Author: Amitav Ghosh
In this book, acclaimed Indian writer Amitav Ghosh explains our imaginative failure in the face of global warming. 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, makes them peculiarly resistant to contemporary modes of thinking and imagining.
In the writing of history, 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, according to a review on goodreads.com.
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.
