Slightly older interview with the Indian writer Amitav Ghosh. He points out that a lot of anxiety over climate change is related to anxiety over the end of Western dominance, because the tropics are already experiencing climate driven catastrophe on top of the damage done by colonialism:

The West has also come to rely on what Ghosh calls “an expert discourse” from scientists. The result, he believes, is that science is giving fearful westerners a hope in business-friendly “sustainable development,” biofuels, or carbon-capture technology, which they think will save the system before it collapses.

The alternative, a massive-scale economic adaptation to a new distribution of resources, is too scary to consider: The end of capitalism would be as bad as the end of the world.

“The people who saw the climate crisis first are at the absolute other end: farmers, fishermen, Inuit, indigenous peoples, forest peoples in India, and they’ve already had to adapt, mainly by moving, finding new livelihoods,” says Ghosh. “And indigenous peoples have already lived through the end of the world and found ways to survive.”

It’s a grim sort of optimism, but it is a reminder that there are opportunities to adapt and persist if we don’t push our biosphere to the point of collapse in an effort to maintain a failed system. We’re not going to do that, right?