The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (Berlin Family Lectures)

Are we deranged? The acclaimed Indian novelist Amitav Ghosh argues that future generations may well think so. How else to explain our imaginative failure in the face of global warming? In his first major book of nonfiction since In an Antique Land, Ghosh examines our inability—at the level of literature, history, and politics—to grasp the scale and violence of climate change.

The extreme nature of today’s climate events, Ghosh asserts, make them peculiarly resistant to contemporary modes of thinking and imagining. This is particularly true of serious literary fiction: hundred-year storms and freakish tornadoes simply feel too improbable for the novel; they are automatically consigned to other genres. In the writing of history, too, the climate crisis has sometimes led to gross simplifications; Ghosh shows that the history of the carbon economy is a tangled global story with many contradictory and counterintuitive elements.

Ghosh ends by suggesting that politics, much like literature, has become a matter of personal moral reckoning rather than an arena of collective action. But to limit fiction and politics to individual moral adventure comes at a great cost. The climate crisis asks us to imagine other forms of human existence—a task to which fiction, Ghosh argues, is the best suited of all cultural forms. His book serves as a great writer’s summons to confront the most urgent task of our time.
 

• Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene
• Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor
• The Discovery of Global Warming: Revised and Expanded Edition (New Histories of Science, Technology, and Medicine)
• The Hungry Tide: A Novel
• The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins
• Learning to Die in the Anthropocene: Reflections on the End of a Civilization (City Lights Open Media)
• The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View from the Future
• Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Experimental Futures)
• Sea of Poppies: A Novel (The Ibis Trilogy)
• The Beautiful and the Damned: A Portrait of the New India