New Delhi:

Author Amitav Ghosh, who is in the forefront of raising awareness about environmental damage and climate change, termed the California wildfires and particularly the Los Angeles inferno as “completely predictable”. He also pointed at the poorly understood idea of safety amid the climate crisis as “wealth and affluence” alone cannot save people.

In an interview to NDTV, Mr Ghosh drew attention to the “weird thing about climate change”, which is a “global phenomenon that manifests locally”.

Mr Ghosh, a Jnanpith Award recipient and winner of the Erasmus Prize for his writings on the planetary crisis and climate change, told NDTV that the California case was completely predictable as it was in a kind of a geographical zone where it’s bound to have catastrophes. “It has exactly that kind of climate.”

“It’s in a desert. The problem with Los Angeles in particular is all its water comes from very distant sources, and there’s a lot of institutional corruption built into it. A couple of billionaires have diverted a lot of water to their farms,” Mr Ghosh told NDTV.

“What you will see in all these disasters that are playing out across the planet is that climate change is an intensifier. But you can’t understand any of them without understanding the localism of it. Because this is the weird thing about climate change – it’s a global phenomenon that manifests locally,” said the celebrated writer.

He said people have to be able to understand how climate change is interacting with local patterns of settlement, and local patterns of development.

“If you just take the case of Chennai, for example, which has had these rain bomb events, repeatedly, the problem there is they have built over an entire floodplain. Similarly, we have these very unsustainable patterns of urban development around Mumbai. And the same is true of Los Angeles. They should not be building along mountains where it’s known that fires will happen, and they have happened repeatedly over the years,” Mr Ghosh said.

Thousands of firefighters continued their efforts to snuff out hotspots over the 40,000 acres that have been burned — an area almost as big as Washington DC. All over Los Angeles, the acclaim for first responders stood in contrast to the political bickering, which has seen Republicans across the US line up behind President-elect Donald Trump as he bashes California’s Democratic leadership.

Actor Eric Braeden, a mainstay of US daytime soap opera ‘The Young and the Restless,’ on Thursday lashed out at the politicisation of the issue. US tennis great Pam Shriver appealed for the return of trophies stolen with her car after she evacuated her luxury home. Dozens of people have been arrested in the wake of the disaster, with several charged for looting.

Mr Ghosh said the US could pull out of the Paris Agreement again after President-elect Donald Trump takes charge, and cautioned that such a decision would be a wrong one.

“… What is the thinking behind that [pulling out of Paris Agreement]? The thinking is that climate change will mainly affect poor countries, poor people, and that wealthy countries will be okay. But this is a complete fantasy. I mean, what we see today in California, these are some of the richest and most famous people in the world. Wealth or affluence as such is not going to protect them,” Mr Ghosh said.

Referring to the COVID-19 crisis, the author said the pandemic was a forerunner of the planetary crisis.

“The COVID pandemic didn’t play out at all according to affluence or wealth. Two of the countries that were worst-affected were the UK and the US. So wealth is not actually going to protect people from the impacts of the planetary crisis,” Mr Ghosh said.

On Donald Trump, the author said the incoming president is “not entirely a climate [change] denier. In 2009, he actually signed a petition asking the US government to act on climate change because he has properties all around the world, which are now actually threatened by climate impacts,” the author told NDTV. “So at some point, he made a very political decision, to deny climate change. It’s actually become a part of a culture war.”

New Delhi:

Eight years before a massive billboard in Mumbai crushed 14 people and injured many others during a storm, author Amitav Ghosh had warned of how the Maximum City’s billboards will become “deadly projectiles” if a cyclone strikes.

Mr Ghosh, who has repeatedly underlined the issues surrounding climate change in his work, wrote in ‘The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable’, “Many of the dwellings in Mumbai’s informal settlements have roofs made of metal sheets and corrugated iron; cyclone-force winds will turn these, and the thousands of billboards that encrust the city, into deadly projectiles, hurling them with great force at the glass-wrapped towers that soar above the city.”

In The Great Derangement I wrote that in the event of a major storm ‘the thousands of billboards that encrust’ Mumbai would turn ‘into deadly projectiles’. The recent storm was nowhere near as damaging as a major cyclone would be. Mumbai really needs to cut back drastically on…

— Amitav Ghosh (@GhoshAmitav) May 14, 2024

Recounting the warning in the wake of the horrifying tragedy, Mr Ghosh said in a social media post that Monday’s storm was not even close to being a major cyclone and called for immediate steps to cut back on such billboards.

“In The Great Derangement I wrote that in the event of a major storm ‘the thousands of billboards that encrust’ Mumbai would turn ‘into deadly projectiles’. The recent storm was nowhere near as damaging as a major cyclone would be. Mumbai really needs to cut back drastically on billboards,” he said on X.

During a dust-storm and sudden showers in Mumbai on Monday afternoon, a 120 x 120-feet billboard collapsed on a petrol pump, trapping more than 100 people. Fourteen bodies have been recovered so far and rescue work is still on. Under fire, civic officials have said the billboard was illegal and was installed without permission.

A case of culpable homicide not amounting to murder has been registered against those linked to the firm that installed the billboard.