For nearly every day of the past decade, I have walked or cycled along one of the two waterbodies — the East River and the Hudson River — that ensconce the island of Manhattan in New York. Yet, only on rare occasions have I walked to the river banks with an intent to watch the waters that press into this metropolis. My oversight or reluctance has not been out of choice or lack of interest in these tidal estuaries where the salt water of the Atlantic Ocean meets the fresh waters from the Adirondack mountain ranges. Rather, like the Arabian Sea in Mumbai or the Bay of Bengal in Chennai, these rivers and the Atlantic ocean had become a permanent fixture on the horizon of my everyday consciousness. Every so often, however, when the eye of a hurricane makes landfall on the island, with the winds threatening to pummel all that stands in its way and the waves in a furious tumult, like some wronged ancient god, this assuredness reveals its wobbly flooring. The ocean and its waters suddenly reveal how mighty a terror it can be.
‘Comedy of coping’
In February 2016, during a public conversation between the author Amitav Ghosh and the scholar Prasenjit Duara, Ghosh posed a question to no one and everyone: what would happen if a “black swan” event like a supercyclone — winds in excess of 250 km per hour — were to hit a city like Mumbai? To take Ghosh’s thought experiment further would be to ask what if the seas were to permanently rise by 50 ft? According to the United Nations, 40% of the human population live within 100 km of a coastline. To contextualise this increase, it is useful to remember that the average elevation of Mumbai is 46 ft, Chennai is around 22 ft, and Manhattan sits around 16 ft above sea level. In short, such an eventuality would be a disaster, a catastrophe that would birth misery on a scale unseen in the history of man. It is this question that forms the premise of the great science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robison’s fascinating novel about a city partially submerged, New York 2140.
In Robinson’s imagined future, the seas rise by 10 ft by 2050 and another 40 ft by 2100 — events he calls the First Pulse and the Second Pulse. Entire cities across the world are underwater and in some like Manhattan, where the elevation is uneven, many stretches become ‘intertidal’ zones — areas that are dry in low tide and submerged during high tide. What is revelatory in Robinson’s novel is the recognition that irrespective of the catastrophe, man survives, innovates, and, on occasions, even manages to thrive. Life in the future, with half the world under water, despite its tragic tenor, can be indistinguishable from a “comedy of coping” for those alive.
Cities once known for skyscrapers that rise to the skies are now transformed into an archipelago of canals and waterways. The skies are filled with airships that never land, refuel in air, and simply meander. Successful reality TV shows — there is no escaping them even in a half-drowned world — now comprise of celebrities trying to save animals on the verge of drowning. And because Robinson’s novel is a story set in New York, people still complain about rent and real estate prices. Somebody is always trying to outbid somebody else to buy a condominium in an apartment complex that is half-submerged. Meanwhile, true to their creed, hedge funds create and trade on tidal index — betting on how high or low tides go — as a way to speculate on the drowned coastal markets. All the while, the washed up, unusable, and toxic remains of our infrastructure built on plastic and heavy metals constitute a permanent danger.
Breaks on capitalism
One of Robinson’s key insights is that the ‘tyranny of sunk costs’ shall dominate human decision-making. Cities are costly to build in terms of money, human efforts, and human emotional toil. To abandon them all — even if they are half under water — is difficult, if not impossible. The result is a world where cities continue to survive, like grass in a storm, by being adaptable: growing, falling apart, regrouping and learning to improvise some more. Half-drowned skyscrapers become abodes for those who refuse to leave cities for the hinterlands. Even in the future which Robinson imagines, the rich will remain cocooned away, in the Antillas of their opulent loneliness. Meanwhile, the rest of us will learn to adopt communal kitchens, structure societies around wider public transport, and dream of becoming rich in the hope of becoming lonely on our own terms. In the world of the day after, according to Robinson’s magnificent imagination, we will finally be ready to put brakes on capitalism that has aided global warming since the 1800s. But to get there, unfortunately, the world must nearly drown in a deluge of our own making. Should this world that Robinson has dreamt up become reality, it won’t be for lack of imagination but our inability to see the world that lay in front of our noses. That, as Orwell wrote, is the hardest thing.