The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable

by Amitav Ghosh

But the most promising development, in my view, is the growing involvement of religious groups and leaders in the politics of climate change. Pope Francis is, of course, the most prominent example, but some Hindu, Muslim, Buddhist and other groups and organizations have also recently voiced their concern. I take this to be a sign of hope because it is increasingly clear to me that the formal political structures of our time are incapable of confronting this crisis on their own. The reason for this is simple: the basic building block of these structures is the nation state, inherent to the nature of which is the pursuit of the interests of a particular group of people. So powerful is this imperative that even transnational groupings of nation states, like the UN, seem unable to overcome it. This is partly due of course to questions of power and geo-political rivalries. But it may also be that climate change represents, in its very nature, an unresolvable problem for modern nations in terms of their biopolitical mission and the practices of governance that are associated with it. I would like to believe that a great upsurge of secular protest movements around the world could break through the deadlock and bring about fundamental changes. The problem, however, is time. One of the reasons why climate change is a ‘wicked’ as opposed to a ‘normal’ problem is that the time horizon in which effective action can be taken is very narrow: every year that passes without a drastic redu...