What kind of politics would adequately address climate change?

Image source: Internazionale

Amitav Ghosh was born in Calcutta in 1956. An anthropologist, journalist, and novelist, Ghosh has taught creative writing at New York’s Columbia University and been a correspondent for the New Yorker. Today he divides his time between New York and Goa. His novels, published in more than 20 languages including Italian, have earned significant international praise and cemented his place among the most important figures in contemporary Indian literature. His most recent work is The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (Penguin 2016).

We recently featured an article written by Amitav Ghosh about the need to refresh our collective appreciation for spices, while today we share with you this interview conducted during a recent festival held by Italian weekly newspaper Internazionale. The topic is an important one for Slow Food, but most of all one that needs to be discussed continually, to ensure the spread of knowledge and understanding about it. The climate has already changed, we can no longer ignore it. On the contrary, as Ghosh stresses, “In many of the most advanced countries there is actually a whole movement underway to deny these impacts, to deny the predictions of climate science. The Paris climate accord does not even use the word ‘disaster’, let alone ‘catastrophe’, and we see all around us disaster and catastrophe.”

Disasters around the world caused by the weather, like floods, droughts, and cloudbursts show that nowhere and nobody is immune. While waiting for meaningful political intervention, we can all make changes starting straight away, with something so simple as eating less meat.