Climate Change Is This Generation’s Biggest Threat: Amitav Ghosh

Amitav Ghosh on how climate change in India forces communities out of the places that define their very existence.

In ‘The Great Derangement: Climate Change and The Unthinkable,’ Amitav Ghosh writes about the threats posed by global warming. (Image altered by The Quint)

The Sundarbans is where Amitav Ghosh first began to really understand the devastating consequences of climate change.

It is there, in the river delta which opens into the Bay of Bengal, that tens of millions of people are on the verge of watching the earth swallow their ancestral lands. A rise in sea levels and stronger cyclones – both symptoms of climate change – are rapidly engulfing their homes and livelihoods.

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Climate change is the enveloping shell within which so much else is going on. 

Amitav Ghosh

The way climate change is depicted in the media often makes it seem like a distant event – an unimaginable future. But millions of people around the world are already suffering from exacerbated drought, flooding, and unusual weather patterns.

In his book, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and The Unthinkable, Amitav Ghosh writes about the threats posed by global warming.

The book addresses the challenges of representing the complexity of climate change in literature, and the responsibility of writers to document the extreme reality humans are now facing.

In an interview with The Quint, Ghosh discussed how climate change affects India and the very real questions it raises about identity as communities are forced out of the places that have defined their very existence.

That sense of rootedness that human beings have, that is what we are being evicted from.

Amitav Ghosh

Camera: Sanjoy Deb

Video Editor: Hitesh Singh

(This story was first published on 19 July 2016. It is being reposted from The Quint’s archives on the occasion of World Environment Day.)