The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable

Ghosh begins Part 1 with a reference to the movie The Empire Strikes Back, in which the rebel hero Han Solo lands a spaceship on what he believes is an asteroid only to find that it is actually a giant space monster. Ghosh suggests that future historians will see this scene as a reflection of a very brief period in which humans believed planets to be inert objects.

The second chapter in this section introduces Ghosh’s personal connection to the climate crisis: His ancestors once lived in a village on the banks of a river in what is now Bangladesh, but they were forced to relocate after the path of the river changed, washing the village away. Ghosh considers his ancestors to be climate refugees, and he imagines the climactic moment when they finally recognized the power of the river they’d lived on for so long. He believes that this family history with environmental disaster informs his own experience of the climate crisis.

While researching the Sundarbans, a mangrove forest located in the Bengal Delta, Ghosh was made intimately aware of the active presence of nonhuman forces like rivers and silt in shaping the forest.