India, May 30 -- Almost every historical crisis has produced its version of the same thought: that what is happening is happening to someone else. In times of plague, those with better houses and cleaner air believed the arrangement of their lives protected them, until the plague climbed the stairs. In times of famine, those with granaries assumed the hunger would stay at the gate, until the gate became the problem. The ego, that false sense of "I" which has built itself from a body, a position, and the externalities accumulated around both, manufactures this thought not out of malice but as the expression of its most fundamental operation: the construction of a self that stands apart from its predicament.

The climate crisis has produced...