The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable

 “This, I imagine, was what my forebears experienced on that day when the river rose up to claim their village: they awoke to the recognition of a presence that had molded their lives to the point where they had come to take it as much for granted as the air they breathed.”

Ghosh’s personal family history is essential to the arguments he makes throughout the book. In this instance, his ancestors’ history as environmental refugees informs his own understanding of the power of nonhuman forces like rivers and floods.

“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.