> The book starts out by wondering why it is so difficult to get climate change into a modern English-language novel that isn't science fiction. It concludes that Western literature has, in the past 200 years or so, become trapped in a world where human comedy and tragedy is separated from nature. Along the way, Ghosh considers the power dynamics that make the climate debate so different in the Eastern than the Western hemisphere.
https://www.dw.com/en/amitav-ghosh-what-the-west-doesnt-get-about-the-climate-crisis/a-50823088
#GunIsland #GreatDerangement #AmitavGhosh

> There’s often thought to be a negative relationship between oil and democracy. If you have a lot of oil, if you’re a state that produces a lot of oil, you seem to be undemocratic. What I try to show in the book is there’s a much longer and more interesting history of this relationship between oil and democracy, and that it involves us as much as the countries that depend on the production of oil.
https://www.democracynow.org/2013/10/8/from_caspian_sea_to_arctic_to
#CarbonDemocracy by #TimothyMitchell is quoted in #GreatDerangement

> The U.S. military is by some accounts the largest single consumer of petroleum in the world. In 2011, the Department of Defense released, at minimum, 56.6 million metric tons of CO2 equivalent into the atmosphere, more than the U.S.-based operations of ExxonMobil and Shell combined.
#NaomiKlein #ThisChangesEverything is great to read along with #AmitavGhosh. She has me, after #GreatDerangement, re-reading pages of #NutmegsCurse . I ended up reading the books in reverse chronological order.

> The dominant approach in.. [#ClimateEthics] is again posited on rational actors, freely pursuing their own interests. A philosopher of this tradition, in responding to the argument that the moral imperative of climate change comes from the need to save the millions of lives in Asia, Africa, and elsewhere, might well quote #DavidHume: ‘’Tis not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger.’
#AmitavGosh's #GreatDerangement and #Western #YangChu

> In 1971.. ‘As we watch the sun go down, evening after evening, through the smog across the poisoned waters of our native earth, we must ask ourselves seriously whether we really wish some future universal historian on another planet to say about us: “With all their genius and with all their skill, they ran out of foresight and air and food and water and ideas,” or, “They went on playing politics until their world collapsed around them.”’ #UThant in The #GreatDerangement