Global Warming and the Crisis of Imagination

In his 2016 collection of three essays, novelist Amitav Ghosh takes up a question of immense importance: what explains humanity’s collective failure to avert the existential threat posed by climate change? Capitalism and colonialism are the great structural forces that keep humanity on its suicidal path toward destruction. But, Ghosh argues, it is also our habits of thinking as they are shaped by the ideas of literature, history and politics, which in turn are driven by the hegemonic ideologies of those same forces of capitalism and colonialism. Patricia Kullberg reviews the book by Amitav Ghosh, called The Great Derangement.