The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable

“Culture generates desires—for vehicles and appliances, for certain kinds of gardens and dwellings—that are among the principal drivers of the carbon economy.”

As a novelist, Ghosh has a professional interest in the question of climate change in modern literature. Here, he suggests that artists are complicit in the conditions that cause climate change. As such, artists are also responsible for addressing the crisis.

“In a substantially altered world, when sea-level rise has swallowed the Sundarbans and made cities like Kolkata, New York, and Bangkok uninhabitable, when readers and museumgoers turn to the art and literature of our time, will they not look, first and most urgently, for traces and portents of the altered world of their inheritance?”

Ghosh’s arguments about the need for modern literature to address the climate crisis rely on his belief in future historians’ interest in our time. Here, he imagines future readers, in a world more dramatically transformed by climate change than our own, studying 21st-century literature for evidence that we were aware of the crisis.

“Only much later did I realize that the tornado’s eye had passed directly over me. It seemed to me that there was something eerily apt about that metaphor: what had happened at that moment was strangely like a species of visual contact, of beholding and being beheld.”

This passage is indicative of Ghosh’s literary style throughout this work of nonfiction. As a novelist, Ghosh is accustomed to engaging narrative devices like metaphor: Here, the metaphor of the tornado’s eye is an entryway into Ghosh’s arguments about interspecies communication.

“In relation to other forms of narrative, this is indeed something new: instead of being told about what has happened we learn about what was observed.”

Central to Ghosh’s argument is the idea that novels are driven by small observations and character studies rather than descriptions of events. Here, he suggests that this reliance on observation is unusual in other forms of narrative.

“This, then, is the first of the many ways in which the age of global warming defies both literary fiction and contemporary common sense: the weather events of this time have a very high degree of improbability.”

Ghosh argues that the genre of the novel—and particularly of modern literary fiction—relies on the regularity and order of modern life and that this feature is what makes it unsuited for discussion of the climate crisis. Modern climate emergencies, which are by their very nature improbable, are not compatible with the genre conventions of the novel.

“But there is another reason why, from the writer’s point of view, it would serve no purpose to approach [climate crises] in that way: because to treat them as magical or surreal would be to rob them of precisely the quality that makes them so urgently compelling—which is that they are actually happening on this earth, at this time.”

Although Ghosh laments the lack of climate-focused literary fiction, he acknowledges that the genres of surrealism and magical realism often discuss the climate crisis. Here, he suggests that these genres diminish the severity of the crisis, which is compelling precisely because it is really happening.

“Can the timing of this renewed recognition be mere coincidence, or is the synchronicity an indication that there are entities in the world, like forests, that are fully capable of inserting themselves into our processes of thought?”

Ghosh points to the growing interest in academic fields dedicated to the nonhuman as evidence of increasing awareness that humans are not the only forces on earth with active desires. Here, he suggests that this interest can be attributed to the active desire of nonhuman beings like the tigers of the Sundarbans forest. In other words, the recognition of interspecies awareness is leading to deeper awareness of other species.

“More than a quarter century has passed since Bill McKibben wrote, ‘We live in a post-natural world.’ But did ‘Nature’ in this sense ever exist? Or was it rather the deification of the human that gave it an illusory apartness from ourselves?”

Central to Ghosh’s argument is the idea that nonhuman entities, such as storms, animals, and rivers, are intimately intwined with and acting on human lives. Here, he suggests that the rise of humanism and rationalism causes humans to think of themselves as distinct from the rest of the world.

“It was only after passing into British hands that the southern islands became the nucleus of sprawling urban conglomeration. It was then too that a distinct line of separation between land and sea was conjured up through the application of techniques of surveying within a ‘milieu of colonial power.’”

Throughout the book, Ghosh argues that the separation of humanity and nature was the result of modern ideas about rationalism and order. Here, he suggests that the transformation of Mumbai’s landscape from marshy islands to solid land was the result of colonial desires.

“Many of the dwellings in Mumbai’s informal settlements have roofs made of metal sheets and corrugated iron; cyclone-force winds will turn these, and the thousands of billboards that encrust the city, into deadly projectiles, hurling them with great force at the glass-wrapped towers that soar above the city.”

This excerpt comes from a long passage in which Ghosh imagines a Category 5 hurricane hitting Mumbai; the vivid details included bring the threat of climate change viscerally to life. By including both informal settlements and glass skyscrapers in the same event, Ghosh highlights the broad impact of these kinds of storms, which pose a threat to people of all classes.

“The brute fact is that no strategy can work globally unless it works in Asia and is adopted by large numbers of Asians.”

Central to Ghosh’s argument in this section of the book is the idea that Asia is at the heart of the climate crisis. Because of the continent’s outsized role in the climate crisis and large population, Ghosh argues that Asia must be at the center of attempts to face the challenges of climate change.

“What we have learned from this experiment is that the patterns of life that modernity engenders can only be practiced by a small minority of the world’s population. Asia’s historical experience demonstrates that our planet will not allow these patterns of living to be adopted by every human being.”

This passage is indicative of Ghosh’s belief in the severity of the climate crisis. Here, he suggests that the luxuries of modern life are not sustainable on a global scale. He does not suggest how these patterns of living should be allocated, although the book hints that the Asian continent will suffer the most.

“The fact that these developments were set in motion during a period of great climatic disruption (i.e., the seventeenth century) opens the door to the possibility that the changes of the early modern era were influenced by shifts in climate, which had varying effects on different parts of the planet.”

Here, Ghosh demonstrates that societies across the world have actively and creatively responded to the climate crises of their day. The inclusion of this historical detail supports Ghosh’s larger arguments about the importance of a collective response to our current climate crisis.

“The gathering of the oil was the work of a community endemic to those burning hills, a group of people known as twin-zas, a tight-knit, secretive bunch of outcasts, runaways and foreigners.”

This excerpt comes from a lengthy passage in which Ghosh quotes The Glass Palace, one of his own novels. The inclusion of Ghosh’s fiction strengthens his position as an authority on literary culture. By describing the oil-collecting community as endemic to the hills, Ghosh highlights the connection between societies and landscapes.

“There is no reason to suppose that Burma would have been unable to navigate the emerging petroleum economy had it been free to do so: certainly in the mid-nineteenth century no part of the world had more experience in the production of oil than Burma.”

Ghosh argues that Asian nations adopted modern technological advances at the same time as their Western counterparts, if not earlier, in some instances. Here, he suggests that the Burmese government could have industrialized their economy at a large scale if colonial British forces had not intervened and taken control.

“It was the very fact that India’s ruling power was also the global pioneer of the carbon economy that ensured that it could not take hold in India, at that point in time.”

In this passage, Ghosh argues that because Britain was a global leader in coal-based industrialization, the coal industry in colonial India was deliberately suppressed. Ghosh’s analysis of fossil-fuel industries in India and other Asian nations is used as evidence of imperialism’s influence on the climate crisis.

“Here, then, is the paradoxical possibility that is implied by these positions: the fact that some of the key technologies of the carbon economy were first adopted in England, the world’s leading colonial power, may have actually retarded the onset of the climate crisis.”

This is Ghosh’s most explosive argument: the fact that England, rather than an Asian country, was the world’s leading colonial power at the time of industrialization meant that industrialization occurred on a smaller scale than might have otherwise been the case. Ghosh does not absolve the West of responsibility for the climate crisis, but rather uses this hypothetical to argue for the importance of Asian countries in world history.

“If Bruno Latour is right, then to be modern is to envision time as irreversible, to think of it as progression that is forever propelled forward by revolutionary ruptures: these in turn are conceived of on the analogy of scientific innovations, each of which is thought to render its predecessor obsolete.”

This passage is representative of Ghosh’s definition of modernity, the concept at the center of his critique. As the references to revolutions and science suggest, Ghosh believes modernity to be an incomplete process: Revolutions rarely last, and science is always evolving. Presenting the concept of modernity in this way allows Ghosh to make powerful arguments about the future’s potential.

“In other words, the public sphere, where politics is performed, has been largely emptied of content in terms of the exercise of power: as with fiction, it has become a forum for secular testimony, a baring-of-the-soil in the world-as-church.”

Ghosh is highly critical of modern politics, which he calls an exercise in personal expression. Here, he highlights his main criticisms: first, that the public has no real capacity to exercise power, and second, that it focuses on individual morality. The implication is that a healthy political sphere is one where the people have power and use it to improve the lives of the community as a whole.

“So, in an ironic twist, the individual conscience is now increasingly seen as the battleground of choice for a conflict that is self-evidently the problem of the global commons, requiring collective action.”

Throughout the book, Ghosh argues that the climate crisis has global origins and global impacts. Here, he argues that, as a result, the response to climate change must also be global and focus on global solutions rather than individual action. He argues that individual action cannot stop the climate crisis.

“Seen in this light, climate change is not a danger in itself; it is envisaged rather as a ‘threat multiplier’ that will deepen already existing divisions and lead to the intensification of a range of conflicts.”

Here, Ghosh argues that the climate crisis is dangerous because it exacerbates existing problems in addition to producing new ones. Elsewhere in the book, he argues the inverse: that existing problems and cultural conflicts led to the conditions that created the climate crisis. Both arguments demonstrate the interconnectedness of culture and climate.

“Differentials of power between and within nations are probably greater today than they have ever been. These differentials are, in turn, closely related to carbon emissions. The distribution of power in the world therefore lies at the core of the climate crisis.”

This is the thesis of the third part of the book: Political power is inextricable from the forces and processes that drive climate change, and the people facing the greatest threats often have the least power. Ghosh later argues that governments will not take mitigatory action against climate change precisely because they are unwilling to acknowledge or lose the benefits of these power differentials.

“Insofar as the idea of the limitlessness of human freedom is central to the arts of our time, this is also where the Anthropocene will most intransigently resist them.”

Throughout the book, Ghosh argues that the imperialist belief in limitless political growth, military expansion, and industrialization has led to the current climate crisis. Here, he argues that a belief in the same limitless appetite in all of humanity is incompatible with the challenges of the Anthropocene, which will require a reduction in consumption.