
In his new book “Wild Fictions (Essays)” , award-winning novelist Amitav Ghosh explores the intersection of climate events and political issues, where he highlights how the extreme events of today’s weather are political phenomena as much as they are natural occurrences. Ghosh argues that climatic catastrophes like violent storms, severe droughts, heavy rainfall, and wildfires that were earlier perceived as freakish or improbable have now increasingly come to be perceived as the outcome of human action- specifically the release of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.
As Ghosh says, “What distinguishes our century,” he goes on, “is that its monsters are also made up of weather events that would have been deemed unlikely or freakish at the time Gramsci lived: supercharged storms, mega-droughts, catastrophic rain-bombs, and wildfires.”
Those were the times when those creatures would have been termed ‘natural’, but knowing what we do about anthropogenic greenhouse gases and how they fuel climate disasters, it is difficult to again hold on to that illusion of a strict separation of natural and the political.. Through his powerful writing, Ghosh links the concept of ‘political monsters’ to the reality of modern climate catastrophes, showing how human decisions, particularly political ones, have contributed to a crisis that blurs the line between the natural world and political power structures.
He is an Indian writer and academician who has always been a vociferous advocate of the cause to raise awareness of the effects of climate change. His works usually reflect upon the impacts of history and politics as well as changes in the environment on societies, and with this new book, he delves deeper into how global warming and environmental collapse can now be tied to political and social systems.
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In his new book, Ghosh argues very persuasively that the ‘monsters’ we are dealing with today are not only political leaders but also the climate disasters resulting from human-induced environmental degradation.