THE CLIMATE CRISIS: A NOVELIST’S TAKE
HT’s editors offer a book recommendation every Saturday, which provides history, context, and helps understand recent news events
In two weeks, two powerful cyclones — Tautake and Yaas — battered India’s western and eastern coastlines, respectively. Both have been linked to unusually warm seas, a result of the climate crisis.
This week, we recommend novelist Amitav Ghosh’s The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable. The book is divided into three parts. Part one deals with why modern novels struggle to describe the concept of the climate crisis; in part two, the author highlights the role of colonialism in the climate crisis; and in part three, Ghosh notes that activists who single out capitalism as the systemic driver of climate change miss an important element: Imperialism.
The Great Derangement is an absorbing narrative, which is shorn of scientific jargon, on a critical issue, the harmful impact of which is becoming evident to this country and the world every single year.