Responding to Amitav Ghosh’s The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (2017), four UWM faculty members participated in a roundtable discussion on the afternoon of Friday, November 2, 2018. Each panelist explored the scale and violence of climate change based on their expertise and disciplinary affiliation. Expanding the conversation and making this event a truly reciprocal dialogue, Amitav Ghosh then responded to each of the five-minute presentations (but let’s be honest about time limits in an academic setting – each micro-response actually lasted eight to ten minutes).
Each panelist (Jasmine Alinder, History; Anne Bonds, Geography; Rina Ghose, Geography; and Arijit Sen, Architecture) offered explorations of derangements, offering new insights and new questions.
While I found each micro-presentation compelling, I was particularly struck by Jasmine Alinder’s challenge to those assembled. “Close your eyes,” she instructed the audience, and then continued, “what does climate change look like?” A photo historian, Alinder challenged us to think about climate change in visual terms and explored what she called a “visual derangement.” Arguing that if we have no image, no touchstone, which provides a shared visual language/iconography of climate change, as a society we will falter and perhaps fail in our attempts to address climate change and its repercussions. Alinder went on to provide necessary historical context. If we close our eyes and are asked to visualize the Great Depression we will inevitably draw up Lange’s Migrant Mother, images of impending dust storms, and lines of people seeking food or employment (though likely, both). This immediate conjuring the audience was able to take part in is by design, Alinder stated, and that we have a shared iconography of the Great Depression is not by accident. Many professional artist-photographers were hired by the Farm Security Act and their subsequent images were shared en masse via the news media and magazines. Furthermore, the legacy of the images stays with us; the shared iconography persists despite the fact that many, if not most, of us in the room did not experience the Great Depression first-hand. The same is not so for the current ecological (and economic) disaster: climate change. Google results for images of climate change result in click bait: visually seductive images used as advertisements. Finally, calling for change in an explicit way, Alinder contended that we must no longer use these images of climate change to disorient; instead, a shared visual iconography must be created and then used to promote the creation of renewable energy sources.
Responding to Alinder’s insights, Ghosh commented that he found her micro-presentation inspiring because, as he said, so much of climate change discourse is focused on the future. Continuing the necessary consideration of the past, Ghosh urged us to travel further down the rabbit hole. At the bottom, we found paintings of ‘The Little Ice Age’ in Holland, which precipitated a flourishing of Dutch art. Ghosh reminded us that the climactic disruptions of centuries past spurred a remarkable output of art and religious devotion. Underlining Alinder’s call, Ghosh advised that in order for conversation about climate change to embed itself in our mind, we must have images.
Krista Grensavitch, PhD Candidate: History