The Crucial but Ignored Dynamic in Climate Talks

December 05, 2024 | Source: Deccan Herald | by Rashmi Vasudeva

At a recent lecture at King’s College, London, Dr Luca Raimondi, a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Global Fellow, introduced Amitav Ghosh as a writer who traverses the spaces in between fiction and non-fiction “to create continuities of experience across seas and continents.” It is hard to find a better description of Ghosh’s oeuvre.
Dr Raimondi went on to say that genre-bending has not only become the distinctive feature of Ghosh’s writing but also immensely contributed to our understanding of the climate crisis as a crisis of imagination — an interpretation widely commended as  one of the most important ways to think about our environment. Speaking thereafter, Ghosh went on to prove once again why it is crucial to “imagine the unthinkable”. He began with the heartbreaking example of Ternate, a tiny island in the Indian Ocean archipelago once known as the ‘spice islands’.