Sep. 11th, 2021

skygiants: Princess Tutu, facing darkness with a green light in the distance (Default)
Sometimes one is caught in a sort of vortex wherein one glumly feels like one really ought to read more about climate change, and yet one also does not wish to make oneself any more generally morose about the state of the world then one already ambiently is, but nonetheless one sees a review of Amitav Ghosh's book about climate change, and one does like Amitav Ghosh's writing generally and if one is going to read about climate change this does seem a reasonable way to do it, so one puts it on hold at the library, at which point it sits accusingly on the nightstand until the library starts increasingly less politely asking for it back --

Anyway. I've just finished The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable, a book compiled out of a collection of lectures in which Ghosh starts out by using the voice of literary criticism to talk about why modern authors have been bad at writing about climate change as a metaphor for why modern society is bad in general at thinking about climate change, and then circles around to delve into the role of imperialism and global trade in setting up contemporary climate injustice, using examples mostly drawn from the Indian subcontinent -- a narrative that in its broad strokes is not new to me but that Ghosh in particular is very good at telling in specifics and through particulars; his rich historical vision for connections and resonances and knock-on effects has been my favorite thing about his fiction.

The final section of the book is a critique of the politics/literature of personal moral agency rather than mass communal movement; this is a point at which I wonder how the book would have read to me in 2015, because this feels like more or less accepted wisdom to me now but I think six years ago was not so well entrenched an idea in leftist circles. Conversely, he also takes some time to be depressing about the possibility of public movements to effect any change whatsoever in current global politics, which actually conversely made me feel slightly less depressed because I do think climate activist movements have seen at least slightly more success over the last six years in pushing projects like divestment and closing oil pipelines than Ghosh would have anticipated at the time of writing.

At the end he sort of returns to the voice of literary criticism and uses it to compare/contrast the 2015 Paris Accords with the Pope's encyclical on climate change from the same period to voice a hope that mass religious movements may be able to kick-start greater and more effective shifts towards a genuinely sustainable human lifestyle than the techno-optimism voiced in the Paris Accords. While I believe that the Pope's encyclical is probably a better and more broaadly ethical piece of writing than the Paris Accords, this feels to me more like a desire to end the book by finding uplift somewhere than a true source of optimism.

I followed up the book by reading this review of it at the time it came out, which is both more eloquent than mine and makes me very much want to read the 1930s book about war with the newts.

Profile

skygiants: Princess Tutu, facing darkness with a green light in the distance (Default)
skygiants

June 2025

S M T W T F S
123 45 67
891011121314
15161718192021
222324 25262728
2930     

Most Popular Tags

Page Summary

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags
Page generated Jul. 4th, 2025 07:05 am
Powered by Dreamwidth Studios