Amitav Ghosh: "To think of the Earth as a dead mass has been the worst of delusions"

BarcelonaAmitav Ghosh (Calcutta, 1956), one of India's most important fiction writers, has for many years placed his pen at the service of climate activism. Ten years ago he published in English The great derangement: climate change and the unthinkable (now available in Spanish published by Capitán Swing with the title El gran delirio. Cambio climático y lo impensable). As he explained these days in the CCCB debates, Ghosh understands this "great derangement" as a collective disorder that makes us all incapable of assuming the gravity and reacting adequately to the climate emergency. An incapacity that he particularly denounces within literature.

Why do you think fiction writers do not write enough about the climate crisis?

— Since my book was published, many more writers are doing it. But it is the most important problem in the world and one would expect everyone to be writing about it. But if someone writes about it, they are automatically categorized as science fiction or fantasy. This may have been true thirty years ago, but today we are not writing about the planetary crisis, but from within the planetary crisis. If someone doesn't find it realistic, it means they are closing their eyes to the reality around them.

You yourself witnessed a tornado in Delhi in 1978 and admit that you have not used it in your fiction. Why?

— It was a good story, true. But it was a very improbable event. Within the conventions of a certain type of realism, it is very difficult to write about something that seems unreal. And yet, climate change is now making it real. It is making the improbable more probable.

You say that the climate crisis is also a crisis of imagination. Why?

— The climate crisis arises from a certain way of thinking about the world and about what it means to live well. We have imagined that the good life consists of consumerism and individualism. But there are other ways of imagining life. This is what Pope Francis said in Laudato si', that we must think about other ways of living, of understanding what the good life is. Everyone must do this, including writers.

It also says that climate change is questioning all the ideas of the Enlightenment.

— Yes, absolutely. The most important aspect is Descartes, who formulated the idea that only humans can think, and by this he meant not all humans, but European men of the elite. But this idea creates an enormous distance between humans and any other type of creature, it generates the idea that animals cannot think or feel any pain. Anyone who has a dog or a cat knows it can feel pain. But certain ideas like this become so deeply rooted that people are capable of overlooking the obvious.

Explain that climate change has caused the inanimate to come to life, and that this could be addressed through literature.

— Throughout history, in all cultures, literature was the domain that gave voice to non-humans. And this disappeared with the birth of modernity, with Descartes, but especially in the 19th century. Spanish conquistadors in America, when Native Americans spoke of animals, or forests, or rivers, as living beings, as possessors of souls, they executed them, accused of paganism. It is a long process of suppression of non-human consciousness. Now the Earth itself is reminding us that it is alive. We now know that forests think, that they have ways of communicating through fungi in a network form. We know that whales have elaborate communication systems. I believe it is important for writers to reclaim the role of imagining how humans can relate to other species. I would even go further. One of the reasons we have this terrible situation in the world today is because we started to think of the Earth as dead, an inert mass that existed only to satisfy human needs, without its own needs. This has proven to be the worst of delusions.

And is delirium fought with imagination?

— This now falls to writers because they are the ones who can reimagine the world to make it alive for us again. In fact, the world is profoundly mysterious. Scientists do not know everything, we don't even know the most basic thing: What is consciousness? It is important for writers to try to reimagine what a conscious universe might be like. Pinocchio is a novel that does this in a way, it talks about non-human consciousness.

In his book he criticizes the concept of "individual moral adventure" which is supposed to be the basis of the modern novel.

— It is an idea from the last thirty years articulated by John Updike, one of the most important voices in United States literature. But even within the American literary tradition, it had not always been thought of like this. John Steinbeck in The Grapes of Wrath deals with a collective experience, and in fact, with a climatic disaster. The first chapter is absolutely climate writing, and a very powerful piece of writing.

But the entire theory of creative writing is based on this "hero's journey".

— It is no coincidence that it is like this. It was from the 1950s onwards that the United States pioneered this business of teaching creative writing, and it is now well known that this whole project was conceived and implemented by the CIA because they wanted to create an alternative to Soviet social realism. They helped create the first creative writing centers in Iowa, where they taught this gospel that says literature is about internal states and that people who write about politics are not literature, they are something else. It was part of the Cold War, of a geopolitical context. But there are also many writers who do it in a completely different way, like Barbara Kingsolver and Ruth Ozeki.

Do you think literature can be more effective than science has been in warning about the climate crisis?

— If science has failed, can you expect writers to fill the void? I don't know, but my book is already ten years old, and it is being taught in universities and I receive letters from people who tell me: after reading your book, I became an activist. It has an impact. I think it's because normally when people write about climate change or biodiversity loss, they do it based on data, and my book has no data. It offers a completely different perspective, which is also the perspective of the global South.

Yes, in fact, it talks about the role of imperialism in this crisis, which is attributed to capitalism.

— When the Dutch, British, Spanish, and Portuguese began to conquer the world, there was no capitalism. It was purely a quest for empire, a couple of centuries later the slave trade emerged, the opium trade... So capitalism emerges from imperialism. Viewing the climate crisis purely in terms of capitalism is misleading, because this crisis is fundamentally geopolitical. The Anglo-American empire was founded on fossil fuels. And today it is fighting to maintain control of fossil fuels. This is basically Donald Trump's idea. The historical irony is that the Anglo-American empire was founded on fossil fuels, and now it is being dismantled by fossil fuels, because Iran has taken control of the distribution of fossils.