Summary

The article discusses the failure of contemporary literature and imagination to adequately address and foresee the climate crisis, as evidenced by the global response to the coronavirus pandemic.

Abstract

The author argues that the coronavirus pandemic has laid bare a deeper crisis: the failure of imagination in addressing the climate emergency. Despite literature's historical engagement with humanitarian issues, there is a noticeable absence of creative works that grapple with the planet's crisis with the same intensity as individual-centric issues. The article suggests that recent environmental disasters, from California's wildfires to Cyclone Amphan, should have been imaginable warnings of the current global predicament. The piece underscores the tripling of climate-related disasters over the past three decades and criticizes the anthropocentric focus of art and literature, which has led to a neglect of the non-human world. The author posits that the current pandemic, a result of human disregard for the environment, is a manifestation of this failure to imagine and respond to the consequences of our actions on the planet.

Opinions

The author believes that the coronavirus pandemic was a predictable crisis that should have been anticipated given the planet's responses to environmental degradation.
There is a critique of the literary world for not producing works that adequately reflect or anticipate the scale of the climate crisis.
The article suggests that the frequency and intensity of recent environmental disasters are indicative of a new reality where the improbable has become probable, yet this is not adequately represented in creative expressions.
The author emphasizes that the climate crisis is not only environmental but also cultural and imaginative, implying that art and literature have a responsibility to engage with these issues.
The piece echoes Amitav Ghosh's sentiment that the current era may be remembered for its failure to acknowledge and artistically represent the realities of the climate crisis, potentially leading to a "Great Derangement."
The author implies that the pandemic is a direct consequence of human actions and a symptom of a larger ecological imbalance that has been ignored by society, including its artists and thinkers.

Coronavirus Is The Crisis of Our Imagination

We are failing to imagine an alternative scenario for the climate crisis.

Most of you would agree that the coronavirus pandemic has a deep connection with the climate crisis that we urgently need to address.

Literature has long succeeded in tackling the humanitarian crises in the world from wars, racism, slavery, apartheid to patriarchy, imperialism, misogyny, and so forth.

But, why can’t our creative authors find a way to engage with the planet’s crisis as much as they did with the issues concerning the individual?

Almost five months have passed since the first COVID-19 outbreak was identified in Wuhan, China. It has swept across the world, and lots of things have changed since then. We’ve been quarantined, we’ve lost our jobs, we’ve felt depressed, and we are starving for human interactions. Most importantly, global warming hasn’t ceased to accelerate its intensity.

The number of confirmed coronavirus cases worldwide has exceeded 5,000,000 cases, including 332,711 deaths.

Furthermore, the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) predicts that the virus might affect half the global population within a year.

Despite the gravity of the situation, when I search for the intellectual voice, imaginative words, and fictional scenarios of my generation, I witness nobody to tackle our urgent emergency.

Of course, I wouldn’t request people to write, draw, work, or do anything productive. It wouldn’t be sensible during a global pandemic.

I’m just implying that coronavirus wasn’t an unexpected crisis. We could have imagined it when the planet started to turn against us.

When California suffered the severe wildfire devastation in 2018, it wasn’t unimaginable, either.
When Cyclone Idai killed more than 1000 people in 2019, it wasn’t uncanny.
When the high-tide in Venice (peaking at 1.87m) left the city underwater, it wasn’t inexplicable.
When Cyclone Amphan made landfall in eastern India ripping apart houses a few days ago, it wasn’t improbable.

We’ve entered a world where the improbable becomes probable. Environmental catastrophes of our era aren’t far away from our reality, thus imagination. As Oxfam states:

“The number of climate-related disasters has tripled in the last 30 years.
Between 2006 and 2016, the rate of global sea-level rise was 2.5 times faster than it was for almost all of the 20th century.
More than 20 million people a year are forced from their homes by climate change.”

When West Africa encountered the Ebola outbreak in 2014, we should have imagined the global pandemic that haunts us today, confining us into our homes.

Since December, all the governments across the world have implemented wide-ranging control measures to prevent the disease infection alongside with health organizations and education ministries.

But where are our artists? Where is their vulnerability, their imagination to express the wild things that are unfolding in our environment?

For the first time in history, our imagination is failing us to engage with the most urgent crisis of our world.

The individual has been the protagonist of our ecology for so long. That’s why we fail to respond when the individual becomes a threat to the planet.

Our conventional anthropocentric view has brought humans into the forefront while ignoring the non-human beings on our earth.

So, yes. Coronavirus was unexpected, but not supernatural. It was an uncanny possibility in the realm of reality. It isn’t our first climate crisis, neither won’t be the last.

Many of us still ignore the fact that this pandemic is the craft of our hands. The pandemic is one of the brutal consequences of human beings’ irresponsible attitudes towards the environment.

For the first time in literary history, we can’t imagine what the inexplicable is. Imagination is a part of our reality that brings a new scenario, a different solution into existence. If we can’t find an alternative in the conversation about the climate crisis, we can’t visualize them. If we cannot respond to the destruction of our creation, it is nothing but a self-annihilation.

In the words of Amitav Ghosh:

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

COVID-19 isn’t only a pandemic that kills several lives, but it is also the death of our imagination.

“In a substantially altered world, when sea-level rise has swallowed the Sundarbans and made cities like Kolkata, New York and Bangkok uninhabitable, when readers and museumgoers turn to the art and literature of our time, will they not look, first, and most urgently, for traces and portents of the altered world of their inheritance? And when they fail to find them, what should they — what can they — do other than to conclude that ours was a time when most forms of art and literature were drawn into the modes of concealment that prevented people from recognizing the realities of their plight? Quite possibly then, this era, which so congratulates itself on its self-awareness, will come to be known as the time of the Great Derangement.” — Amitav Ghosh