THE GREAT DERANGEMENT: CLIMATE CHANGE AND THE UNTHINKABLE.

• Author: Ummat, Astha

A Review of The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable

By Amitav Ghosh

(Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2017), 176 pages.

Are we deranged?

Amitav Ghosh's extended essay on the subject of climate change makes one question their anthropogenic privileges upfront. "Who can forget those moments when something that seems inanimate turns out to be vitally, even dangerously alive?"

In his book, Ghosh beautifully portrays the impact of the untethered forces in shaping his life's journey--forces which made his ancestors ecological refugees in the mid-1850s. He, almost guiltily, drawing on personal experiences, inquires why a phenomenon which has in the past, and will almost definitely in the future, alter the world which we are living in, has not found acceptance in fictional writing. Why is it that in the field of literary writing, climate change is somehow akin to "extra-terrestrials or interplanetary travel?" He wrestles with this thought of imaginative failure by calling out descriptive words associated with climate change like "improbable," "exceptionally unlikely," "a contrivance of the last resort," and finally lands on the least aggressive of the lot "uncanny." He, however, admits that environmentally uncanny is not similar to the uncanniness of the supernatural, which has found acceptance in the works of Charles Dickens, Henry James, and the likes.

He talks about something that the world of climate scientists and negotiators would never have thought of--how will the future generations of readers and museumgoers understand the world that they have inherited? They will conclude that ours was a literary era which focused on concealment of the reality--in short, the era of the Great Derangement.

These are the questions that make Ghosh delve from the literary to the historical and political roots of climate change and ways in which they are contributing to humanity's derangement. Allowing the readers to paint vivid pictures of Miami, Mumbai, the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, New York, the Sundarbans and the Mrauk-U region of Burma--Ghosh allows the readers to witness how urban planning is increasingly deviating from the indigenous wisdom which advised construction away from the oceans and coastlines. Focusing on two cities which he calls home, New York and Mumbai, he draws out examples of the 2012 Superstorm Sandy in New York and the multitude of ever-increasing seismic activity in the Arabian Sea which is now frequently...