According to writer Amitav Ghosh, contemporary culture is incapable of narrating the drama of global warming, revealing a failure of the imagination.
Art has always had the task of recounting the greatest threats that humankind must face, denouncing the horrors of wars, social injustice, hunger and misery. We think of Picasso's painting Guernica, the works of Goya, the novels of Dickens, Steinbeck and Pasolini. Why, then, does art not concern itself with the greatest threat to our species' survival — namely climate change? This question gave rise to the essay The great derangement, il cambiamento climatico e l'impensabile, by the anthropologist and writer of Bengali origin Amitav Ghosh, published by Neri Pozza editore.
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For Ghosh, climate change is not an abstract topic to be treated with academic detachment; on the contrary, it is concrete and closely bound up with his personal history. "My ancestors were environmental refugees long before that term was coined," he has written, recounting how, around 1850, the river Padma in Bangladesh "suddenly changed course," submerging his forebears' village. "When I think of the circumstances that have shaped my life, I think of the fury of the elements that uprooted my ancestors from their native land, forcing them into a series of journeys that preceded, and made possible, my own." The writer's own life was put at risk by an extreme weather event. In 1978, while he was in Delhi, he witnessed a tornado strike the city — the first in its entire meteorological history — which killed 30 people and injured 300.
The "encounter" with the tornado was in some way epiphanic for Ghosh; he became aware of the presence and proximity — in his own words — of non-human interlocutors. "My awareness of the mounting proximity of non-human presences matured through moments of recognition provoked by the environment around me." That recognition gave rise to the conviction that "human beings have never been alone, that we have always been surrounded by a multiplicity of creatures who share with us capacities we believed to be uniquely our own: will, thought and consciousness." The writer also asks whether the recognition of the non-human was in some way suggested by entities such as forests or the planet itself, capable of inserting themselves into our thought processes. Ghosh points out that the non-human, once a very strong presence in literature, has been almost expunged from the modern novel: "just when human activity was beginning to modify the earth's atmosphere, the literary imagination began to focus exclusively on the human."
According to Ghosh it is no coincidence that at the end of the twentieth century literature took a certain path precisely in conjunction with rising emissions. "Today, just when it has been understood that global warming is in every sense a collective problem, humanity finds itself at the mercy of a dominant culture that has expelled the idea of collectivity from politics, economics and literature too." Ghosh observes that the theme of global warming is treated in a truly marginal way by the most authoritative literary journals in the English language, and when it does appear it is almost always in non-fiction. At most, climate change is relegated to genre literature, such as science fiction: "it is as if in the literary imagination climate change were somehow related to extraterrestrials or interplanetary travel," Ghosh writes.
The Indian writer believes that global warming should be the primary concern of writers the world over, noting that this is not, in fact, the case. Climate change, and literature's blindness in the face of it, are the fruit, according to Ghosh, of an imaginative and cultural failure: the climate crisis is therefore also a crisis of culture and of the imagination. "I have come to believe that the challenges that climate change poses to contemporary writers, however specific in certain respects, are also the result of something older and deeper; and derive ultimately from the grid of literary forms and conventions that shaped the narrative imagination precisely during the period when the accumulation of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was rewriting the fate of the earth."
Environmental devastation and culture would therefore be closely linked — indeed, the latter would be the cause of the current situation. "Culture induces desires — for means of transport, household appliances, a certain kind of gardens and homes — that are among the principal drivers of the fossil fuel-based economy. […] This culture is intimately linked to the broader history of imperialism and capitalism that have shaped the world." In particular, Ghosh believes that writers are reluctant to tackle the subject of climate change because it directly concerns our lifestyles and the way in which they "make us complicit in the concealments deployed by the culture in which we are immersed. […] All of us, to a greater or lesser extent, have contributed to global warming; it is a mysterious product of our own hands that now returns to threaten us."
The growing frequency of atmospheric phenomena — such as floods, storms, droughts and heatwaves — once considered improbable, will increasingly characterise our era. "Nothing is remote in the age of global warming; there is no place where the usual expectations of bourgeois life are not called into question." The loss of the status of improbability represents, according to Ghosh, another challenge that climate change poses to the literary imagination. It is not easy, after all, to place climatic events that ought to be sporadic within the prosaic universe of serious literature.
The essay concludes by imagining how the arts and literature of our time might one day be remembered. Ghosh believes they may be remembered not for their courage, but for their "connivance with the Great Derangement." They will therefore be judged as accomplices of an unsustainable system that produced the explosion in emission rates which has significantly altered the planet. All that remains for us now is to remove the blindfold and look climate change in the eye, and to learn once again to coexist with other living beings, in the hope that art and literature may be able to express this vision of the world — at once new and ancient.