- The Great Derangement is essential to read to understand the current status of planet earth. It calls on people to get involved and fight back to restore earth. We can no longer be ignorant to this mess that we made. It’s time to take on the responsibility for the damage we humans have done and think about the future of our children and humanity. (Ghosh)
- The book is an exploration of the past, present, and future of the climate crisis and it calls on everybody to take part in finding solutions. “The materiality of oil is very different from that of coal: its extraction does not require large numbers of workers, and since it can be piped over great distances, it does not need a vast workforce for its transportation and distribution. This is probably why its effects, politically speaking, have been the opposite of those of coal. That this might be the case was well understood by Winston Churchill and other leaders of the British and American political elites, which was why they went to great lengths to promote the large-scale use of oil. This effort gained in urgency after the historic strikes of the 1910s and the 1920s in which miners and workers who transported and distributed coal, played a major role; indeed, fear of working-class militancy was one of the reasons why a large part of the Marshall Plan’s funds went toward effecting the switch from coal to oil”. (Ghosh, 74)
- The author calls on people to think about the future generations who will live with the damage to the planet that our generation is causing. People have neglected the future effects of their present actions because, as humans, they tend not to look beyond their average lifespan. People choose to be ignorant and avoid the responsibilities of their actions. (Ghosh)
- In the past humans were more united under a common cause. Since they were used to frequent natural disasters, they were more prepared and always factored them in their daily lives. Nowadays, natural disasters are less frequent in large part because of scientific interventions. As a result humans have become more individualistic instead of worrying about the whole group. Climate change is one such problem where humans have been reluctant to take action because of political and economic differences. (Ghosh)
- Is climate change a propaganda created by the American and European powers? Because of industrialization, asian countries have been the biggest contributors to pollution. “Despite the deep public divisions in the Anglosphere, there is no denial or division about global warming within the military and intelligence establishments of these countries: to the contrary, there is every indication that their political elites and security structures have tacitly adopted a common approach to climate change”. (Ghosh, page 141). “The vulnerability of Asia’s population is only one aspect of the centrality to global warming. The reality is that the continent has also played a pivotal role in setting in motion the chain of consequences that is driving the present cycle of climatic change. In this story, too, numbers are critical, for it was the rapid and expanding industrialization of Asia’s most populous nations, beginning in the 1980s that brought the climate crisis to a head”. (Ghosh, 91)
- In the end, who will pay for it? The poor. As the world’s wealth is becoming more concentrated on the very few, and as resources become more scarce in the future, the cost of living will go up, forcing people to fight back. In 2015, two publications on climate change appeared. The first was by Pope Francis, called the Laudato Si’ and the second was the Paris agreement. “In Laudato Si’ the words poverty and justice keep close company with each other. Here poverty is not envisaged as a state that can be managed or ameliorated in isolation from other factors; nor are ecological issues seen as problems that can be solved without taking social inequalities into account, as is often implied by a certain kind of conservationism. Laudato Si’ excoriates this latter kind of “green rhetoric” and insists that “a true ecological approach always becomes a social approach; it must integrate questions of justice in debates on the environment, so as to hear both the cry of the earth and the cry of the poor”. (Ghosh, 157)
(Book) Ghosh, A. (2016). The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable. (1st edition, p. xx). The University of Chicago Press.