it healed itself over ages and will heal again the moment we stop wounding it. It is not the earth that has gone out of order, but the one who looks at it, and it is he who must be set right. No treaty and no technology reach that far; only a person coming to see for himself what he is truly chasing, and finding that the thing he burns the world for is never going to fill him. What that seeing asks of a life cannot be drawn up in advance or handed out as a programme; it can only be pointed to, and left to each person to walk. The media will go on bringing us breaking news. What this hour asks for is the other kind, the news that breaks the illusion instead of feeding it, and that is a bulletin no one can broadcast on our behalf. It begins the moment you stop staring at the flood and turn, for once, to look at the appetite that caused it.