The Great Derangement Quotes

“Contrary to what I might like to think,my life is not guided by reason;it is ruled rather by the inertia of habitual motion.”
― Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable

“[T]he great, irreplaceable potentiality of fiction is that it makes possible the imagining of possibilities.”
― Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable

“Similarly, at exactly the time when it has become clear that global warming is in every sense a collective predicament, humanity finds itself in the thrall of a dominant culture in which the idea of the collective has been exiled from politics, economics, and literature alike.”
― Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable

“Recognition is famously a passage from ignorance to knowledge.”
― Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable

“Where it concerns human beings, it is almost always true that the more anxiously we look for purity the more likely we are to come upon admixture and interbreeding.”
― Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable

“I suspect that human beings were generally catastrophists at heart until their instinctive awareness of the earth’s unpredictability was gradually supplanted by a belief in uniformitarianism—a regime of ideas that was supported by scientific theories like Lyell’s, and also by a range of governmental practices that were informed by statistics and probability.”
― Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable

“[C]apitalist trade and industry cannot thrive without access to military and political power. State interventions have always been critical to its advancement.”
― Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable

“And to imagine other forms of human existence is exactly the challenge that is posed by the climate crisis: for if there is one thing that global warming has made perfectly clear it is that to think about the world only as it is amounts to a formula for collective suicide. We need, rather, to envision what it might be.”
― Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable

“annihilation. “Money flows toward short term gain,” writes the geologist David Archer, “and toward the over-exploitation of unregulated common resources. These tendencies are like the invisible hand of fate, guiding the hero in a Greek tragedy toward his inevitable doom.” This is indeed the essence of humanity’s present derangement.”
― Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable

“At the same time, it has also reinforced the mind-body dualism to the point of producing the illusion, so powerfully propagated in cyberspace, that human beings have freed themselves from their material circumstances to the point where they have become floating personalities “decoupled from a body.”
― Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable

“Insofar as the idea of the limitlessness of human freedom is central to the arts of our time, this is also where the Anthropocene will most intransigently resist them.”
― Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable

“Significant sections of the electorate probably understand that climate change negotiations may have the effect of changing their country’s standing in the world’s hierarchies of power as well as wealth: this may indeed form the basis of their resistance to climate science in general. The refusal to”
― Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable

“Just as novels have come to be seen as narratives of identity, so too has politics become, for many, a search for personal authenticity, a journey of self-discovery.”
― Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable

“But there is another reason why, from the writer’s point of view, it would serve no purpose to approach them in that way: because to treat them as magical or surreal would be to rob them of precisely the quality that makes them so urgently compelling—which is that they are actually happening on this earth, at this time.”
― Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable

“But in the era of global warming, nothing is really far away; there is no place where the orderly expectations of bourgeois life hold unchallenged sway. It is as though our earth had become a literary critic and were laughing at Flaubert, Chatterjee, and their like, mocking their mockery of the “prodigious happenings” that occur so often in romances and epic poems. This, then, is the first of the many ways in which the age of global warming defies both literary fiction and contemporary common sense: the weather events of this time have a very high degree of improbability. Indeed, it has even been proposed that this era should be named the “catastrophozoic” (others prefer such phrases as “the long emergency” and “the Penumbral Period”). It is certain in any case that these are not ordinary times: the events that mark them are not easily accommodated in the deliberately prosaic world of serious prose fiction.”
― Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable

“The net result is a deadlocked public sphere, with the actual exercise of power being relegated to the interlocking complex of corporations and institutions of governance that has come to be known as the “deep state.” From the point of view of corporations and other establishment entities, a deadlocked public is, of course, the best possible outcome, which, no doubt, is why they frequently strive to produce it: the funding of climate change “denial” in the United States and elsewhere, by corporations like Exxon—which have long known about the consequences of carbon emissions—is a perfect example of this.”
― Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable

“Among Gandhi’s best-known pronouncements on industrial capitalism are these famous lines written in 1928: “God forbid that India should ever take to industrialism after the manner of the West. If an entire nation of 300 millions [sic] took to similar economic exploitation, it would strip the world bare like locusts.”
― Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable

“at exactly the time when it has become clear that global warming is in every sense a collective predicament, humanity finds itself in the thrall of a dominant culture in which the idea of the collective has been exiled from politics, economics and literature alike.”
― Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable

“my life is not guided by reason; it is ruled, rather, by the inertia of habitual motion.”
― Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable

“As an instrument of empowerment oil has been spectacularly effective in removing the levers of power from the reach of the populace. "No matter how many people take to the streets in massive marches," writes Roy Scranton, "they cannot put their hands on the real flow of power because they do not help to produce it. They only consume." Under these circumstances, a march or a demonstration of popular feeling amounts to "little more than an orgy of democratic emotion, an activist-themed street fair, a real-world analogue to Twitter hashtag campaigns: something that gives you a nice feeling, says you belong in a certain group, and is completely divorced from actual legislation and governance." In other words, the public sphere, where politics is performed, has been largely emptied of content in terms of the exercise of power: as with fiction, it has become a forum for secular testimony, a baring-of-the-soul in the world-as-church. Politics as thus practices is primarily an exercise in personal expressiveness.”
― Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable

“Bill McKibben wrote, ‘We live in a post-natural world.’ But did ‘Nature’ in this sense ever exist? Or was it rather the deification of the human that gave it an illusory apartness from ourselves? Now that non-human agencies have dispelled that illusion, we are confronted suddenly with a new task: that of finding other ways in which to imagine the unthinkable beings and events of this era.”
― Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable

“To want to be ahead, and to celebrate and mythify this endeavor, is indeed one of the most powerful impulses of modernity itself.”
― Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable

“If whole societies and polities are to adapt then the necessary decisions will need to be made collectively, within political institutions, as happens in wartime or national emergencies. After all, isn’t that what politics, in its most fundamental form, is about? Collective survival and the preservation of the body politic?”
― Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable

“No matter how many people take to the streets in massive marches,” writes Roy Scranton, “they cannot put their hands on the real flows of power because they do not help to produce it. They only consume.”
― Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable

“was not for any lack of industriousness, then, or ingenuity or entrepreneurial interest, that this avatar of the carbon economy withered in India: the matter might have taken a completely different turn if local industrialists had enjoyed the kind of state patronage that was routinely extended to their competitors elsewhere.”
― Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable

“In other words, the emerging fossil-fuel economies of the West required that people elsewhere be prevented from developing coal-based energy systems of their own, by compulsion if necessary. As Timothy Mitchell observes, the coal economy thus essentially “depended on not being imitated.” Imperial rule assured that it was not.”
― Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable

“will be evident from this that Indian entrepreneurs were quick to grasp the possibilities of British and American steam technology. There is no reason to suppose that they would not have been at least as good at imitating it as were their counterparts in, say, Germany or Russia, had the circumstances been different. It was the very fact that India’s ruling power was also the global pioneer of the carbon economy that ensured that it could not take hold in India, at that point in time. The appetites of the British economy needed to be fed by large quantities of raw materials, produced by solar-based methods of agriculture.”
― Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable

“For the results are counterintuitive and they contradict all the tenets on which our lives, thoughts, and actions have been based for almost a century. What we have learned from this experiment is that the patterns of life that modernity engenders can only be practiced by a small minority of the world’s population. Asia’s historical experience demonstrates that our planet will not allow these patterns of living to be adopted by every human being. Every family in the world cannot have two cars, a washing machine, and a refrigerator—not because of technical or economic limitations but because humanity would asphyxiate in the process.”
― Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable

“I first heard this story on a nostalgic family trip, as we were journeying down the Padma River in a steamboat. I was a child then, and as I looked into those swirling waters I imagined a great storm, with coconut palms bending over backward until their fronds lashed the ground; I envisioned women and children racing through howling winds as the waters rose behind them.”
― Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable

“will know about the history of their forebears on earth, that only in one, very brief era, lasting less than three centuries, did a significant number of their kind believe that planets and asteroids are inert.”
― Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable