Another summer goes down as the hottest ever on record. Just like the previous year, and quite likely the following year as well. As these indices of ongoing and future catastrophes stack against each other, another ritual plays out—the clamour over numbers. Do the prevailing scientific projections—and the models that underlie them—accurately reflect the temperature shifts currently being experienced or are global heating trends beyond the predictive capacity of these models? Is the planet heating at a faster rate than anticipated? The frustration and helplessness that accompanies this clamour is all the more volatile due to powerful well-funded disinformation campaigns that deny not just the scope but also the reasons behind global warming. Ineffectively designed and implemented international treaties and regional environmental policies are yet to provide reasons to hope. Apart from these obstacles, could this sense of frustration and insurmountability also betray something even more fundamental—a blind spot inherent to the technocratic conception of an environmental crisis that has been centuries in the making? Are the knowledge paradigms, attitudes and institutions that have actively pushed planetary processes to a breaking point now stepping in as crisis managers? Can this frustration and urgency then be seen as a ritual for a problem that cannot be addressed meaningfully through the scientific, administrative, economic and political institutions and actors that have come to dominate the global scene?

This is not to suggest that frustration at climate inaction is feigned or half-hearted, or that climate science is unnecessary. Rather, it is to say that this crisis is so vast and all-encompassing that any meaningful response would involve a total and radical overhaul of the global economic and political order as it stands. To reduce it to the monitoring and modulation of what is primarily one line of measurement—carbon accumulation in the atmosphere—would inevitably provide a woefully incomplete description of the crisis, culminating in rituals of frustration. This will be followed by only the appearance or staging of a response. Responses based on a narrow engagement with global environmental crises are likely to yield policy instruments that don’t really address the historical, political, and economic roots of these catastrophes. This technocratic frustration and clamour over measures becomes a ritual in the sense of  a well-known parable by Kafka, “Leop­ards break into the tem­ple and drink up the offer­ing in the chal­ices; this hap­pens again and again; final­ly, one can pre­dict their action in advance and it becomes part of the cer­e­mo­ny”. Despite its exotic setting, the parable points to something simultaneously profound and ordinary: that the rituals we live by have consequences beyond their initial designs and that rituals expand in scope absorbing the other realms of activity that have become a part of their gravitational field. Simply put, this can be seen as a parable about knock-on effects. If it was believed and made imperative that every phenomenon, creature and society could be endlessly known, modified, homogenised, controlled and profited from, surely the knock-on effects of that scrutiny and exploitation would lead to consequences that can longer be contained by those very modes of control.

In the discourse on climate action, there has been a pronounced focus on the urgent need to move away from fossil fuels and adapt other renewable sources of energy like wind and solar energy. This push has inaugurated an era of green capitalism with increased investments in newer technologies like electric cars and fiscal outlays which seek to fulfil policies that accelerate this shift away from non-renewable sources of energy. As this push for a greener, cleaner capitalism evolves, it could be argued that different consequences, rather than the ones being claimed by those invested in such a push, are taking shape. Rather than a course correction and a cleaner planet, this push seems to have opened up an entirely new frontier of financial speculation for corporations. A salient example of this is the case of carbon offsets which amount to  little more than a secular form of purchasing indulgences. Through this financial instrument, corporations are allowed to offset their carbon footprint by purchasing credits which are transferred to industries and enterprises that might enable reduced emissions and foster initiatives such as the protection of rainforest ecosystems. In this way, corporations do not have to worry about their impact on the environment as they can literally purchase and declare their carbon neutrality. Unsurprisingly, studies are now concluding that this sort of exchange does not reduce emissions or nurture vulnerable ecosystems and often have detrimental effects on the habitats they are supposed to protect.

What the example of carbon credits demonstrates is that corporations and financial institutions are not interested in pursuing actions that will reduce their disastrous impact on the environment. Rather, corporations, financial institutions and the governments that abet them are primarily invested in claiming a ‘carbon neutral’ status that will legitimise their unfettered pursuit of profit. Such disjunctions lurk at the heart of the speculative frontiers of green capitalism. Our collective environmental predicament can be seen as a history of looking away; of claiming to seek solutions and enacting remedies while actively pursuing the contrary. This vacillation between the sober auditing and designing of outcomes and the surprise and frustration of not being able to achieve them is akin to deeming something inert and being shocked by its movement. In his extended essay on climate change The Great Derangement, the writer Amitav Ghosh poses the encounter with climate catastrophe in images of the uncanny.

Who can forget those moments when something that seems inanimate turns out to be vitally, even dangerously alive? As, for example, when an arabesque in the pattern of a carpet is revealed to be a dog’s tail, which, if stepped upon, could lead to a nipped ankle? Or when we reach for an innocent-looking vine and find it to be a worm or a snake? When a harmlessly drifting log turns out to be a crocodile.

The technocratic clamour over climate change is characterised by urgency and does not have time for the uncanny. But what looks like urgency for action on one level could be recognised as a convoluted form of inertia on another level. The large leeway and exits permitted by the world of climate measures and policies allows for flagrant contradictions. The UAE might have a strategy to reduce net emissions to zero by 2050 but the Emirati minister who presided over the COP28 summit (and is the chief executive of the state oil company) can also simultaneously claim there is “no science” behind the assumption that a phase-out of fossil fuels is required in order to limit global heating to not more than 1.5C. Similarly, Elon Musk can claim green points for making electric cars with Tesla while simultaneously raising billions of dollars from banks and venture capitalists to fund the SpaceX program that includes an apocalyptically envisioned Mars Colonization program—two ventures with diametrically opposed horizons.

In this fairground of futurity, the commodification of hope—of a climate-friendly capitalism—can quite easily be sensed as a vast tapestry of dissociation from the various crises that occupy the present. Here, the rapid churn of speculative capital disguises a more fundamental paralysis. It is only fitting then that the other image Ghosh summons to encapsulate the climate crisis is one where urgency is conjoined with immobility. Referencing  the unique topography of the Sunderbans, Ghosh notes that “concealment is so easy for an animal that it could be just a few feet away. If it charged, you would not see it till the last minute, and even if you did, you would not be able to get away; the mud would immobilize you”.  Given the frequency of such ambushes, the local folklore of the region contains many stories where “a great deal hinges on the eyes; seeing is one of their central themes; not seeing is another. The tiger is watching you; you are aware of its gaze, as you always are, but you do not see it; you do not lock eyes with it until it launches its charge, and at that moment a shock courses through you and you are immobilized, frozen”. Panoramas are antithetical to the mangroves where seeing happens at the very end, when the threat has already made escape impossible. In Ghosh’s allegorical framing, climate catastrophe is only accorded significance after an extremely delayed cognisance, this endgame preceded by a lengthy and complex not-seeing.

Ghosh traces the planetary catastrophes arising from this ‘deranged’ relation with the environment to “the era of Western military conquests” that “predates the emergence of capitalism by centuries. Indeed, it was these conquests, and the imperial systems that arose in their wake, that fostered and made possible the rise to dominance of what we now call capitalism”. If one aspect of the history of our current environmental predicaments is a history of looking away, of not-seeing, what would such a history look like? The commodification of hope, the harnessing of its dissociative powers, is not unique to our present moment and can be distinctly traced back to the history of colonial speculation that took root across Europe in the fifteenth century. As reports of voyages to the ‘New World’ and its riches began to circulate, aided by the explosion of print culture, it engendered a frenzy of speculation regarding the natural world, the diversity of social formations, avenues of investment, the justification of violence and conquest, and civilizational and racial hierarchies. One of the locales in which these concerns coalesced was the hybrid genre of utopian writing, of which Thomas More’s Utopia (1516) and Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis (1627) are prototypical examples. More and Bacon’s fictional depictions of ideal societies and ‘New World’ geographies are useful examples through which the imperial and colonial intent undergirding the emerging discourses of scientific, technological and social improvement can be evinced.

Unlike More’s England replete with corruption, poverty, unemployment and reeling under the devastating social and economic effects of enclosure, More’s Utopians are prosperous, dutybound, learned, industrious and peaceful. So pacifist are the Utopians that even amidst war, their physicians administer treatment to their wounded opponents while their priests administer prayers. The Utopians only participate in war as a measure of last resort. There is one interesting exception, however, where the Utopians engage in pre-emptive warfare. If their neighbours refuse to use the service of the Utopians in improving the former’s wastelands (for mutual benefit), they colonise the neighbouring land by justifying it in the following manner:     

But if a city has too many people, the extra persons serve to make up the shortage of population in other cities. And if the population throughout the entire island exceeds the quota, they enrol citizens out of every city and plant a colony under their own laws on the mainland near them, wherever the natives have plenty of unoccupied and uncultivated land. Those natives who want to live with the Utopians are adopted by them. When such a merger occurs, the two peoples gradually and easily blend together, sharing the same way of life and customs, much to the advantage of both. For by their policies the Utopians make the land yield an abundance for all, though previously it had seemed too poor and barren even to support the natives. But those who refuse to live under their laws they drive out of the land they claim for themselves; and against those who resist them, they wage war. They think it is perfectly justifiable to make war on people who leave their land idle and waste yet forbid the use and possession of it to others who, by the law of nature, ought to be supported from it.

This passage is eerily reminiscent of a contemporary trope of Israeli settler-colonial discourse where it’s claimed that Palestinian land was a bleak desert that is now made fertile by the agricultural ingenuity and technical prowess of Israel. If colonial promoters had to convince potential investors and patrons of the profitability of their ventures, they also had to simultaneously construct a rhetoric of why their conquest was necessary for the people whose lands they would dispossess.

Bacon’s New Atlantis is centred on a scientific institution, ‘Salomon’s House’—“the very eye of this kingdom”—where all manner of inventions are brought forth. The dungeons of Salomon’s House consist of laboratories where experiments over every variety of phenomenon is carried out, including the prolonging of life, the “divinations of diseases, plagues, swarms-of hurtful creatures, scarcity, tempests, earthquakes, great inundations, comets, temperature of the year, and divers other things”. The aim of Salomon’s House is to acquire “the knowledge of causes, and secret motions of things; and the enlarging of the bounds of human empire, to the effecting of all things possible”. In Bacon’s empire of knowledge, ‘Merchants of Light’ are dispatched as spies to collect information in secret from various corners of the planet. Here, knowledge and secrecy, seeing and not-seeing, epistemic dominion and the inscrutable motivations that drive such a dominion are conjoined. These texts are rudimentary, distilled exemplars of the repertoire of dissimulation that sustained the self-image and grandiose visions of these global maritime colonial empires. They are ideological models through which it is possible to see how a history of not-seeing was arranged.   

The elsewheres conjured by More and Bacon, though explicitly fictional, were directly inspired by accounts of colonial voyages. This does not necessarily imply that they are divorced from the imaginaries encountered in the travel accounts that were actually employed to promote and gather funds for a potential colony. In one such colonial promotional text, Walter Hamond’s A paradox Prooving that the inhabitants of the isle called Madagascar, or St.Laurence, (in temporall things) are the happiest people in the world (1640), the virtues of Madagascar’s inhabitants are emphasised by contrasting their fulfilment with English avariciousness for whom “the whole world being scarse sufficient [...] whilst we impoverish the land, air and water, to in rich a privat Table”. And yet, the opening plea, within the same text, to plant a settlement in the island where the English “may enjoy the first fruits of a most plentifull Harvest, which is better than the gleanings of America”—typifies the very acquisitiveness that Hamond rails against in the concluding section of his pamphlet. Hamond used the rhetoric and arguments of Montaigne’s essay Of Cannibals to construct his paradoxical colonial pitch. Hamond’s trope of colonial greed is reminiscent of Girolamo Benzoni, the Italian-born conquistador’s description of Indigenous perspectives on Europeans. Benzoni’s History of the New World (1565) features the following passage:

They say that we have come to this earth to destroy the world. They say that we devour everything, we consume the earth, we redirect the rivers, we are never quiet, never at rest, but always run here and there, seeking gold and silver, never satisfied, and then we gamble with it, make war, kill each other, rob, swear, never say the truth, and have deprived them of their means of livelihood.

Hamond employs the trope of colonial greed to contrast it with the innocence of the natives who it is later implied can be easily disarmed and dispossessed. What Hamond’s text demonstrates is the severity of dissociation and the extent of the not-seeing. Amid the churn of financial speculation that fuelled colonial enterprise, even a critique of colonial greed is purposed as a rhetorical tool for attracting colonial investments.

In the measurement-oriented world of climate solutions, there is a tacit assumption that once the evidence is irrefutable, once the crisis is rendered transparent, a system of global coordination can be put in place to take remedial action. The problem with such an assumption is that the systems of coordination that constitute global capitalism are largely geared towards the expansion of profit and the extraction of resources and labour. Even the critique of such a system can be manoeuvred to open up new frontiers of financial speculation. Common to the futurity of contemporary projects—whether the occupation of distant planets, a new era of green capitalism, or the promise of miracle technologies such as fusion reactors—is a vision of future progress built on utopian ruins. Utopian ruins refers to the historical sleight of hand by which the ideal futures that dominate an earlier age, having failed to materialise and having accelerated a new set of crises, are then repurposed and redeployed as novel solutions for the problems of the current moment. Utopian ruins are characterised by hubris, blind spots, paradoxes, schisms, contradictions, dissimulation and forgetting. What does not alter in these transitions are the uninterrupted programs of plunder, extraction, exploitation and profit that are needed to sustain these visions.