"Recognition is famously a passage from ignorance to knowledge."
The climate crisis is one that can be curbed through education, awareness, and a comprehension of its magnitude in the present and the near future, not the distant future. But Ghosh sees that society is too self-interested to openly and honestly assess the calamity that is climate change. Ignorance has become the norm, and humans have chosen to do almost nothing and particularly have eschewed any real collective accounting or action.
"I suspect that human beings were generally catastrophists at heart until their instinctive awareness of the earth's unpredictability was gradually supplanted by a belief in uniformitarianism—a regime of ideas that was supported by scientific theories...and also by a range of governmental practices..."
Ghosh provides a fascinating history of earth science and the modern novel, the two developing coterminously and having much more in common than might initially appear. As capitalism and imperialism created and shaped a bourgeois middle class, anything that portrayed the unpredictable or disruptive was excised from intellectual discourse and the arts. It was necessary to be less catastrophist and mute the power of nature, just as it was necessary for novels to move away from the epic's broad timelines, generations of characters, and uncanny events toward something that was, as Updike said, an "individual moral adventure."
"All of this makes climate change events particularly resistant to the customary frames that literature has applied to "Nature": they are too powerful, too grotesque, too dangerous, and too accusatory to be written about in a lyrical, or elegiac, or romantic vein."
In his cogent analysis of why the modern novel is unequipped or unwilling to take on climate change as a subject, Ghosh explains that the art form has a template that is rather rigid, and there are certain things that simply do not belong for fear of the work seeming absurd or fantastical. Instead, it is works of science fiction that engage with the climate crisis, but that is much lower-stakes since science fiction is a genre, and a sub-genre of that. Science fiction, the romance novel, true crime, etc. are all considered inferior to serious literary fiction, which, in Ghosh's argument, means that there is not currently a wider popular or critical audience for the works that are actually addressing the crisis.
"As I watched these events unfold it occurred to me to wonder what would happen if a similar storm were to hit Mumbai. I reassured myself with the thought that this was very unlikely."
Ghosh is unsparing in his criticism of modern novelists for not taking on the climate crisis and contributing to our "Great Derangement," but he also does not spare himself. He acknowledges that he is also privy to self-interest, to willfull ignorance, to a reluctance to bring in nonhuman actors or fantastical events into his works. In this quote he does what we all do, which is reassure ourselves that something terrible probably and most likely will not happen to the place where we live or our family lives. Yet to Ghosh's credit, right after this thought he decides to research whether or not this assumption of his is true, and ends up discovering that yes, it is very possibly for Mumbai to be threatened in the way he thinks is unlikely. Ghosh chooses knowledge over ignorance, modeling awareness for his readers.
"An awareness of the precariousness of human existence is to be found in every culture..."
One of the myths Ghosh shatters is the teleology that we have moved from ignorance to awareness, from barbarism to civilization. He states that ancient civilizations did not actually live right by the sea, whereas in our modern industrialized era living right on the ocean is a marker of wealth and status even if such dwellings are in dire threat of being swallowed by the sea. In this quote he reminds us that all cultures in the past knew that human existence was precarious, and they did not adopt a position of willfull ignorance in order to rapaciously pursue expansion or empire.
"Money flows toward short term gain…and toward the over-exploitation of unregulated common resources. These tendencies are like the invisible hand of fate, guiding the hero in a Greek tragedy toward his inevitable doom."
Industrial capitalism has been a great villain in the climate change discourse for innumerable reasons. Carbon emissions go hand in hand with the growing demand for products, so when the industrial sector soars the global emissions follow suit. The aim is to reduce the carbon footprint since the rewards of industrialization are too short-term to warrant such damage. Ghosh states that our current actions will be viewed with criticism in the future because they will be seen as "deranged."
"Climate change poses a powerful challenge to what is perhaps the single most important political conception of the modern era: the idea of freedom..."
"Freedom" is not a bad thing, certainly, but when it comes to addressing the climate crisis, it is a profound deterrent to real action. People do not want to compromise their standard of living; they do not want more limitations and rules and mandates; they do not want to feel circumscribed by powerful (and remote) entities such as governments or bureaucracies. They think that if they make the individual choice to recycle or compost or be vegan or drive a Prius, they are doing their part and that should be enough. They do not want to be told they have to do something, as it violates that sacrosanct freedom. The collective and the communal come second, which Ghosh laments as a mindset that makes it hard to address this problem that demands a group response.
"...the scale of climate change is such that individual choices will make little difference unless certain collective decisions are taken and acted upon."
Ghosh explains that governments do not focus on the crisis of climate change in a collective manner. The issue is boiled down to an individual moral issue rather than approached in a communal method. For a crisis that threatens our very existence, it is not addressed by all players with the urgency that it demands. Political administrations focus on immediate problems that will affect them in their lifespans. Thus, by making it a collective action through innovating climate-control measures, Ghosh argues, the crisis will be managed before it is irreparable.
"In short, even if capitalism were to be magically transformed tomorrow, the imperatives of political and military dominance would remain a significant obstacle to progress on mitigatory action."
Ghosh writes persuasively of how central imperialism was to the acceleration of the carbon economy, as well as how its legacies still shape the way we consume energy today. Capitalism is often seen as the core menace to curbing emissions, but it was the history of imperialism that dictated the course of the catastrophe. Ghosh states matter-of-factly that "carbon emissions were, from very early on, closely related to power on all its aspects: this continues to be a major, though unacknowledged, factor in the politics of contemporary global warming" (109).
"The very speed with which the crisis is now unfolding may be the one factor that will preserve some of these resources."
Ghosh does not provide a lot of hope throughout and at the end of his text; after all, why would he? It would be misleading, for the climate catastrophe is far along and our way of life is already drastically changing. However, he does find a few places that give him pause, such as this quote here in which he wonders if we have now arrived at a point where things are so bad that people cannot help but open their eyes and demand change. This does not mean our actions now can reverse anything, or even stem some of the worse effects, but it can do something.
