From The Watts Up With That?
Essay by Eric Worrall
Imagine someone so left wing they think Joe Biden is a jingoistic capitalist.
‘Quite radical’: the feeling of exhaustion is key to tackling climate change, says author
Exhausted of the Earth author Ajay Singh Chaudhary says how we feel and the state of the earth are connected
Wed 28 Feb 2024 16.00 AEDTLast modified on Wed 28 Feb 2024 21.28 AEDT
Are you exhausted today?” political theorist Ajay Singh Chaudhary asks over video chat on a dark Friday afternoon. This is a question he is posing not just to me, but to you, too – and it’s one he already knows the answer to. Most of us, the indicators suggest, would suggest we are. But Chaudhary argues this isn’t just an individual problem: “Our ecological life is exhausting, our social and economic lives are exhausting, even our individual lives are exhausting.”
This is one of the central arguments of his first book The Exhausted of the Earth: how you feel and the state of the world are connected. And, he argues, it doesn’t have to be this way. “Your exhaustion is not some random byproduct […] There is a class of people out there who cause your exhaustion, [and] it’s not just Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk.” Under capitalism, we are not all in it together.
Executive director of the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research, an educational organisation for adult learners, Chaudhary’s book is an accessible analysis of how climate and politics interact. Writing it was “like a return to home”, he says; his parents are natural scientists and it was drilled into him from a young age that the climate crisis was not being approached politically.
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He considers Joe Biden a type of rightwing climate realist. Among the US president’s most important climate policies is not just the Inflation Reduction Act but the US National Security Strategy, Chaudhary argues. “It is insanely jingoistic,” he says. It describes, for instance, out-competing China. If that’s the framework, he argues, we’re doomed, “because US-China cooperation is vital”. Ultimately, rightwing climate realists know there will be “instability” and “they are preparing for it”. That they will be successful is not only “plausible and possible, but probable,” he says.
Do you feel exhausted? I certainly don’t. I enjoy life, family, and the wonderful place I live, where I can make money doing something which doesn’t involve heavy lifting, thanks to the joys of our modern information age.
Why do some green left wing radicals feel so exhausted and fed up? Aside from the fact lots of people think they are nut jobs and ignore them, I personally believe what they are feeling is the mental stress of maintaining belief in a set of absurd fictions.
Imagine the effort of continuously forcing yourself to believe how doomed we all are during your every waking hour, reminding yourself every time you make a coffee or eat pre-packaged food, of how all the modern conveniences of life are accelerating us towards the imminent extinction of Mankind, and how if you catch a glimpse of children playing in the sunshine, that sunshine and warmth is a harbinger of the end times.
Maybe I’m wrong. I would be happy to read and review Ajay Singh Chaudhary’s book The Exhausted of Earth. But I’m not going to pay £14.99 for what essentially seems to be a political tract.