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Alyssa Hull writes: We desperately need narratives that move past apocalypse as an endpoint, not only because there are people and societies already living through the Western world’s vision of climate apocalypse, but also because it can only inspire a helpless waiting for the post-apocalypse to arrive, suddenly, to cleave the past from the future.
The West has come to rely on “an expert discourse” from scientists. The result is that science is giving fearful westerners hope in a business-friendly “sustainable development,”, which they think will save the system before it collapses. The alternative, a massive scale economic adaptation to a new distribution of resources, is too scary to consider.
Literature has always conditioned our philosophical understanding of nature. Likewise, ecology as a way of seeing and reading the world has irrevocably changed the study of literature itself. We must examine literary/cultural production in relation to questions of environmental impact, ecological thinking and the implications of revising conventional ways of articulating human with extra-human nature.
“And now, irony of ironies, a consensus is building that climate change is the world’s single largest security challenge. Increasingly the vocabulary around it is being militarized. And no doubt very soon its victims will become the ‘enemies’ in the new war without end.” (From Arundhati Roy’s Arthur Miller Freedom to Write Lecture for PEN-America)
From Vox.com: “For a long time I was a climate change denier,” says William T. Vollmann, the award-winning American author, journalist, and war correspondent. Yet, he has just completed a sprawling, two volume polemic called Carbon Ideologies, which explores the ideology of energy consumption, and is addressed to humans living in a “hot dark future.”
From The Third Pole: In 2004, the world’s second largest mangrove forest, Pichavaram in Tamil Nadu, helped moderate the tsunami wave and protected 18 villages. ‘Let mangroves recover’, a film on Pichavaram by Adarsh Prathap, a 23-year-old from Kerala, has won one of two prizes in the 2017 global youth video competition on climate change.
From LA Times Review of Books: If global warming is the most pressing planetary problem, why do we see so few references to it in contemporary novels, apart from post-apocalyptic science fiction? Amitav Ghosh believes the inward turn of modern art has cut it off from nature, and that we desperately need a new approach.
So where are my reading glasses? Here, right in front of me, so close that I missed them. The lenses need cleaning. Some of Delhi’s smog still clings to them. Landour would not approve. And here I am, back on my hilltop, pen in hand, spectacles balanced on my nose. The new day has begun.
From The Indian Quarterly: Strange things happen in this forest. A bug sucks and then pees. Droplets of bright water shoot out of its bum and fall rain-like on the forest floor. I saw it today with my own eyes. Orange and black bug on a Heliconia leaf, shadow-spangled, tumbling in the gusting wind, peeing.
This 27-year-old documentary filmmaker from Hyderabad has won 104 national and international awards. Anshul Sinha has spent more than a year now, studying and understanding the agrarian crisis that has affected the country. “The vision of the film is to save farmers in India,” says Anshul. Despite his credentials, Anshul’s new film has no takers.
Debutant director Aparnaa Singh’s Irada is said to have been inspired by real events –the pollution of groundwater by a chemical manufacturer with the blessings of a state’s ruling party. Set in Punjab, Irada advocates solutions that viewers will be hard-pressed to replicate, but its concerns are timely, character sketches memorable, and its empathy unmistakable.
Acclaimed novelist Amitav Ghosh‘s non-fiction take on climate change and our collective inability to acknowledge its danger – titled The Great Derangement – has been hailed as a landmark, which promises to change the conversation around this crucial issue. In this series, we’re re-publishing interviews which feature the writer at his forceful and articulate best.
The Narmada Bachao Andolan began 31 years ago as a protest against the Sardar Sarovar dam on the Narmada river, and went on to raise questions about the very development model India has embraced. Today, with the NBA reviving their landmark struggle for justice, we are re-publishing author Arundhati Roy’s landmark 1999 essay on the topic.
Acclaimed novelist Amitav Ghosh‘s non-fiction take on climate change and our collective inability to acknowledge its danger – titled The Great Derangement – has been hailed as a landmark, which promises to change the conversation around this crucial issue. In this series, we’re re-publishing interviews which feature the writer at his forceful and articulate best.
John Michael Greer writes: I’ve had any number of well-meaning climate change activists ask me, in tones of baffled despair, why they can’t get ordinary people to take climate change seriously. My answer is not one they want to hear, because I tell them that it’s because well-meaning climate change activists don’t take climate change seriously.
Acclaimed novelist Amitav Ghosh‘s non-fiction take on climate change and our collective inability to acknowledge its danger – titled The Great Derangement – has been hailed as a landmark, which promises to change the conversation around this crucial issue. In this series, we re-publish interviews which feature the writer at his forceful and articulate best.
Acclaimed novelist Amitav Ghosh‘s non-fiction take on climate change and our collective inability to acknowledge its danger – titled The Great Derangement – has been hailed as a landmark, which promises to change the conversation around this crucial issue. In this series, we’re re-publishing interviews which feature the writer at his forceful and articulate best.
Acclaimed novelist Amitav Ghosh‘s non-fiction take on climate change and our collective inability to acknowledge its danger – titled The Great Derangement – has been hailed as a landmark, which promises to change the conversation around this crucial issue. In this series, we’re re-publishing interviews which feature the writer at his forceful and articulate best.
Raghu Karnad writes: The mysterious absence of climate disaster from contemporary arts and fiction is the central issue in Amitav Ghosh’s The Great Derangement, a genuinely important book. The book’s about much else: but stops at every point to ask why our pressing concern, that we are wrecking our climate and habitat, is so ignored.
John Cook writes: An Inconvenient Truth, the documentary about the threat of climate change, starring former US vice president Al Gore, was released ten years ago. It has undoubtedly made a mark, winning two Oscar awards, and the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize for Gore. But has the film achieved what it set out to do?
