[Vision2020] Amitav Ghosh: "Climate Change and the Unthinkable"

[Ted Moffett]

http://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/G/bo22265507.html

176 pages | 5 1/2 x 8 1/2 | © 2016
Berlin Family Lectures
<http://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/series/BFLS.html>
Paper $15.00ISBN: 9780226526812 Will Publish July 2017 Not for sale in
India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bhutan, Maldive Islands, Bangladesh, Burma/Myanmar,
and Sri Lanka
Cloth $22.00ISBN: 9780226323039 Published September 2016 Not for sale in
India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bhutan, Maldive Islands, Bangladesh, Burma/Myanmar,
and Sri Lanka
E-book $15.00About E-books
<http://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/G/bo22265507.html#> ISBN:
9780226323176 Published September 2016 Not for sale in India, Pakistan,
Nepal, Bhutan, Maldive Islands, Bangladesh, Burma/Myanmar, and Sri Lanka
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… Read More
<http://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/G/bo22265507.html#>

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.
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Vision2020 Post: Ted Moffett
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