Amitav Ghosh + Naomi Oreskes

In this conversation renowned author Amitav Ghosh takes a big picture view of our immediate and long-term future with Harvard professor of earth and planetary sciences Naomi Oreskes. Ghosh takes on this topic in his new book The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable.

“For a long time, we have been talking about climate change as a scientific question. In this magnificent book, Ghosh changes the conversation, moving it out of the narrow corridors of science and into the wide precincts of culture, politics, and power. Climate change, he argues, is the result of a set of interrelated histories that promoted and sustained our collective dependence on fossil fuels, and it is a kind of derangement to say we want a different world but act in a way that ensures the continuance of the present one. A clarion call not just to act on climate, but to think about it in a wholly new way.” —Naomi Oreskes

A book signing by both Amitav Ghosh (The Great Derangement) and Naomi Oreskes (Merchants of Doubt, The Collapse of Western Civilization) will follow the talk.

About the Speakers

Amitav Ghosh was born in Calcutta and grew up in India, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka. He studied in Delhi, Oxford, and Alexandria and is an award-winning novelist and essayist whose books include The Circle of Reason, The Shadow Lines, In an Antique Land, Dancing in Cambodia, The Calcutta Chromosome, The Glass Palace, The Hungry Tide, and the Ibis Trilogy: Sea of Poppies, River of Smoke, and Flood of Fire. This is his third appearance at the Rubin Museum of Art.

Naomi Oreskes is professor of the history of science and affiliated professor of earth and planetary sciences at Harvard University. She is also an internationally renowned geologist, science historian, and the author of both scholarly and popular books and articles on the history of the earth and environmental science. For the past decade Oreskes has been primarily interested in the science and politics of anthropogenic climate change. Her 2010 book Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco to Global Warming, co-authored with Erik M. Conway, won the Watson-Davis Prize from the History of Science Society. Oreskes and Conway also wrote The Collapse of Western Civilization, which has been a bestseller in France and has been translated into nine languages.