“Waking Up to the Fierce Urgency of the Now”: Foregrounding Climate Change in Amitav Ghosh’s The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable and Naomi Klein’s This Changes Everything: Capitalism v/s the Climate

Abstract

The spectre of climate crisis is hovering over the earth leaving the planet in an emergency
mode to save civilization from a complete catastrophe. Climate change is moving quickly
toward a tipping point of the incorrigible and life on Earth is slowly dying off. Hundreds of
species are going extinct, the oceans are warming, plastic trash is choking wildlife and wars are
just imminent in many parts of the world owing to droughts and scarcity of resources.
Humanity is careening towards the deaths of billions of people fighting for survival. Yet many
insanely self-destructive, greed mongering political power centres prefer to deny climate crisis
emergency altogether in order to keep profits high. Their lies about its non-existence are funded
by the fossil fuel industrialists in collusion with our major media, which have never reported
adequately on the issues.