'Great Nicobar mega port or Char Dham highway are ideological assertions'

Eminent writer Amitav Ghosh in an email interview to Nandini Keshari speaks about climate fiction, implications of Trump's climate actions, development in ecologically sensitive areas and India's net-zero-emission targets. Edited excerpts

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Nearly a decade ago, you posed an important question: ‘Where is the fiction about climate change?’ How do you view the current state of climate fiction?

What I was arguing for in The Great Derangement is that writers should engage with the changing realities of the world. I was not calling for a new sub-genre called ‘climate fiction’. The problem with climate fiction is the phrase itself—because it foregrounds ‘climate’ over all other vectors of the planetary crisis.

Right now, biodiversity loss and geopolitical tensions may, in fact, be even greater threats than climate change. Moreover, to link fiction directly to climate change is to tie it to certain domains of scientific and sociological research. What is implied by this link is that fiction should be a mode of narrativising certain kinds of academic research.

The problem with this is that those fields of research are themselves often limited by certain assumptions, which means that those limitations will also circumscribe the fiction.

Take for example, the idea that a certain ‘wet-bulb temperature’ will automatically lead to predictable kinds of human behaviour. This is a very typical behaviorist assumption, and it is laughably inaccurate in relation to real-world events.

Moreover, the very notion of wet-bulb temperatures is based on skewed data. Mike Hulme [professor of human geography, Cambridge University] has argued forcefully that we should be very careful about ‘climate reductionism’ that is reducing complex phenomena to climate change alone. Climate fiction runs the risk of doing exactly that.

With Donald Trump taking a position of global influence, how do you think this could shift the geopolitical landscape around climate change?