‘Can a set of ontological rights – such as breathing, actually challenge or even displace economic hegemony?’¹

IN her recent work, Tania Li shows how some villagers in the Indonesian uplands moved ever deeper into primary forests to survive enclosures wrought by the privatization of land, but after a point, with no more forests remaining, found themselves at ‘land’s end’.² In the immediate, there was no land left for them to colonize, and in the larger sense it was the end of a generational relationship with land as the basis of social reproduction. This intervention suggests that we are similarly at ‘nature’s end’; there is no pristine nature out there anymore, and nature as ontological comfort space is undermined by the proliferation of (tricky and scary) entities like global warming, plastics, super bugs and toxic air.

These ‘hyperobjects’, as eco-critic Timothy Morton calls them, are viscous (we can feel them) and non-local (they are at once here and elsewhere) phenomena that underline the continuities between humans and non-humans in a fundamental way.³ During the recent episode of massive forest fires across the Western Himalayas, chir pine behaved as an hyperobject: a hybrid entity with intersecting biophysical, political and economic logics, extremely difficult to grasp intellectually, and even harder to ‘control’ in practice.

It is increasingly apparent that much of our theorizing is unable to keep up with the multiplication of such things. The Muir-Pinchot debate, which formed the background to environmental thought over the previous century is more or less redundant today, for neither are there any spaces left that are worth keeping away from humanity, nor is science able to model the world with enough confidence to ‘save’ it. Faced with entities that transcend the nature/society divide, we are left with two options: holding on to the warm and fuzzy but progressively useless ideas about saving nature, with their quasi-religious undertones; or, second, reorienting thought around actually existing phenomena, that is, viewing the present as the proliferation of things that do not have a ‘prior’ state that they may be returned to, that will be around for the long haul, and with whom we must learn to coexist. Developing this line of thought, in what follows, I comment on nature’s present through a critical analysis of the current atmospheric crisis in India.

Since 2014, Delhi’s – and to a somewhat lesser extent India’s – air has been the object of debate, the contours of which provide a revealing vantage point on to the larger landscape of nature’s present. Positions on the air debate diverge sharply, leading to the construction of what Kim Fortun calls ‘enunciatory communities’, or collectives that come together in specific circumstances not as ‘a matter of shared values, interests or even culture, but a response to a temporally specific paradox’.⁴ Constituents in Delhi include environmental advocacy groups like the Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) and Greenpeace; scientists affiliated with the state, academic institutions and research groups; policy makers at various administrative scales; journalists who have taken up the issue as media activism; and several ‘air entrepreneurs’ looking to market new products like masks and purifiers.

 

One interesting feature of the debate has been its data-driven nature. In addition to official state data, private organizations have created their own, relatively inexpensive, air monitoring stations, while many (well-off) urban residents carry around handheld PM 2.5 devices imported from China. Others rely on the several competing apps and twitter handles that provide ‘real-time’ air quality data to interested users.

To the extent this is an environmental concern, can we think of air as ‘nature’ in the sense of being pristine and asocial? Hardly. To be sure, there may be places that replicate to a fair degree the pie chart of atmospheric gases that we’ve all seen in our primary school textbooks. But for many around the word, air may not be taken for granted. As Peter Sloterdijk notes, air stopped being the passive backdrop to life when, during the First World War, the German army poisoned the air with chlorine, causing hundreds of enemy casualties, whereupon the provisioning of gas masks became a common feature of warfare.

This ‘airquake’ marks a turning point for Sloterdijk: ‘If, in their history to date, humans could step out at will under any stretch of sky, in or out-of-doors, and take for granted the unquestioned idea of the possibility of breathing in the surrounding atmosphere… they enjoyed a privilege of naivety which was withdrawn.’⁵ Those of us who live in Indian cities have had our privilege withdrawn for a while now, given that we experience air as a mixture of gases with significant human induced footprint, and moreover, which poses serious health risks.

 

Modern air may then be considered a hyperobject. We experience it daily and have built affective relations around our interactions, but it appears withdrawn from us: no one is fully sure they’ve captured its essence. As Morton writes, ‘We see signs everywhere, but not the hyperobject as such.’⁶ In this scenario, our relations with air are mediated by things like laser eggs, masks, nebulizers and purifiers. We ‘view’ air through various representational devises like the Air Quality Index (AQI), which boil a deeply complex phenomenon down to a number, and in one of its new avatars, an emotion on the face of a little girl (see Figure 1). In this manner, air seems to straddle the objective/subjective divide. As Gernot Böhme notes, atmospheres are ‘neither something objective, that is, qualities possessed by things, and yet they are something thing like… Nor are atmospheres something subjective, for example, determinations of a psychic state. And yet, they are subject like, belong to subjects in that they are sensed in bodily presence by human beings… Atmosphere is the common reality of the perceiver and the perceived.’⁸

FIGURE 1 Experiencing Air Through Representational Devices: AQI Graphic in China7

The representational mediation of air was apparent at an event in Delhi organized by CSE where the Delhi Chief Minister, Arvind Kejriwal was to speak. As the packed arena awaited the CM’s arrival, an expatriate activist next to me exchanged greetings with a fellow traveller, who walked towards us, mobile phone in hand. He showed us a histogram with hourly AQI trends in Delhi. It had been building up since the morning, and had shot up to about 250 by that afternoon. Another individual, an adviser to the Delhi government, also joined in the conversation. The three of them speculated on the reasons for the spike in the reading. ‘Maybe they’ve set fire to crops around Delhi,’ said the expat activist, a conclusion that the adviser doubted. The discussion ended as the CM walked in, but the incident suggested not only the devise-mediated relationship with the object of concern, but also the simultaneity of consensus (on the readings) and disagreement (on the cause) in air activist spaces.

 

Air is moreover shot through by class and other social differences. The vast population of urban subalterns is more exposed to toxic air, while also having poorer access to quality health care. During the turn-of-century debate that led to actions like industrial relocation and CNG conversion in Delhi, social activists decried the entire chain of interventions as anti-poor. Scholarly critiques then gave birth to concepts like ‘bourgeois environmentalism’⁹ that still find traction. Environmental collectives and activists have consequently been forced to engage with this criticism, and the language of social justice now permeates their work. And yet, any air related protest or action sees a motley group of expats, elite residents, and certain ‘star’ air experts gleefully interviewed by media personnel in attendance. This is the aporetic space activists must continually negotiate – the more they incorporate social justice into their discourse, greater the anxiety they feel about their own composition and about the marginalizing technical language they must adopt to reach other publics (the state, judiciary etc).

State responses to hyperobjects like air follow along predictable lines and are progressively off the mark. The nodal state agency, i.e. the Ministry of Environment, Forests and Climate Change, draws its philosophical underpinnings from the same debates around protection that defined 20th century environmentalism. But what about things like air, nuclear waste and chir pine that render the ‘conserving nature’ imperative moot? These objects cannot be managed through the precautionary principle either, since they are already here. Rather than a Ministry of Environment, what we perhaps need is a Ministry of Tricky Things.

 

To Morton, the time of hyperobjects is marked by hypocrisy, weakness and lameness. Weakness is the simplest to recognize – confronted by objects like nuclear waste (half-life of thousands of years), we become acutely aware of limits to our knowledge and available actions. Hypocrisy in turn results from knowing fully well that our explanatory narratives are unable to grasp or articulate messy realities, but we keep up the pretence. This is as true of the state as it is of academia. The ‘safe distance’ of scholarship from what’s out there collapses in the time of toxic air – we breathe as we think and write! Lameness, as we will shortly see, marks the end of conviction.

A recent study by scientists at the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology (IITM) estimated that an average resident of Delhi loses over six years of his/her life due to air pollution, extrapolating from similar studies of health risks of PM 2.5 in Europe. A month or two earlier, a World Health Organization (WHO) report, based once again on particulate matter, had noted that thirty of the world’s most polluted cities were in India. The Environment Minister Prakash Javadekar’s response to the WHO document was that by focusing on India, such reports brought public attention, and presumably shame, to the country rather than the ‘many cities in the western countries… which are suffering… in different categories and degrees.’¹⁰ In response to the IITM study, Javadekar released a press statement, later retracted, where he argued that ‘the problem of pollution is being faced by cities across the world…The study focusing only on India and creating sensationalism is not creditworthy.’¹¹ Such a response might have passed for being thoughtful in a previous era, but now it simply suggests lameness. The minister’s statement is unconvincing and uninspiring in the way it aims to use comparison as a device for deflection. It moreover draws on a geopolitical imaginary of siege, which might be an extension of lameness to the modern nation state framework.

 

One must concede the minister consistency of stand: a year before these two reports were out, Javadekar had blamed ‘vested interests’ with connections to ‘forces that do not want India to progress’ for the supposed brouhaha over air, adding that ‘no media…no other NGOs raised the issue of Delhi air quality’ during the ten years of the previous regime.¹² Javadekar’s public positions may not be dismissed as uniquely reactionary. Even the popular environment minister during the previous regime, for all his well meaning rhetoric, presided over what observers have considered a business-as-usual phase of Indian environmental governance. This shows that there is something more at work here: the larger growth at all costs rhetoric has governance and thought in a vice-like grip, which tends to condition responses to entities like air.

 

Air is not simply a matter of pollution but raises questions about the nature of knowledge on the one hand, and the fragmentation of atmospheres in cities and regions on the other. In the 1990s, during an earlier wave of air related activism and court mediated action in Delhi, the city’s public and paratransit fleet was converted to Compressed Natural Gas (CNG), which in the process went from a supposedly ‘clean’ fuel to an ‘environmentally acceptable’ one, presumably to keep the door open for alternate acceptable fuels like low-sulphur diesel.¹³

More recently, the precise role of vehicular emissions in comparison with roadside or construction dust has been hotly debated. One would expect more (or ‘better’) data to settle such epistemic contentions. On the contrary, as Timothy Choy notes in the case of an atmospheric controversy in Hong Kong, ‘navigating layers upon layers of differently scaled data, yields a sensation of incomplete knowledge, a vertiginous sense that there is always something in excess of the explanation.’¹⁴

Uncertainty, then, marks our knowledge of hyperobjects. A single-minded and self-confident stand, for instance CSE’s against diesel, is consequently open to criticism for its manufacturing of certainty and on the ground of hypocrisy, since the gap between knowledge and posturing is precisely what activists criticize corporations and the state for. But since hypocrisy is the very mode of being in the present, such stands must be considered with critical empathy as the pivots around which alliances are built and movements sustained.

 

The preceding discussion points to a crisis; how might we begin to approach it? Political economy comes to mind as a strong explanatory frame. David Harvey, for instance, views capitalist crisis as the forces behind dispossession, as well as imperial projects.¹⁵ To Harvey neoliberalism, as a response to the so-called ‘long downturn’ since the 1970s, has generated a tendency to profit from the enclosures of commons and the privatization and commodification of nature. Drawing on a world history approach, Jason Moore calls for thinking through what he terms the ‘Capitalocene’, that is, the present epoch marked by the fusing of capitalist and ecological forces.¹⁶ In this period, four cheaps have been central to the system’s reproduction: labour power, food, energy and raw materials. The appropriation of these social-ecological cheaps, through patriarchy, colonialism and the unbounded extraction of fossil fuels, is immanent to capitalism. Crisis follows when bottlenecks in the supply of the cheaps begin to add significant cost to the system.

It seems to me that an atmospheric sensibility must be supplied to Harvey and Moore. Air escaped entering the balance sheets until the 1960s and thereabouts, when regulations tightened and technological shifts were made mandatory. Given the increased possibilities of mobility, capitalists used the uneven atmospheric and regulatory environments to move to regions where these costs could be externalized. In due course, however, air became a major biopolitical concern even in these places and was made costlier by interventions like stricter emission norms, the deconcentration of industry, and restrictions on the sale and use of automobiles.¹⁷ Moreover, the cost of labour power tends to rise too, given the increased social expenditure on respiratory ailments and allergies on the one hand, and highly skilled workers looking to move out of affected city-regions on the other. The end of cheap air in places like Delhi is then articulated with the global system, and contributes to its overall crisis. It is beyond pointless, in this scenario, to keep harping on the development/ environment binary – the crisis is not economic, it emerges where growth encounters its own materiality.¹⁸

 

In sum, nature’s present is also nature’s end. We are face-to-face with objects that have proliferated through human interactions with the physical world. It is not possible to return them to a prior – natural – state. Instead, the correct move is to view them as neighbourly entities. The limits to our understanding and actions need not be considered a weakness to be hidden away, but the knowledge of limits is critical to a more meaningful engagement with the present.

The narrative of inexorable and teleologically defined development has simultaneously produced dispossessions and environmental destruction. If there is one thing that has challenged the reign of the growth at any cost ideology in the recent past, it is air. As Albert Pope suggests in the opening quote, and to paraphrase Lenin, air may just be the weakest link in the discursive chain of development where the (ecological) revolution may strike.

 

Footnotes:

1. Alber Pope quoted in Stephen Graham, ‘Life Support: the Political Ecology of Urban Air’, City 19(2-3), 2015, pp. 192-215.

2. Tania Li, Land’s End: Capitalist Relations on an Indigenous Frontier. Yale University Press, New Haven, 2014.

3. Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 2013.

4. Kim Fortun, Advocacy after Bhopal: Environmentalism, Disaster, New Global Orders. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2001, p. 11.

5. Peter Sloterdijk, Terror from the Air. Translated by Amy Patton and Steve Corcoran. Semiotext(e), Los Angeles, 2009, p. 48.

6. Timothy Morton, 2013, p. 152, op. cit., fn. 3.

7. http://datadriven.yale.edu/files/2013/01/ShanghaiAQI2-21qacna.png

8. Germot Böhme, ‘Atmosphere as the Fundamental Concept of a New Aesthetics’, Thesis Eleven 36, 1993, p. 122.

9. Amita Baviskar, ‘Between Violence and Desire: Space, Power, and Identity in the Making of Metropolitan Delhi’, International Social Science Journal 175, 2003, pp. 89-98.

10. Asmita Sarkar, ‘WHO Report on Polluted Indian Cities Misleading: Govt’, International Business Times, 18 May 2016.

11. Statement by HMoEFCC, 7 June 2016.

12. Quoted in Liz Mathew and Amitabh Sinha, ‘Why Did no One Raise Air Pollution Issue for 10 Years…Vested Interests Doing it Now, says Javadekar’, Indian Express, 2 May 2015.

13. Thanks to Prerna Srigyan for this insight.

14. Timothy Choy, ‘Air’s Substantiations.’ Paper for Berkeley Environmental Politics Colloquium, 2010, p. 4, http://globetrotter. berkeley.edu/bwep/colloquium/papers/ChoyAirEP.pdf

15. David Harvey, The New Imperialism. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2003.

16. Jason Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital. Verso, London, 2015.

17. Eg. lottery for new cars in Beijing; on/off or odd/even in both China and India; ban on sale of diesel SUVs in Delhi.

18. Rohit Negi, ‘In the Time of Toxic Air’, Himal Southasian 28(3), 2015; also available online at http://himalmag.com/time-toxic-air, accessed 7 July 2015.