The atlas of lost islands in a rapidly drowning world

The oceans have played a significant role in life on Earth — this holds as true today as it has been for millennia. Early great civilizations built their prosperity on maritime trade. The waterways opened opportunities for people to share cultures, helping societies to grow.

According to the United Nations Environment Programme, about 37 per cent of the global population lives within 100 km of the coast, “at a population density which is twice the global average”. World over, around 145 million people live within three feet of the sea.

It isn’t that oceans allowed us only ways to boost trade and enrich civilizations, these gigantic water bodies for a long time also tempered the impact of greenhouse gases. Estimates suggest world’s seas have absorbed more than 90 per cent of the heat from these gases. This tempering, however, has taken a toll on the oceans. Our seas are now gnawing at our cities with increased ferocity. For instances, Indonesia’s capital Jakarta is one of the world’s rapidly vanishing cities. Experts say that it will drown by 2050.

A National Geographic report says, “Jakarta is now sinking at a truly alarming rate — a rate that varies around the city but is up to 11 inches a year in the northern areas. About 40 per cent of Jakarta is below sea level.”

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) claims that the sea level will rise by around 16 to 25 inches by 2100. While some may think it is just a matter of two feet, for those who live in Maldives, Lakshadweep or Andaman and Nicobar islands, this ‘meagre’ rise in sea level means near total submergence.

The global crisis that we have unleashed as a species is going to claim multiple lives, according to Dilip M Menon, professor of history, University of Witwatersrand, South Africa. “In addition to the migration that we have seen as a result of civil wars, or as a result of collapsing ecosystems, we shall have a global migration that draws upon these people fleeing the sea, moving inwards, to get away from the rising waters. The next great migration really will be this migration that seeks to escape the rising waters,” said Menon, while speaking on ‘The Sea is History’ as part of an ongoing exhibition titled ‘Sea: A Boiling Vessel’ organised by Aazhi Archives in Kochi recently.

Highlighting the crisis we are staring at, South African photographer Gideon Mendel has a series of photographs titled the ‘Drowning World’ in which he photographs people in their houses, all the way from Norway to Bangladesh, standing in their houses, literally neck-deep in water. A disturbing portrayal of the human condition during rising floods due to climate change, the photographs are a reminder of the fury of nature.

“They tell us that when the water rises, all the distinctions of the first world, second world, third world or global north or south will become meaningless. When the water rises, it will rise as one. There is no Indian Ocean, Pacific Ocean or the Atlantic Ocean. It is one continuous ocean. And when these waters rise, they shall create a drowning world. A disastrous global warming with the melting of the ice caps, the sea is at our door, the sea is lapping at our feet. And we still remain incognizant of this fact,” Menon said.

Global warming, according to Menon, has reminded us of the porosity of the boundaries between ocean and land, belying the hard distinctions that we have been prone to make at least since Hugo Grotius’s Mare Liberum (The Freedom of the Seas) in 1609.

Written in Latin by a Dutch jurist-philosopher called Hugo Grotius, Mare Liberum introduced a new set of code that sea was an international territory and all nations were free to use it for trade and other purposes. “Ironically, Grotius’s argument for a free, open ocean simultaneously laid political claims on the freedom to trade and travel of nations. The fundamental question before us, as humans, is how we stop fragmenting the ocean along national claims and ideas of ‘territorial waters’,” Menon wrote in Ocean as Method: Thinking with the Maritime. “The divisions into oceans – Atlantic, Pacific, Indian – and seas – Red, the Mediterranean – while heuristically satisfying, sometimes forget the underlying fact of one body of water with its tides and seasonal winds, within which human beings negotiate and make claims.”

Sound moves about four times faster in water than in air. Many marine mammals rely on vocalisation to communicate. The song of the whales is one of the most fascinating systems of communication in the marine animal kingdom. When they sing, they produce a deep sound, which according to scientists, travels across the oceans in rapid time. “The sound that travels through the continuous ocean is picked up by other whales, and they circumnavigate the world. So, these continuous oceans also tell us about a life beyond our imagination, a life in which no human is involved. It cuts away the hubris,” said Menon, who has also written Changing Theory: Concepts from the Global South and Walking on Water: Globalization and History.

To prove his point, Menon referred to a timely work of Swiss artist Marie Velardi. Velardi’s Atlas des îles perdues (Atlas of Lost Islands) seeks a dialogue on the fate of scores of inhabited islands across the world that face submergence due to rising seas. The installation consists of ink drawings Velardi made of many such sinking islands, among them Minicoy in The Lakshadweep and the many islets that form The Maldives.

These are arranged in a rough geographic order on the walls of a gallery converted into an open globe by plotting meridians along its length. Velardi’s Atlas des îles perdues, a bound volume from the future containing all the drawings, is kept in the middle of the hall. Its cover announces the date of its release: 2107, by when all the islands it lists would have disappeared under the sea.

“Velardi’s installation shows you islands that have vanished; they’ve been submerged by the water by 2107. Not a single one of these islands will be there; they will all be underwater. So, it is a vision of the present, the past and the future in one room. As I watched this, I felt what in classical Indian aesthetics is called the feeling of horripilation where your hair stands on it because I saw for myself a collapsing of time, a concatenation of many events happening in one moment. And this is something that we need to think about,” said Menon, who is the Mellon Chair in Indian Studies at the University of Witwatersrand.

The mythical cities such as Atlantis in the Atlantic Ocean and Kumari Kandam (Lemuria in Tamil literature which connects Madagascar, South India and Australia) in the Indian Ocean were believed to have submerged in the ocean. Even though there was no scientific evidence to establish the existence of these two continents, there are many hypotheses that claim they existed. “They have become lost civilizations. All these have come back to us because history is not a process of mere recording of what happens before our eyes. History is also a process of suddenly remembering something that you had forgotten. Why is it that when more and more historians are now beginning to resurrect these ideas of Atlantis and Kumari Kandam, it is also because we are now standing at the edge of a precipice where we see that the land beneath our feet is water and could be water,” said Menon.

There is an old saying that whatever we take from the ocean, the ocean can take back. Menon said the idea of Atlantis came to us from the texts of Greek philosopher Plato around 380 BCE. Atlantis was a mighty power and it challenged Athens which was then considered the greatest civilization. Good triumphs over evil. Atlantis is reclaimed by the waves, and it submerges. That’s the story as we know it in popular law.

“But absolute good is not possible in the historical world. At the same time, as Atlantis is claimed by the ocean, ancient Athens is destroyed by an earthquake. These are twin fates. So, when we think about the rising of the waters, and we imagine it is something that happens to somebody else, which is how we look at old tragedies… Oh, that is happening to somebody else. Here we are reminded in the twin story of Atlantis and Athens that we remember one part of the story we don’t remember the other part that the fate of others is entwined with ours. And this is what the continuous oceans remind us that we share as a common fate,” he added.

In the 1980s, there was the campaign for nuclear disarmament. As a student, Menon would participate in long marches to protest the accumulation of arms by the Soviet Union and the US, and the idea was that the world would come to an end if nations were allowed to arm themselves with nuclear arsenal. He believed that the world would come to an end as a result of a nuclear holocaust. So did many people at that point, because everybody remembered Hiroshima and the killing of civilians by the Americans in August 1945. But then, the Cold War ended as a result of an arbitrary act of executive fiat.

“As human beings, we seem to require a sense of an impending end of the world in order to correct ourselves. I think the current choices that motivate the world for the new generation is the idea of global warming. Again, it’s none other than the young Greta Thunberg, the Swedish activist, who challenged leaders across the world to take immediate action for climate change mitigation, who has become the image that will probably hold us back from the precipice. I think it’s tragic, but true, that without the sense of a crisis, without the sense of finality, without the sense of an end, we don’t seem to actually wake up,” said Menon.