Book Review: The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable by Amitav Ghosh

 

The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable
by Amitav Ghosh
Hardcover, 196 pages
Published September 2016 by University of Chicago Press

There is no doubt what we are doing to the climate and the thin biosphere we depend on is insane. We can call it short-sighted when being kind. It is unthinkable and insane but it is also crazy to me that this is the point that needs making. The idea that we could endlessly pollute, exploit and destroy our environment with a cannibalistic system of Capitalism without limits is bonkers. There is an argument that nothing is more important of a point to make and thus I was looking forward to reading this.

 In 2021 I have to remind myself that we live in this country in a reality where the President can try to overthrow the election and actual elected officials will tell the public the insurrectionists who were chanting “hang Mike Pence” looked like tourists.  

The title of this book was enough to get my interest because it is a point I have been making for decades.  It is totally sad to me that this needs to a book, or that this is a point that needs to be made at all. Here we are.

I admit I never heard of Amitav Ghosh before. This book got on my radar during a Twitter discussion about Cli-Fi, or Climate Change. Someone asked me if I had read this book, and I put it on hold at the library right away.

Ghosh makes the argument for Cli-fi early in the book.

“[T]he great, irreplaceable potentiality of fiction is that it makes possible the imagining of possibilities.”

But this put is not a study or look at the various ways science fiction has tackled ecological collapse. There is a great tradition some of my favorites range from Blackfish City by Sam J. Miller or Carrie Vaughn’s Bannerless in the last few years to John Brunner’s eco-nightmare masterpiece Stand on Zanzibar in 1969. I would love a book that explores these works and how they express these ideas but Ghosh only really goes into his own related titles. In other words, don’t go into this looking for a study of the genre.

The Great Derangement has plenty of great points and important ideas. I am just not sure it all couldn’t have been said in an essay.


“If whole societies and polities are to adapt then the necessary decisions will need to be made collectively, within political institutions, as happens in wartime or national emergencies. After all, isn’t that what politics, in its most fundamental form, is about? Collective survival and the preservation of the body politic?”

A wartime attitude like the efforts we saw in COVID-19 make more than sense, but you look at how the exploiters and capitalists are reacting to the so-called “Green new deal” which is a perfectly valid response to this crisis. The problem is the suicidal capitalists are happy to line their pockets now no matter what happens to their kids or grandkids. That is why young people like Greta are pissed. They 200%  should be pissed off.

“Among Gandhi’s best-known pronouncements on industrial capitalism are these famous lines written in 1928: “God forbid that India should ever take to industrialism after the manner of the West. If an entire nation of 300 millions [sic] took to similar economic exploitation, it would strip the world bare like locusts.”

That is happening now in China, and the west are stripping the planet to death. This book is filled with important ideas but in the end, the biggest probably for me is why didn’t need a whole book to make this point.