Submerged Perspective is an essay by Radical Ecology co-founder and director Ashish Ghadiali for the British Council, tracing a journey through Malaysia in Feb/March 2024 as part of a UK delegation aiming to foster transnational solidarities around creative responses to climate adaptation.
Over the course of 10 days, 7 UK-based artists and professionals met with 250 artists, climate activists, researchers, academics, Civil Society Organisations, and community leaders. This programme has since shaped the curatorial approach of Time of the Rivers, an artist fellowship programme co-convened by Radical Ecology and Borneo Bengkel.
When, along with other UK delegates selected by the British Council for the launch of Human/Nature, I boarded the plane from Heathrow airport to Kuala Lumpur in late February 2024, it was almost a decade since I had last participated in a long-haul flight from Europe to Asia. In recent years, my practice as a climate justice activist, while focused, on the one hand, on unfolding solidarity with communities living on the frontlines of environmental breakdown in the global south, has also been idiosyncratically geared towards uncovering the meaning of climate justice in the corner of South-West England where I live – a region where some 95% of the population (across Devon, Cornwall, Plymouth, Somerset and Dorset) identifies as White and where historic connections to transatlantic slavery, and to acts of genocide and ecocide in global regions including Australasia and the South Pacific, remain awkwardly entangled with official notions of regional civic pride.
On the one hand, the opportunity to be led, by the British Council, to the homes and villages of indigenous communities in Borneo felt like the gift of a broader horizon that could help to more effectively centre the voices and experiences of communities confronted by extremes of climate vulnerability in my own work. On the other hand, it’s hard not to question the cost of carbon emissions involved in the travel – an issue that activists from the UK collective, Plane Stupid, have worked to raise awareness around over many years. In 2024, the problem of carbon emissions incurred along this flight route is further exacerbated by the geopolitical dynamics of the war in Ukraine. We’re compelled to fly around not through Russian airspace,- over the Yerevan mountains, Iran and Afghanistan, over Amritsar and Jaipur, Port Blair and Phuket - before descending on Kuala Lumpur. Whilst marvelling at the sight of this sublime night journey that unfolds outside my cabin window, and using the on-board wi-fi to share the view with my children back in Devon, I also worked out, in the margins of my notebook, that the additional carbon emitted as a consequence of this reroute alone is the same as would come from driving all the way around the world.
Reflecting on this unsettling dimension of global travel in 2024, I emerged from the red-eye flight into a new day in Malaysia committed to making the most of an extraordinary opportunity to further action and research around the following questions. Firstly, what are the ways that human creativity can and does contribute to the emergence of a just and sustainable planet? Secondly, how do we deliver on climate adaptation in a world defined not only by rising atmospheric temperatures but also by the rapidly escalating vulnerability that comes with global warming? The work I’ve been doing, alongside the University of Exeter’s Professor Tim Lenton, around projected movement in the human climate niche (HCN), offers new perspectives around the future context in which climate adaptation in Malaysia will take place during the course of the 21st century. All species exist within niches where the conditions of the planet best support our specific biophysical needs and one way to read and measure the impacts of climate change on the future of human life is to map projected movement in the human climate niche at successive intervals of global warming.
Our calculations suggest that, should current policy commitments on decarbonisation play out, nearly 28 million Malaysians could be displaced outside of the HCN by 2070, 32 million by 2100 [where the projected total population is around 42 million (2070) and 39 million (2100) respectively]. These are startling projections. Much of the coverage of our research has, to-date, focused on the case studies of India and Nigeria, where the total projections for displacement by 2100 are highest [600 million and 300 million respectively]. However, the Malaysia example points towards the possibility of 82% displacement within the borders of a single country [versus the Indian example of 39% displacement] and, therefore, towards a crisis of coming climate vulnerability that is perhaps not yet centre-stage in either domestic or global thinking about Malaysia’s climate future. Getting to grips with what this data means for the future of climate adaptation in Malaysia was therefore central to my own objectives at the outset of this trip as well as the ongoing consideration of the potential for artists, activists and scientists to engage art and culture as a way of facilitating broader shifts in human consciousness around these questions. It’s this approach, of transformation through research and culture, that broadly informs the work of the organisation I co-founded in 2021, Radical Ecology.
Within hours of our arrival, we had the great privilege of an audience at the British Council offices in Kuala Lumpur with Dr June Rubis, an honorary member and former co-chair of the Indigenous and Community Conserved Areas [ICCAs] consortium. Dr Rubis has an academic background in conservation biology and has also conducted research on the subject of ritual revitalisation in Sarawak, which is seen, in her terms, as a visionary approach to climate adaptation that centres community cohesion and environmental connection through connection to ancestral knowledge, and where her interest has been informed by the practices of her late Bidayuh father, who in turn followed his own parents’ journey as a traditional Bidayuh priest and priestess. Dr Rubis’ presentation to our delegation highlighted how the Green Wave in Malaysian Development, underpinned by the ambition to reach a target of 70% renewable energy by 2050, relies, as with so many previous waves of Malaysian development, on the ongoing dispossession and displacement of indigenous people where, acording to the Sarawak-based NGO, Save Rivers, the Sarawak Corridor of Renewable Energy (SCORE), a development corridor made up of 12 hydroelectric dam projects that was launched in 2011, saw the displacement, with the completion of the 2400 MW Bakun dam alone, of some 10000 people from indigenous communities including from the Kajang, Kayan, Kenyah, Lahanan, Penan and Ukit ethnic groups. Subsequent projects including the 944 MW Murum dam, completed in 2013, displaced around 1500 people from 8 Kenyah and Penan communities. Ironically, as Dr Rubis’ research has demonstrated, the way of life that is being destroyed by these acts of mass displacement is one that is rich in values including community cohesion and environmental connection. These are values that can support precisely the resilience needed to withstand an era of escalating global warming. By contrast, communities forced into the alienated setting of resettlement camps are driven, by relocation, into conditions of precarity and rising climate vulnerability.
This is the paradox of development as seen from the viewpoint of indigenous dispossession in Malaysia. It’s a model of development that UK observers must acknowledge as so profoundly tied up with the legacy of British imperialism in Malaysia. This includes the influence of the 19th century adventurer, James Brooke who, in 1841, quelled a Dayak rebellion for the Sultan of Brunei and was gifted the kingdom of Sarawak in return, going on to expand the state by force and open up trade routes and commercial forestry lines across the territory, whilst also initiating a private family dynasty that would dominate politics in Sarawak for more than a hundred years. It also encompasses the evolution of Britain’s mid-20th century dependency on Malayan rubber and tin, which by the end of the Second World War was so great that it supported the UK’s entire debt bill to the USA, motivating the Attlee and then the Churchill governments to resist movements for the communist liberation of Malaya at all cost including through the development of pioneering new tactics for counter-insurgency including torture manuals that would later be emulated by the French in Algeria and the USA in Iraq, chemical warfare (Agent Orange), later used by the USA in Vietnam, and concentration camps, sold to the British public at the time as resettlement projects, that would be deployed again by the British against the Mao-Mao in Kenya. Many of the Malaysian artists, academics and curators that we had the fortune to meet and connect with in Kuala Lumpur, including Mark Teh, Nadira Ilana, Bilqis Hijjas and Dr Vilashini Somiah, repeatedly invited us to reflect on these connections, and to consider what it might mean, within the slipstream of this history, to be a British delegation seeking out collaboration with artists and communities now confronted by a future of global warming in Malaysia - a future that Britain, as pioneer of the first industrial revolution, was instrumental in propagating around the world.
This was the background to field trips, led by Borneo Bengkel in Sarawak and Forever Sabah in Sabah, to the homes of indigenous families that have been resettled, following the submergence of their ancestral lands for big dam projects. In Sarawak, the Bengoh Dam is a 127 square kilometre expanse of submerged forest, part of the infrastructure that now supplies the city of Kuching with its water. The area is now being developed by the state government for tourism and here, our guide, Lek, introduced us to his uncle, Simuh, at their home in Kampung Nyegol, where Simuh talked to us about the pressure he and his family are subjected to, to quit the area entirely and surrender a way of life rooted in forest agriculture for what would ultimately be a form of assimilation with the juggernaut of urban modernity. Here, the artist and poet Bethany Luhong Balan, part of the Borneo Bengkel collective, also shared memories of her own family’s displacement, more than a decade earlier, from the Bakun Dam area near Mhiri, an experience that she has captured to great effect in her essay, Above a drowned world existence is resistance, while in Sabah, looking over the Babagon Dam which, in turn, supports the water infrastructure of the booming city of Kota Kinabalu beneath it, we heard from residents of resettled villages how years of grassroots resistance to the dam and campaigns for a just settlement on land compensation and water provision had been thwarted by a project that, while providing water to the capital city, undermined the watershed, creating conditions of local drought.
To hear such testimony first hand is also to recognise the dysfunction of the paradigm of development that continues to unfold in our time. It’s a paradigm that sits at the roots of global warming and that all too often plays out in our approach to the solutions to climate change as well, reinforcing and even exacerbating existing inequalities and so deepening injustice. Yet to hear such testimony is also to glimpse the possibility of other ways of living in the world, an experience that resonates with the writing of decolonial theorist, Macarena Gomez-Barris who, in her text, The Extractive Zone (Duke University Press, 2017) writes: “Central to how I analyse colonial capitalism and the possibilities of the future is the critical task of perceiving life otherwise, or what I refer to as “submerged perspectives” that allow us to see [the] local knowledge that resides within what power has constituted as extractive zones.” Based on her own research into indigenous struggle and creative resistance in Latin America, Gomez-Barris argues that “in each of these places, submerged perspectives pierce through the entanglements of power to differently organise the meanings of social and political life.“ It’s an analysis that speaks deeply to the context of indigenous displacement in North Borneo. In Gomez-Barris’s words, “the possibility of decolonisation moves within the landscape of multiplicity that is submerged perspectives.” It’s this possibility that moves through the experience and testimony of Uncle Simuh and in the writings of Bethany Balan Luhong. We met it again, in such majestic form, in the company of the artist collective, Pangrok Sulap, who shared their practice of deep engagement, in service of the building of a common story, with indigenous and rural communities across Sabah who are living within and resisting this dominant paradigm of development. It’s this possibility, of art and culture as a strategy for making new worlds together that landed on this trip for me with the clamour of a clarion call.
When I get home, I drag the kids and the dog out to Sheepstor and Burrator on a rainy Saturday afternoon. I’d read, while sitting in the hotel lobby in Kuching, that James Brooke, the “White Rajah of Sarawak” and his descendants were buried there - about half way from the village where I live to Plymouth where I often work. The celebrated author, Joseph Conrad, drew on Brooke’s legend when he wrote Lord Jim, which in turn served as a prototype for the character, Kurtz, in The Heart of Darkness, who Marlon Brando later immortalised in the American New Wave adaptation by Francis Ford Coppola, Apocalypse Now. But when James Brooke became ill later in life, he didn’t surrender, like his literary and cinematic counterparts, to a tragic and exotic fate informed by the horrors of the imperialist project. He retired to Dartmoor, where he died in 1868. The revised version of “A Perambulation of Dartmoor”, published in 1896, clocks his grave there as a landmark, and also notes how “this little village is now very busy, the important new works in connection with the water supply of Plymouth, going on close by, and altering the face of the country by the damming up of a valley from the construction of a vast reservoir”. [“Sheepstor”, it notes, is also “the reputed home of the pixies who store the precious metals which are said to be hidden [in the Pixy Cave]”.] Burrator Reservoir - historic replacement to the earlier infrastructure of Drake’s 16th century leat - which still supplies Plymouth’s water more than a century later, is now owned and managed by Southwest Water, who spilt sewage 58,000 times across England in 2023 in what amounts to a spill event lasting 530,000 hours or 61 years. Shit. This is a model of development that we are still exporting at scale. I stop in at a petrol station on the way home. The local candidate of the new right wing start up party, Reform, is on the front page of the Totnes Times. He “questions the need to cut our emissions quickly”. He shares his “views on immigration”. He thinks “we’re losing our identity”.