Amitav Ghosh on ‘The Great Derangement’

Are we deranged? Acclaimed Indian novelist Amitav Ghosh argues that future generations may well think so, given our imaginative failure in the face of global warming. In this powerful presentation, Ghosh charts the complicity of fiction in shaping the priorities and consumer choices of the world we have created. When our descendants look back at this moment from a “substantially altered world”, he predicts, they will conclude that ours was a time when most forms of art and literature prevented people from recognizing the realities of their plight. They will think of our current moment on earth as the “time of the Great Derangement”.