The crisis we ignore

I still occasionally attend lectures at my alma mater, the University of Chicago. During these talks, I frequently find myself frustrated, lost in the intricacies of the argument. But usually near the end of the lecture I experience a moment of insight where the big picture is suddenly clear. (It doesn’t always work that way. I recall one talk in which the lecturer used the phrase “the ontological destruction of Augustine by Heidegger in 1927.” I spent the rest of the lecture wondering how a mere mortal like Heidegger could ontologically destroy a human who had already been dead for nearly 1500 years. That day my moment of insight never came.)

If I had attended the four lectures on climate change that the novelist Amitav Ghosh delivered at the University of Chicago in 2015—which later evolved into this book—I suspect the balance would have been tipped toward more insights and fewer frustrations. It’s a dense book, and it circles around several topics. But it is also elegantly composed and compellingly argued. Ghosh’s diagnosis is blunt. “We are mired in the Great Derangement: our lives and our choices are enframed in a pattern of history that seems to leave us nowhere to turn but toward our self-annihilation.”

In 1978, as a graduate student in Delhi, Ghosh found himself in the path of a freak tornado. So why, he asks, hasn’t he written about extreme climate events in any of his novels? As he examines cultural perceptions of the natural world in relation to climate change, he explains how literary fiction came to avoid depicting the uncanny, the nonhuman, the improbable, and the aggregate—all of which characterize extreme weather events.