Climate Change
Climate change is certainly the text's most central theme. It is an existential threat of a magnitude that we either cannot, or refuse to, grasp. Ghosh details the evidence of climate change's disruptions thus far, and paints disturbing pictures of what is to come. He laments novelists' lack of engagement with this, claiming that it is their role to "imagine," and by not doing so they are contributing to this "Great Derangement."
Politics
Climate change is perhaps the most politicized issue in the world. While some sovereign states are quick to embrace it, some are quick to ridicule it or ignore it. Ghosh articulates how, disturbingly, in ostensibly democratic states the people do not actually have an ability to use the political process to manifest real change.
Capitalism
Ghosh does not see capitalism as the only driver of climate change, but it is a central one. In the quest to industrialize and expand, countries used extreme amounts of carbon with little or no attention paid to the ramifications of burning fossil fuels.
Past, Present, and Future
Ghosh looks to the past to explain why the climate change catastrophe developed as it did, concentrates on the present moment to explain how the world is already irrevocably changed, and paints a bleak picture of the future, which is sure to be characterized by extreme weather events and concomitant loss of property and life.
Imperialism
Ghosh considers this the major driver of climate change, for the colonial powers needed to exploit the colonized in order to compete with each other on the global stage. Ironically, imperialism may have actually retarded the climate crisis to a degree, for places in Asia and Africa were controlled by imperial powers for much of the 20th century and were not able to burn fossil fuels of their own accord. Yet this also means that we could have faced the crisis earlier and perhaps done something about it before we were completely at the brink.
Collective Action
Ghosh accounts for the failures of the political system and of the individual to make a dent in the climate change crisis, and suggests that the only way anything can happen is through collective action that transcends the boundaries of nation-states. In particular, he looks to world religions as one place where this might occur, since religions do not belong to one country and they already have "organized" populations.
The Problem with Literary Fiction
One of Ghosh's main arguments is that literary fiction, or serious fiction, is unwilling to engage in any real way with climate change. While some novels do deal with climate change in a far-off future, they will not address the actual present moment and the thousands of distressing ways, big and small, that our world is changing every day. Ghosh looks to the development of the modern novel to account for why this is the case, suggesting that its elision of the "big picture" (shown through the epic, passing of generations, catastrophe, and anything beyond the mundane and the individual moral adventure) created this situation. As such, he argues that only the oft-maligned genre of science fiction really deals seriously with climate change as its subject.
