Climate Change and Environmental Studies

Research Possibilities in Amitav Ghosh’s Gun Island : 

This blog is assigned by Dr. Dilip Barad Sir. It focuses on the research possibilities in Amitav Ghosh’s Gun Island, with special reference to climate change and environmental studies, using the Notebook LM notes as support.For further information Click here

Research Possibilities in Amitav Ghosh’s Gun Island : 

• Climate Change and Environmental Studies 

The Climate Crisis Didn't Start With Coal. It Started With a Nutmeg.

A Crisis of Imagination, Not Carbon

The climate conversation can feel exhausting. It often arrives as a cascade of abstract data—parts per million, degrees of warming, rising sea levels—or as a distant, apocalyptic warning of a future we can barely comprehend. The sheer scale of the problem, framed in scientific and technical terms, can leave us feeling overwhelmed and powerless, detached from the human realities of the crisis.

Enter Amitav Ghosh. A novelist, historian, and cultural thinker, Ghosh radically reframes this conversation. For him, the planetary crisis is not primarily a problem of science or technology, but a profound failure of imagination, history, and storytelling. His work is an act of intellectual excavation, digging beneath the surface of science and policy to uncover the rotten foundations of a worldview. He argues that the stories we have told ourselves for centuries—about progress, empire, and nature itself—are the very architects of the crisis. To understand our predicament, he insists we must look beyond carbon emissions and reckon with the cultural forces that set the stage for our great derangement.

This article explores five of Amitav Ghosh's most surprising and impactful takeaways. They challenge us to see the roots of the climate crisis not in the smokestacks of the Industrial Revolution, but in the violence of colonialism, the limitations of our literature, and the forgotten wisdom of ancient myths.

1. The Climate Crisis Didn’t Start with Coal, But with a Nutmeg

In his book The Nutmeg’s Curse, Amitav Ghosh argues that the ecological crisis has its roots not in the 18th-century invention of the steam engine, but in 17th-century colonialism. He pinpoints a foundational event: the Dutch genocide on the Banda Islands, a small archipelago that was once the world's only source of nutmeg. To secure a global monopoly, Dutch forces systematically annihilated the native Bandanese and engaged in a violent project of "terraforming"—the radical re-engineering of entire landscapes to serve the empire.

This event, for Ghosh, was more than a historical atrocity; it established a new worldview that saw the Earth and its inhabitants as "inert" resources to be cataloged, conquered, and exploited for profit. This ideology, which he terms "omnicide," is the philosophical justification for destroying anything and everything—people, species, ecosystems, and cultures—deemed an obstacle to extraction. The planet was no longer a vital, living being, but a machine to be controlled. This ideology of "omnicide"—the logic of total destruction for profit—required a culture that could no longer see the vitality of the non-human world, a failure that would eventually cripple its art, justify its wars, and silence its oldest sources of wisdom.

This historical reframing is critical because it shifts the origin of the crisis from the Industrial Revolution to the colonial age. It moves the blame from a vague, all-encompassing "humanity" to the specific historical systems of empire and capitalism that first declared war on the planet. Our climate crisis, Ghosh reveals, began with a worldview that saw the world as a storehouse for the taking.

2. Your Favorite Novels Might Be Part of the Problem

This colonial worldview, which reduced the world to an inert resource, didn't just enable physical conquest; it also colonized our imagination, shaping the very stories we tell—or, more importantly, the ones we don't. In The Great Derangement, Ghosh argues that modern "serious" literature, particularly the realist novel, is structurally incapable of grappling with the "uncanny" and "unthinkable" nature of climate change.

The 19th-century novel is built on an assumption Ghosh calls "uniformitarianism"—the belief, borrowed from geology, that change is slow, gradual, and predictable. This framework, with its focus on individual psychology, domestic settings, and orderly events, is profoundly ill-equipped to represent the violent and sudden "catastrophism" of the Anthropocene. Cataclysmic storms, mass migrations, and freak weather events are deemed too "improbable" for serious fiction and are relegated to genres like science fiction.

By sidelining these world-altering events, serious fiction has reinforced a cultural blind spot. It has taught us to see the world as stable and predictable, and to view the non-human world as a passive backdrop for human concerns. In doing so, it has inadvertently participated in a broader cultural failure to take the planetary crisis seriously as a present reality.

The climate crisis is also a crisis of culture, and thus of the imagination.

3. The World's Militaries Are Hiding a Massive Carbon Footprint

Ghosh also turns his critical lens to an often-overlooked driver of climate change: the military-industrial complex. He highlights the stark fact that the world's military forces are among the biggest consumers of fossil fuels and the greatest producers of hazardous waste. The U.S. military, for example, is one of the largest institutional polluters in history.

A crucial point Ghosh raises is that military emissions are frequently exempt from mandatory reporting under international climate agreements like the Paris Accord. This creates a massive data "fog," obscuring a significant portion of global greenhouse gas emissions and allowing the world's most powerful institutions to evade accountability for their environmental impact.

Ghosh reveals a deeply cyclical logic at play. Fossil fuels are essential to maintaining geopolitical power and projecting military violence across the globe. That same military power is then used to control global access to fossil fuels, ensuring the dominance of a "petrodollar" regime (a system where any country must pay in US dollars to purchase oil, in exclusion of any other currency). In this closed loop, the machinery of war is fueled by the very resources it is designed to protect, locking the planet into a system of perpetual extraction and conflict.

4. Ancient Myths Aren't Fairy Tales—They're Survival Guides

While modern culture often dismisses ancient stories as mere superstition, Ghosh sees them as a vital form of "environmental memory"—coded ecological wisdom passed down through generations. He argues that these narratives contain time-tested moral frameworks for human-nature coexistence that have been devalued by the rationalism of the Enlightenment.

A powerful example from Ghosh’s novel The Hungry Tide is the legend of Bon Bibi from the Sundarbans, the vast mangrove forest between India and Bangladesh. According to the myth, Bon Bibi, the goddess of the forest, offers protection to all who enter her domain on the condition that they act with respect and restraint. Her core law dictates that "the rich and greedy would be punished while the poor and righteous were rewarded." Those who violate this sacred law are left vulnerable to the tiger-demon Dokkhin Rai, who embodies the forest's destructive power. The myth provides a clear ethical guide for survival in a dangerous ecosystem.

This idea is so compelling because it revalidates indigenous and non-Western knowledge systems. It suggests that folklore is not a collection of quaint fairy tales but a sophisticated body of ecological knowledge. These stories hold vital lessons for resilience and sustainability that modern science, with its focus on empirical data, has often overlooked.

5. Nature Isn't Just a Victim. It's an Actor.

Ghosh’s final, and most radical, move is to directly counter the foundational colonial lie. If the planetary crisis began by declaring the Earth dead, it can only be confronted by recognizing that it is, and always has been, alive. This is his insistence on "non-human agency," where animals, rivers, storms, and spiritual beings are not passive backdrops for human drama but active participants with their own intentions and impact.

Ghosh fills his narratives with examples of this agency. In The Hungry Tide, the powerful tides of the Sundarbans are a central character, shaping the lives and destinies of everyone in the region. In Gun Island, a king cobra is revered as the sacred guardian of a shrine, and a pod of dolphins appears to intentionally guide a refugee boat to safety across the Mediterranean. These are not metaphors, but expressions of a world that is sentient and communicative.

This perspective directly challenges the mechanistic worldview inherited from the colonial age. By restoring agency to the non-human world, Ghosh calls for a "politics of vitality" that recognizes the Earth not as a machine but as a dynamic, living system of which we are only one part. He forces us to confront a fundamental question at the heart of our ecological predicament.

The question of who is a brute, and who is fully human, who makes meaning and who does not, lie at the core of the planetary crisis.

Conclusion

The thread connecting all of Amitav Ghosh's ideas is a powerful and urgent call for a new way of seeing. He argues that confronting the climate crisis requires more than new technologies or better policies; it demands a radical transformation of our imagination, our stories, and our understanding of history. We must recognize that the crisis began not with carbon, but with a worldview that severed the connection between humanity and the rest of the living world.

Ghosh’s work leaves us with a profound challenge. If the stories we tell have the power to shape our world, what narratives must we begin telling now to imagine a different future?

Infography :

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