In 2015 the great Indian writer Amitav Ghosh started asking why the world’s fiction writers weren’t addressing the climate crisis. He praised a small list of writers who had done it, but confessed that he himself had found it much more difficult than he had expected. Even though he has the material: he’s from Bengal, the most flood-devastated place on the planet. Ghosh himself had been caught in Kolkata’s first recorded tornado.

He coined the term The Great Derangement, to explain a phenomenon of our times: we know what’s happening, but we’re letting happen anyway. He wrote a non-fiction book with that name, and now he’s found the way to put the climate crisis into his fiction, too.

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Ghosh’s new novel is Ghost-Eye, which begins in Kolkata in 1969, with a small child in a strictly vegetarian family demanding to eat the fish she remembers from a previous life. The narrative bounces between her and a middle-aged man in contemporary America who gets involved with a group of radical climate activists. Along the way, we dive deeply into the relationship of science and traditional belief systems, the ongoing wreckage of Britain’s colonial empire in South Asia, the beauty and terrors of the tidal mangrove jungle of the Sundarbans, that vast delta of the Ganges and the Brahmaputra that stretches from Indian West Bengal to Bangladesh. And all through it, there’s a great, lyrical thread about the possibility of bringing all this together to defend the world against the ravaging climate.

Amitav Ghosh is a guest at the Auckland Writers Festival this week. He’s doing three sessions, including an hour with him than I’m chairing, 4pm on Saturday. Tickets are available.

Since his callout in 2015, things have changed: cli-fi is now a thing. But one of the early adopters named in Ghosh’s shortlist 11 years ago was Ian McEwan. He addressed climate change directly in Solar (2010) and again in Lessons (2022) and has returned to the topic with his latest work, What We Can Know. It’s set, in part, 100 years in the future, at a time when people refer to our own period as … the Derangement.

Uncannily, I am also chairing an hour with McEwan during the writers festival, 7pm on Friday. Tickets here. It’s a virtual interview, he’s at home in England, but don’t let that get in the way. We’ll bring it alive.

In the 2119 of What We Can Know, climate change and a nuclear “accident” in the 2040s, known as the Inundation, have had terrible consequences: most of the world’s coastal cities annihilated, hundreds of millions dead, America run by warlords. Nigeria is the new global power and it has the internet under control.

Britain is now an archipelago of small islands. So much has been ruined, but what remains can still be beautiful. McEwan’s tone is not apocalyptic and the central quest in the book is not to do with politics, but poetry. It is, as one reviewer noted, “a very British dystopia—measured, melancholy and devastatingly polite”. Although the book does have a murder and many people in the future time look back at us as “ignorant, squalid and destructive louts”.

“What we can know” refers not only to the changing climate. It’s about history and our sense of the future, events, our values, our friends and family, ourselves. The book proceeds with an almost forensic analysis, from the vantage of the 22^nd century, of a major incident in the life of a poet and his friends in 2014. But having given us a rich array of conflicting perspectives from which we discern some sense of truth, it then proceeds to trash them all.

In both time zones, it’s a story of people whose lives go awry because they misunderstand the people around them, especially those they love. Which stands as a metaphor for the larger question. How could we be so deranged as to let this climate catastrophe happen?

What we can know, it turns out, is more than we do know. But we can know it only if we start paying attention.

McEwan is a novelist capable of stirring politics vigorously into his plots, and so is Ghosh. The Ibis trilogy of novels brings to life the 19^th century opium trade, which Britain, through imperial control of India and military supremacy over China, used as its new source of colossal wealth once the slave trade was abolished. Britain forced an “opium war” on China at exactly the same time Hobson was signing the Treaty of Waitangi here, and Ghosh writes about colonialism in ways I suspect will resonate deeply with many readers in this country. We’ll talk about that.

But his novels are not tracts. One of their greatest strengths is the richness of their human stories: the aspirations and talents of girmitiyas, or indentured labourers, lascars on the ships, rural peasants, subsistence fishing villagers, people brutalised in so many different ways by the British.

Ghosh and McEwan are both great storytellers and deep thinkers about the climate crisis. There’s hope in those Ibis books, and even more so in Ghost-Eye, as there is in McEwan’s What We Can Know. But the hope does turns on that simple, urgent thing. We’re supposed to recognise what’s going on around us.

If you’re a McEwan fan and you’re thinking, What? Too much climate! What about escaped balloons and wedding nights gone wrong and creepy strangers and missing children and Keira Knightley in a green dress? Don’t worry. With McEwan, as with Ghosh, there’s an enormous amount of stuff to talk about that isn’t at all climate related, and we’ll do that too. They won’t be one-track conversations. Ghosh even has revelatory things to say about nutmeg, and I do hope we get to that.

The Auckland Writers Festival is one of the city’s great cultural celebrations (they say it’s the biggest literary festival in the southern hemisphere), with big crowds expected in all the venues of the Aotea Centre, hour after hour, until late on Sunday. There’s so much good stuff: sessions with Louise Erdrich, Tayari Jones, Yann Martel, Roddy Doyle, R.F. Kuang, and that’s only a few of the visiting writers. Big names and names to discover, heaps of events for families and kids, lots of free sessions, and a long lineup of local favourites.

It’s such a great place to get un-deranged. Check it all out here.

Three other writers I’m keen to hear

Asher Emanuel is a New Zealand author whose book The Valley isn’t quite published yet so I haven’t read it, but I’ve been hearing great things. It’s about young men “enmeshed” in the criminal justice system: the valley of the title is the Hutt Valley. Emanuel is appearing in a session on investigative journalism with New Yorker writer Patrick Radden Keefe and foreign correspondent Barbara Demick.

Luke Kemp writes, in his book Goliath’s Curse, about what he learned from studying 400 civilisational collapses over 5000 years. Yes, there’s a pattern: the concentration of resources in the hands of an elite, which makes a society powerful, also leads to its destruction. Details here.

The Trump session. Actually, it’s not called that, and it’s three writers, not one. In Writing in Today’s America, Toby Manhire is talking to novelist Louise Erdrich, novelist and thriller writer SA Cosby and biographer Deborah Baker about the expectations on, and responsibilities of, writers in America right now. How do you do it? And what is it you’re meant to do anyway?

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Kia ora e te whanau. I live in Hopetown, a place where hope is possible because it’s what we all want. So I am hopeful. But not merely wishful. Hope takes effort. It demands determination.

Hopetown is all around. It’s a town, a suburb, a village, a city. A country, a world, a state of mind. A place to dream and a place for action. A place where better things are possible, even if we sometimes have to fight for them.

In this Substack I’ll be covering politics, the climate and the environment, urban design and development, social issues, books, culture and movements for change. I live in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland and I’m especially interested in cities, but I’ll write about events and ideas from all over.

I’ll be exploring how we can live within planetary limits and also thrive and prosper. How we can strengthen democracy and live with each other in ways that are just and fair. Who’s doing these things and what can we learn from them?

I’ll be keeping a close eye on issues of the moment, too. Asking how they relate to the larger political forces of our world, how we can extract hope from the hardship.

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That hardship is real. We have rising poverty in the midst of plenty, the Child Poverty Action Group has consistently reported, and it’s because 50 years of social and economic progress was followed by 40 years of neoliberalism and corporate greed. Climate change threatens to destroy the global ecosystem and we’re not immune in Aotearoa New Zealand. The damaging monthly storms of just a few years ago are now arriving weekly, says the Climate Change Commission, but we’re doing precious little to reduce the risks.

We have crises in housing and health, but although they’re fixable, hope that they will be fixed is undermined every day. Other social services are also severely strained, urban infrastructure is underfunded and sometimes broken altogether, confidence in the institutions of civil society is weak. A vigorously racist and misogynist far right is on the rise. Our information systems and our sense of community are corrupted by social media, and by many in the new media, and by many more in the old mainstream. Most political parties offer slogans designed to win votes instead of plans to fix problems.

It’s not just us. The nuclear arms race poses renewed perils and, in Ukraine and Gaza, militarist nations have waged wars of total annihilation. Human rights are terribly abused. The most powerful country on the planet is led by a vainglorious despot who seems unaware, or uncaring, or both, that he might collapse the entire global economy.

Hopetown? I know. We’re in what’s now called a polycrisis and hope seems like a stretch. This is a world run by and for elites. That’s the true elites: the billionaire class, the techbros, fossil-fuel tycoons, major financiers and investors, the oligarchs who control our biggest companies, the royal families, the rulers of fascist regimes, the friends of Jeffrey Epstein.

They are served by many willing servants: the influencers and public intellectuals, the lobbyists, spin doctors and politicians who do their bidding. Thanks to those servants, the elites have accumulated vast wealth and power. Much of it very recently: last year alone the wealth of billionaires jumped 16%, or US$2.5 trillion. That’s enough, according to Oxfam, to overcome extreme poverty globally 26 times over.

But they don’t use that wealth to overcome poverty. They fight against climate action, they undermine democracy and they widen inequality.

All of this poses a question for the force that sits at the heart of it: Big Capital. Will it degenerate into rogue corporates profiting outrageously from a wild world, or will it be part of the transition we need to a more stable, hopeful civil society? The latter is possible: capital has all the economic levers, political power, institutional structures and public support it needs to enable the transition. But it won’t happen inevitably or by accident.

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And yet I live in Hopetown. I believe we can do something about all this. In fact, I think we can do a lot. Making the world a better place – making our own towns and cities and regions into better places – is up to us. We don’t need to wait for oil tycoons to see the light or for miracle technologies to save us. We already have the means.

The Manchester revolt

To kick off, I want to talk about a place called Gorton and Denton.

It’s in Britain. Gorton and Denton is a parliamentary seat near Manchester, and earlier this year it held a by-election. Although barely reported here, the outcome was astonishing.

The electorate is one of the most deprived places in the British Isles. The locals are working class, many are unemployed. A little over half of them are white; more than a quarter are Muslim. Gorton has had a Labour MP for nearly 100 years.

It’s the kind of place that’s become central to British politics, where the Labour Party is engaged in a massive battle with Nigel Farage’s ethno-nationalist Reform UK. At stake: the hearts and minds of white working-class Britain.

Reform appears to be winning. For more than a year it has consistently topped the opinion polls (and in this week’s local body elections it surged to power in many places). In the Gorton and Denton by-election, Labour’s strategy was to campaign on fear of Farage. Only Labour, the party said, could beat him.

But that didn’t happen. Labour came third. Reform came second. And well out in front of both, with about 50% more votes than either of them, was the Green Party.

(The Greens also rose sharply in the local body elections. One highlight: in the east London borough of Hackney, Zoë Garbett became the party’s first directly elected mayor.)

How did the Greens do it? Gorton and Denton isn’t a liberal urban seat. The Greens themselves, in the last election, ranked it only 127^th on their target list.

What happened? You can’t put a result like that down to just one thing. But you can say the Greens got a lot right and Labour got a lot wrong.

How they did it

For starters, the Greens had “Hannah the Plumber”: a smart, charismatic and “authentic” candidate called Hannah Spencer. She really is a plumber and she spoke from the heart, knew her stuff and endeared herself to the electorate.

They also had a relentless focus on the cost-of-living crisis. This had three components.

1. Like Zohran Mamdani when he won the mayoral race in New York, the Greens had real policies to lower the cost of living.

2. They named their enemy. The Greens are just as determined as Labour to keep Reform out of power, but the enemy they focus on is the group that causes people’s hardship: the super-wealthy. In her victory speech, Spencer said, “Instead of working for a nice life, we’re working to line the pockets of billionaires … We’re being bled dry. And I don’t think it’s extreme or radical to think that working hard should get you a nice life.”

It’s about time someone reclaimed the slogan “hard work” from right-wingers who think they own it. Labour doesn’t talk about class conflict much at all.

3. The Greens appealed constantly to the unifying power of class politics. They said workers aren’t the enemy of each other, depending on the colour of their skin. All workers share a common foe. As one commentator put it, the Greens understood that “contrary to media caricatures, most working-class people are not knuckle-dragging racists”. Labour, not grasping this, shifted its immigration policies towards Reform and that fed the racism. Spencer called out “the politicians and divisive figures who constantly scapegoat and blame our communities for all the problems in society”.

The Greens have a new leader, Zack Polanski, who drives all this. “Class politics is not a relic but a necessity,” he says. “Anger must be acknowledged and channelled, and fused with hope.”

The party had a good social-media game, full of that anger and hope. And more fundamentally, it had a grassroots army of people on the phones and knocking on doors. Observers said that by polling day the Greens seemed to have “more volunteers than they knew what to do with”.

Campaigners also pointed to a late surge of support, as undecided punters realised that a Green vote would not be a wasted vote. Keeping hope alive is a powerful motivator.

None of this is a secret sauce. Gorton and Denton showed that policies that resonate with people’s real concerns, and offer hope, will be supported.

Critically – this is the thing that eludes Labour parties everywhere – they need to be radical enough to make a difference, not mild enough to avoid offending anyone.

They need to be pitched as real solutions to real problems, not gestures in the general direction of something. And good solid boots-on-the-ground campaigning makes a difference.

All of this is possible for any party that wants to win and get things done. The Greens achieved 13% in the 2024 general election in that seat, but they surged to over 40% in the by-election. The leading pollster, YouGov, reports that the Greens in Britain are now roughly as popular nationwide as Labour.

Could Labour take back the lead from Nigel Farage, if it had the courage to adopt the Greens’ approach?

In the New Zealand Labour Party, MPs and new candidates are already singing from the Mamdani/Hannah the Plumber songsheet. They talk all the time about the cost of living and jobs, health and housing. But it’s not enough just to know the words. Real policies have to be there too.

People want hope, but they’re not likely to invest it in empty slogans.

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I live in Hopetown, a place inspired by the meaningful policies and hard campaigning of the Greens in Gorton and Denton. Hannah the Plumber lives in Hopetown, too.

And already I have a long list of issues to analyse, topics to explore and stories of hope to share.

Three more reasons for hope

1. Victory in Hungary

In Hungary in April, the authoritarian government of Victor Orban, which MAGA champ Steve Bannon called “an inspiration to the world”, was defeated in elections. It wasn’t even close. Some lessons in there, most obviously that democracy is more resilient than we often realise. Orban spent 16 years rewriting the constitution, gerrymandering the electorate, stacking the courts and changing the law to shore up his position, but it came to nothing.

He waged a strident culture war against immigrants and what he called the scourge of liberalism, but he also made Hungary the most corrupt country with the worst-performing economy in Europe. The lesson there: the “strongman saviour” theory of politics creates economic stagnation, poverty and misery.

Orban was defeated not by a democratic socialist or Green movement, but by a centre-right opponent. That’s another big lesson: moderate parties and politicians have a vital role to play in preserving democracy. A lesson the US Republican Party has, to date, chosen to ignore.

I spoke about Orban’s defeat on RNZ on April 23.

2. Blueprint for Prosperity

“The economy was designed, it can be redesigned,” says WEAll Aotearoa, the Wellbeing Economy Alliance. As campaigning for the general election warms up, WEAll has suggested how, with the launch of a Blueprint for Prosperity.

Inspired by the work of Italian-American economist Mariana Mazzucato, the Blueprint contains “five principles of modern economic systems design that lead to 10 missions for Aotearoa”, which in turn have produced 33 specific policies.

At a time where it’s easy to say, “Oh, but no one has any answers,” WEAll does have answers and it wants all political parties to take a look. I’ll explore this Blueprint more fully in a post to come.

3. The human chain bike lane

The Wellington City Council has doubled the length of time it will take to complete the Paneke Pōneke bike network, from 10 years to 20 years, and almost halved the budget from $115 million to just under $67 million. But cyclists aren’t giving up. One recent Thursday morning, using a tactic widely seen in Europe and North America, dozens of them stood along a busy downtown street to create a human bike lane.

Patrick Morgan from Cycle Wellington called the council decision “appalling”.

“We know there’s around 2 million bikes in sheds and garages around the country,” he said. “With protected bike lanes, people feel safe enough to use their bikes for everyday trips.”

“We need to build the whole network, especially during this time of high fuel prices. People need more choices of how they get around.”