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Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement: Climate Change

Article in Journal for the Study of Religion Nature and Culture · March 2018
DOI: 10.1558/jsrnc.36018

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Arthur Shapiro
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Book Review
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Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (Chicago
and London: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 196 pp., $22.00 (cloth), ISBN: 978-0-
226-32303-9.

I spend a lot of time in Argentina and have become an enthusiastic consumer of that
country’s cinema, most of which remains unknown in the United States. One of my
favorites is titled De Eso no se Habla (‘One doesn’t talk about that’).1 The story centers
on an imperious woman named Leonor who is intensely protective of her daughter,
who is a dwarf. The ‘that’ that one does not talk about is the perfectly obvious fact
that the daughter is a dwarf. To mention that fact is to unleash Leonor’s unlimited
fury, and everyone in her circle knows that and so avoids the subject. Leonor’s
daughter’s condition is the proverbial elephant in the room. The Indian-born writer
Amitav Ghosh, best known as a novelist (The Circle of Reason, The Shadow Lines, The
Glass Palace, and The Hungry Tide, among others) focusing primarily on South Asian
themes, has written The Great Derangement to ask why literature in general—with the
possible exception of science-lction—’doesn’t talk about’ climate change, which he
sees as the most pressing problem of our time. At least that is the stated, narrowly
focused objective, but clearly Ghosh is aiming more widely, implicitly asking why
society as a whole seems so unconcerned. His conclusion is basically an elaboration of
the interconnectedness of things: society—writers explicitly included—gives lip
service to the crisis and the need to take meaningful action, but all the while we are so
deeply enmeshed in our late-capitalist lifestyle dependence on fossil fuels that we
cannot step out of it in any delnitive way.
The ‘great derangement’ of the title is the contradiction between our expressed
desires and our failure to act on them. The book ranges widely even as it leans heavily
on the author’s personal experience and general South Asian intellectual milieu, citing
numerous authors quite unfamiliar to me (but upon investigation proving very
interesting and worth reading!) and examples of environmental issues little-known or
–publicized in the West (I am a little more familiar with some of them than most
readers are likely to be just because I teach tropical ecology—but only a little more!). It
is copiously, and very helpfully, footnoted. Ghosh is not a big fan of the Paris Agree-
ment on Climate Change (the one the Trump Administration wants to ‘nullify’)—he
views it as a cynical papering-over of the problem. He is an enthusiastic fan of Pope

1. Editor’s Note: Although the oflcial English title is ‘I Don’t Want to Talk About
It’, Shapiro’s choice of the indelnite pronoun more accurately remects the idiomatic
nuance of the original.

© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2018, 415 The Workstation, 15 Paternoster Row, Shefleld S1 2BX.
 Book Review 103

Francis’s ‘environmental’ encyclical Laudato Si, which, he feels, cuts directly to the
moral issues. But he is virtually silent on how that moral teaching can be converted
into effective action. As an environmental educator, I have a somewhat different take
on this. I lnd that the public, even the well-educated public, has a very poor under-
standing of the planet we live on. When I teach biogeography or tropical ecology, I
lnd hardly any of my University of California undergraduates can explain such
fundamental concepts as the causes of seasonality or the difference (and relationship)
between weather and climate. The same is true of their parents, when they attend my
public lectures. It is easy for the merchants of disinformation to dupe people who
don’t know enough to suspect they are being duped! We can try to motivate people in
a political/economic context, but we are far more likely to succeed if they understand
and can articulate the basic physical science underlying the issue. There is a wide-
spread and mostly incorrect perception that these things are too abstract and technical
for laypeople to understand—so why try? But I lnd that after a half-hour chalk talk,
people come up to me and say things like ‘You know, I’ve always tuned out the
weather discussion on TV—all I wanted was the forecast—because I had no idea what
this stuff about highs and lows and fronts was all about. I thought you needed
advanced math and physics for that! But you just made it perfectly comprehensible.’
It’s a lot easier to take something seriously when it actually makes sense. Ghosh says:

When future generations look back upon the Great Derangement they will
certainly blame the leaders and politicians of this time for their failure to
address the climate crisis. But they may well hold artists and writers to be
equally culpable—for the imagining of possibilities is not, after all, the job
of politicians and bureaucrats. (p. 135)

I would add that educators, from kindergarten through college, should share the
blame too. In many schools geography is not taught at all, and planetary or geoscience
is presented as a series of narrowly focused topics often taught at too high a level. The
most effective background for an environmentally aware and active citizenry is a
solid understanding of basic geography and planetary science, taught not with a
didactic or indoctrinational slant, but simply as something that every person needs,
perhaps more than ever before. I commend The Great Derangement as a thoughtful and
motivational exposition of the ‘that’ that one all too often does not talk about. And
when you lnish it, get a book called Why Geology Matters—subtitled Decoding the Past,
Anticipating the Future—by Doug Macdougall. It will lll the lacunae in your planetary-
science education. When you have lnished it, you will be well prepared to go forth
and talk about ‘that’.

Arthur M. Shapiro
Department of Evolution and Ecology
University of California, Davis
[email protected]

Reference

Macdougall, Doug. 2011. Why Geology Matters: Decoding the Past, Anticipating the
Future (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press).

© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2018.

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