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The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (Berlin Family Lectures) Paperback – July 24, 2017

by Amitav Ghosh (Author)

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Part of: Berlin Family Lectures (4 books)

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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.

Part of series

Berlin Family Lectures
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176 pages
Language

English
Publisher

University of Chicago Press
Publication date

July 24, 2017
Dimensions

8.4 x 5.4 x 0.6 inches
ISBN-10

9780226526812
ISBN-13

978-0226526812
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Editorial Reviews

Review

"The interesting contribution of this book . . . is his indictment of the culture-makers. It has become unfashionable to seem too concerned. To make climate change the theme or setting of a novel, Ghosh writes, is 'to court eviction from the mansion in which serious fiction has long been in residence.' His bigger point is that we need a change of narrative. But to do this means that those who make our narratives need to lead the way, to bring their talents of storytelling to bear on what is, he writes, no less than an 'existential danger.'”

― New York Times

“Ghosh, who has previously broached environmental questions in fiction (The HungryTide, the Ibis trilogy, and elsewhere), here steps back from the role of storyteller to analyze modern literature, history, and politics. His purpose is to show that all three cultural modes share assumptions that render climate change unthinkable, occluding our view of its dangers rather than aiding our understanding. . . . To tackle climate change, we would need not only to overcome climate denialism and our reliance on fossil fuels, but also our commitment to moral uplift. The radical restructuring of global power requires more than a good conscience and respect for individuals. From this perspective, the humanities and human sciences confront their greatest challenge armed only with rusting tools forged for another age. ‘The climate crisis is,’ as Ghosh writes, ‘also a crisis of culture, and thus of the imagination.’”
― Times Literary Supplement

“Ghosh is one of the most important living writers writing in English.” ― Los Angeles Review of Books

“A short but broad-ranging and consistently stimulating indictment of our era of the ‘great derangement.’ . . . The Great Derangement is a bracing reminder that there is no more vital task for writers and artists than to clear the intellectual dead wood of a vulgarly boosterish age and create space for apocalyptic thinking – which may at least delay, if not avert, the catastrophes ahead.”
― Guardian

“In his first work of long-form nonfiction in over 20 years, celebrated novelist Ghosh ‘perhaps the most important question ever to confront culture’: how can writers, scholars, and policy makers combat the collective inability to grasp the dangers of today’s climate crisis? Ghosh’s choice of genre is hardly incidental; among the chief sources of the ‘imaginative and cultural failure that lies at the heart of the climate crisis,’ he argues, is the resistance of modern linguistic and narrative traditions—particularly the 20th-century novel—to events so cataclysmic and heretofore improbable that they exceed the purview of serious literary fiction. . . . In this concise and utterly enlightening volume, Ghosh urges the public to find new artistic and political frameworks to understand and reduce the effects of human-caused climate change, sharing his own visionary perspective as a novelist, scholar, and citizen of our imperiled world.”
― Publishers Weekly

“The exciting and frightening thing about Ghosh’s argument is how he traces the novel’s narrow compass back to popular and influential scientific ideas—ideas that championed uniform and gradual processes over cataclysms and catastrophes. One big complaint about science —that it kills wonder—is the same criticism Ghosh levels at the novel: that it bequeaths us ‘a world of few surprises, fewer adventures, and no miracles at all.’ Lawfulness in biology is rather like realism in fiction: it is a convention so useful that we forget that it is a convention. But, if anthropogenic climate change and the gathering sixth mass extinction event have taught us anything, it is that the world is wilder than the laws we are used to would predict. Indeed, if the world really were in a novel—or even in a book of popular science—no one would believe it.”
― New Scientist

“The Great Derangement . . . begins with a simple question—why have the arts (literature and fiction in particular) been unable and unwilling to grapple with the greatest crisis facing the planet, anthropogenic climate change?—and runs in thrillingly unpredictable directions with it. . . . The Great Derangement bristles with trenchant and dense ideas, expressed with exemplary lucidity and finesse. At a time when the idea of the engagé intellectual is not just unfashionable, but in full-blown retreat, here is a book that triumphantly announces its return.”
― New Statesman

“In this elegant book, Ghosh explains how literary fiction came to avoid depicting the uncanny, the nonhuman, the improbable, and the aggregate. His exploration of the relationship between British imperialism and Asia’s carbon economy shows that our constructions of history are as deranged as our literature. In short, we are in denial. . . . Ghosh finds hope in art’s tendency to envision possibilities, as well as in the activism of religious communities.”
― Christian Century

"Don’t be deterred by this book’s academic appearance. Ghosh, an award-winning novelist, takes a fascinating look at how literature and history (as well as politics) have sidestepped or grossly simplified the scale and urgency of climate change. By doing so, we have been conditioned to doubt stories that feel too apocalyptic. The climate crisis, as Ghosh explains, is also a crisis of culture, and thus of the imagination." ― LA Times

“Resistance to the grim realities of climate change is so widespread that the crisis barely figures in literary fiction, notes writer Amitav Ghosh. Branding our era of denial and inertia the Great Derangement, Ghosh looks in turn at literature, history and politics to examine this failure, noting that extreme events such as 2012’s Hurricane Sandy are so freakish that they seem inexpressible. The solution, he argues, lies in collective action as well as scientific and governmental involvement — and in a resurgence in our imaginative capacity to envision human existence anew.”
― Nature

“One of its central themes is that writers, artists and filmmakers, including himself, have largely ignored climate change—‘the great derangement’ of the title— simply because it seems too far-fetched and terrifying. But does it really make a difference if authors write about climate change? ‘Making a difference isn’t the point; the point is to examine the meaning of the arts. If we believe that the arts are meant to look ahead, open doors, then how is this huge issue of our time, absent from the arts? It’s like death, no one wants to talk about it.’”
― Guardian

"Ghosh... [argues] that the blind pursuit of economic growth is a derangement in need of fundamental reform." ― Geographical

"Ghosh refers to our current climate predicament as a 'great derangement', a collective reluctance to face up to the reality of how the crisis will affect our lives. Pretending that we can bypass people and democracy is, to my mind, the ultimate derangement." ― Guardian

“Ghosh’s latest book, The Great Derangement, is a j’accuse issued against all those literary writers who abdicated their social responsibility by being indifferent to the climate crisis—by far the greatest predicament facing humanity. . . . As The Great Derangement emphasises throughout, the crisis of language is at the heart of every human predicament. And now, if our writers are not leading the way, we’re more than doomed.”
― Sunday Guardian Live (New Delhi)

“For a long time, we have been talking about climate change as a scientific question. In this magnificent book, Ghosh changes the conversation, moving it out of the narrow corridors of science and into the wide precincts of culture, politics, and power. Climate change, he argues, is the result of a set of interrelated histories that promoted and sustained our collective dependence on fossil fuels, and it is a kind of derangement to say we want a different world but act in a way that ensures the continuance of the present one. A clarion call not just to act on climate, but to think about it in a wholly new way.” -- Naomi Oreskes, author of The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View from the Future

“With the deftness of a master storyteller and the powerful vision of a keen political observer, Ghosh traces the complex ways that globalization, empire, and the bourgeois novel are entangled with the history of carbon and our contemporary climate crisis. A thrilling, often brilliant work of synthesis and imagination, The Great Derangement is essential reading for anyone trying to understand what the Anthropocene means for our human future.”
-- Roy Scranton, author of Learning to Die in the Anthropocene: Reflections on the End of Civilization

“Ghosh’s analysis of the ‘era of climate change’ is fascinating, erudite, and unflinching. The Great Derangement is a profoundly original book that spares no one.” -- Elizabeth Kolbert, author of The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History

“Captivating. . . .The lightness and agility of Ghosh’s writing succeeds in keeping all the urgency and the shadows of something we cannot really look at: the destiny of mankind.”
-- Giorgio Agamben

“On very rare occasions, a writer marshals such searing insight and storytelling skill that even a well trodden subject is blown wide open. New connections are made, new futures appear. Ghosh is that kind of writer, and this is that kind of book.” -- Naomi Klein, author of This Changes Everything

“Ghosh has written brilliant fiction, impactful essays. But this work on climate change is the most transformational and powerful piece of writing to come from his pen. The Great Derangement is a book on our burning planet for those who are burning it and are being burnt with it. Ghosh gives us, in scalding anguish, a masterpiece that reflects the Buddha’'s Adittapariyaya Sutta or ‘The Fire Sermon’ that T S Eliot so plangently re-affirmed in ‘The Waste Land.’ We have here a book that seeks to chastise, challenge, and change our brain's clogged circuitry.”
-- Gopalkrishna Gandhi

“For decades Ghosh has been telling us exquisite stories of unlikely human connection across geographical and historical boundaries. In The Great Derangement he goes a step further and sets us amidst the great collectivity of a living and dying planet. This intensely lyrical work from a visionary writer at his best calls for a restitution of the sacred—in its most inclusive form—so that we can face the climate crisis of our times with our finest remaining resources.”
-- Leela Gandhi, Brown University

“A stupendous return to non-fiction. . . . Ghosh charts our progress, our cultures, history, politics, and its environmental fallout, as delicately and firmly as a Buddhist monk resolutely scattering coloured sand to create a mandala. Pixel by pixel, in distant corners of a canvas, he builds his arguments. Through the three sections of The Great Derangement, he carves a picture out of seemingly disparate global and local events and trends. And when you step back, slowly, inch by inch, a grander story is revealed—our story. We get to see a picture so grotesque and distorted that it is impossible to look away. And we look on, transfixed by a singular conclusion—climate change is on us.”

― LiveMint (India)

“…Ghosh argues that at the very time it is becoming clear that the situation is “in every sense a collective predicament”, we find ourselves living in the age of the individual. The Great Derangement is a reminder that there are no more vital tasks for writers, artists and politicians than to confront the existential environmental crisis we face and imagine new ways of living.” ― Independent

About the Author

Amitav Ghosh is a novelist and essayist whose many books include the acclaimed Ibis Trilogy (Sea of Poppies, River of Smoke, and Flood of Fire), Gun Island, Jungle Nama: A Story of the Sundarban, and The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable, the latter also published by the University of Chicago Press.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ 022652681X
Publisher ‏ : ‎ University of Chicago Press (July 24, 2017)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 176 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 9780226526812
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0226526812
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 10 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 8.4 x 5.4 x 0.6 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #89,645 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #31 in Atmospheric Sciences (Books)
- #114 in Nature Conservation
- #142 in Environmentalism

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Amitav Ghosh

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Amitav Ghosh (born 11 July 1956), is a Bengali Indian author best known for his work in English fiction.

Bio from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Photo by David Shankbone (Own work) [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/)], via Wikimedia Commons.

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reader

Brilliant book for our times

Reviewed in the United States on July 7, 2023

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This is a brilliant and highly readable book. The truths it contains become more evident with each passing year.

Reviewed in the United States on January 9, 2017

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Amitav Ghosh, who is about equally known as a novelist and an essayist, begins this terrifying book--really a "cri du coeur"-- by asking why anthropogenic climate change, the central crisis of our time, is nearly absent from contemporary fiction. This question initially struck me as odd and narrowly-focused and poorly reflective of the broader societal response to the problem. But he devotes most of the rest of the book to showing that the absence of climate change from fiction is indeed reflective of society's unwillingness to confront it at all. Why? Because of its scale, its pervasiveness, its dreadful implications for the future; the perfect conditions to trigger denial. Ghosh compares the texts of the 2016 Paris Agreement and Pope Francis' environmental encyclical "Laudato Si." Of the first, he writes: "The Agreement's rhetoric serves to clarify much that it leaves unsaid; namely, that its intention and the essence of what it has achieved, is to create yet another neo-liberal
frontier where corporations, entrepreneurs, and public officials will be able to join forces in enriching each other." He is much more sanguine about the encyclical, seeing it as a moral guidepost to effective action, if not a directly applicable one. But to what extent can moral force overcome entrenched interests, short-term vision, and institutionalized hypocrisy?
Two more observations: (1) This display of Ghosh's wide-ranging erudition encompasses many allusions unfamiliar to American readers. Because I teach tropical ecology I am familiar with the Sundurbans. I am not familiar with many of the South Asian writers and thinkers referenced here. I hope other readers will be motivated, as I am, to learn more about them. (2) On page 5 Ghosh refers to the Lake Nyos outgassing disaster, in which some 1700 people died. He says Lake Nyos is in the Congo. It's in Cameroon. The error has no impact on the message of the book, but it's annoying that it got through the editing process.

70 people found this helpful

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Provivalist

Climate change phenomenon from a novel perspective (see what I did there?)

Reviewed in the United States on May 21, 2020

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Ghosh talks about why climate change (CC) is almost entirely absent from literary novels. This is an excellent discussion, and you get the sense that the reason novelists don't include CC in their work is one and the same with why we don't include it in our national life/discussions. Which isn't an answer in itself, more of a pointing toward a mystery. Literary novels have conventional wisdom as their foundation--their basis is a kind of facile knowledge of the world. Conventional wisdom cannot grasp CC, probably because its implications spell the total and complete end of conventional wisdom. CC will make our knowing and grasping of the world largely extinct (it's already happening), and along with that facile knowing, the novel as we know it will likely also become extinct. (Good thing I like genre novels.)

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Joan Harvey

his conclusion disappointed me and colored my overall feeling for the book

Reviewed in the United States on October 21, 2017

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This book, though very short, has many valuable ideas that one doesn't encounter often in discussions of climate change in the West, such as how critique of empire is neglected for critique of capitalism, when in fact they are two separate issues. His discussion of why coal leads to more worker solidarity than oil is also something I haven't seen addressed elsewhere, and he generally thinks through climate change in original ways. However he completely lost me at the end when he compared the Pope's encyclical with the Paris Accord -- criticizing Paris for being written by a committee and neglecting completely the fact that it was binding among governments whereas the Pope didn't have to get anyone to agree to do anything. His conclusion that religious groups might be our only hope seemed bonkers -- most of the rational European West is increasingly secular -- and most of the power is in this West. The religious American Right of course opposes the idea of climate change, and I doubt that Islamic countries which are heavily dependent on oil revenues will move this way. China is not religious, and as he points out in India there is a move toward increased accumulation of Western things. The Pope can't speak for birth control and women having many children won't help. Buddhists? So far not a very powerful force in world politics that I can see. Anyhow, his conclusion disappointed me and colored my overall feeling for the book.

49 people found this helpful

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Ed Evans

An Important Book - Read it, buy it for others

Reviewed in the United States on December 2, 2017

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I very strongly recommend this book. "Where was I at 350 ppm?" should be asked by students. We need to change the way humanity thinks, and Ghosh helps point out where the problem lies, in part.

In parts two and three, Ghosh shares his insights into fossil fuel's role in imperialism, cultural chauvinism, technological innovation, and climate denialism.

Interestingly, Ghosh explains how the control of India and China slowed their addition to carbon dioxide's atmospheric density. Early beneficiaries of fossil fuel-driven economies could care less.

Capital

Our individualism and symbolism reflects the role of capital: the drive for the greatest return in the shortest time, hence environmental suicide.

The ecological, Systemic View

Meanwhile, the holistic view of the earth for the long term goes unheeded. These are my terms because I cannot hope to match Ghosh's intellect. I can only recommend that you read this book and share it. Talk with others about this book and the role of the arts, religion, and literature in climate denial. It's vital.
Eddie Evans - ClimateDeception.Net

11 people found this helpful

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Zato Ici

Great Gems in a Mixed Matrix. Well Worth the Slog

Reviewed in the United States on July 31, 2022

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Three dazzling essays, pasted together. Occasionally pompous. But with quality like this, 5 stars anyway.
DONT MISS:
Dark Mountain page 8
Deep State p.131
Ghandi, M. p.111
Jet skis. p. 81
Klein, N. p.87
Mann, M. p. 137
Thant, U. p. 113
Zola, E. p. 78

Reviewed in the United States on November 16, 2022

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Interesting approach to climate change.

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Ashwani Tripathi

Eye opening

Reviewed in India on October 11, 2023

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The climate change is associated with our day to day life and our civilisation.
The book reveals that we humans are bound to face more challenges due to our nonsense planning of society , urbanisation ,daily life and future.

Recommended for everyone who feels nature by one’s soul

One person found this helpful

Sara

Non il libro per me

Reviewed in Italy on September 26, 2022

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Non sono una grande amante dei libri non-fiction perché faccio onestamente fatica a starci dietro. Infatti, questo libro era - come molti in questo periodo - una lettura obbligatoria per un corso che sto seguendo sul Cli-Fi (ossia Climate Fiction). Capisco bene perché il libro di Ghosh è stato inserito nel programma poiché da molti spunti di riflessione sulla questione climatica.
D'altro canto, l'ho trovato un po' "vecchio": il libro è stato pubblicato nel 2016 e si sente questa distanza temporale con oggigiorno. Tantissime cose sono cambiate dal 2016 ad oggi, non solo a causa della pandemia, ma anche dal punto di vista climatico che tante altre cose sarebbero potute essere dette.
Comunque ho apprezzato moltissime parti del libro (ci sono più di 216 parti sottolineate nel mio kindle, quindi direi che qualcosa ho apprezzato), in particolare la prima parte con delle storie vere e anche autobiografiche che si collegano al cambiamento climatico. Altre parti, invece, le ho trovate appunto molto datate.

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Chaitanya Sethi

A complex thought experiment on climate change

Reviewed in India on August 19, 2020

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Amitav Ghosh's 'The Great Derangement' is an argument against our collective denial of climate change as a species. Spread across three sections - Literature, History, and Politics, it covers how each of these spheres have failed/are failing in understanding the magnitude of the problem.

Despite the well-funded efforts of certain lobbies to deny it, climate change has accelerated in recent years. From Pope Francis to Environmental Agencies to the US military, all have started to act upon it in their own way. What Ghosh argues here is that the narrative of it being a sudden change that was unforeseen, is a deranged fiction that we have concocted for ourselves. Through systematic erasure of climate as a plot point in literature, industrialization as an antidote to colonialism, and an intentional collective silence from our political leaders, we have all been complicit in our delayed response. Ghosh further argues that the political unwillingness to tackle the problem is intentional because response to climate change will likely upturn power imbalance within countries, and will impact the 'deep state' i.e. the nexus of corporates, industries and other big-wigs in cahoots with the government behind the scenes. Thus, it is a 'wicked' problem and is far more complicated than a country's willingness to preserve nature's sanctity.

I thought I was getting into a book on climate change and what I ended up reading was not what I was expecting. I wanted more 'concrete' climate change writing and this was more like a thought experiment on the mechanisms behind climate change as a social/cultural/historical/literary phenomena. It took me a while to get into the rhythm of Ghosh's writing. At times it felt articulate but at other times, it was pretentious and jargon-esque. Even so, some of his points were thought-provoking and approached Climate change with a lens I could not have imagined. I can't endorse it to the extent that you MUST pick it up but if you can spare time, you may check it out.

One person found this helpful

Niladri Choudhury

Awakening

Reviewed in India on June 27, 2023

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An eye opener to save the earth or may be it is too late for us ?

Kshitiz Goliya

Climate justice made clear

Reviewed in India on October 13, 2020

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Amitav Ghosh's novels are nothing less than a feat of scholarship. Very few authors are able to create narratives that combine the art of writing, with a deep contextual knowledge of history. Hence, nothing less can be expected from his attempt at non-fiction. This amazing book very forcefully highlights the absence of climate change from literary fiction and how the modern art might be failing in its ability to represent the reality of our times. It also explains the slow process of nature and invariably climate-related events being forced out of mainstream literature, to be replaced by the western concept of individuality. As a result, the themes, which could have incorporated climate change and destruction of nature, were subsumed and thus devalued in genres such as science fiction.
The books also goes deeper into climate justice and the role of western hegemony in defining the environmental movement. It highlights how western imperialism delayed the Asian industrialization, and thus ended up eating up carbon share of a majority of the world's population.
The book doesn't aim to provide solutions but tries to break down the origins of current climate debate and how it still lacks consideration for the poor and the deprived. It warns that unless we upend the climate discussion and reassess the human costs of our current path, we will never see the sheer urgency for action. We need more such works that try to see beyond the rhetoric of just opposing fossil fuel extraction and so called sustainable development.

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