SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
A new book asks, among many provocative questions, is the elevation of human above all other species, indeed above the Earth itself, responsible for many of Earth's problems? Amitav Ghosh, the Indian Bengali writer whom Foreign Policy magazine has named one of today's most important global thinkers, has collected some of his most striking essays from over the past 25 years. This collection is called "Wild Fiction: Essays On Literature, Empire, And The Environment." And Amitav Ghosh joins us from the studios of member station WVTF in Charlottesville, Virginia. Thanks so much for being with us.
AMITAV GHOSH: Thank you so much for having me.
SIMON: You believe that what we call the climate crisis, at its heart, is a political crisis.
GHOSH: Yes. It's certainly political, but it's also, I would say, cultural and imaginative. I mean, it's very hard for us today, after, you know, several centuries of modernity to recognize that the world is, in a sense, animate, that it's actually an actor. And this actor is now sort of lashing out against us.
SIMON: Lashing out against us.
GHOSH: Yes. Absolutely. Yes, reacting to, you know, our greenhouse gas emissions that human beings have put in the atmosphere. Absolutely.
SIMON: You have a different view of what many in the West call a migration crisis.
GHOSH: Yes.
SIMON: Help us understand your point of view.
GHOSH: Well, my point of view, I have to say, is largely sort of based upon the European Mediterranean experience. I did do a lot of research in Italy especially during the height of the so-called European migration crisis, and that was when I realized that, you know, what is actually driving these journeys is not just political or economic. There is also a very important factor, is really modern technology, especially modern communications technologies. Every bit of these journeys, you know, they occur through the cellphone. It was a really sobering realization that, you know, this modern communications technology is really one of the drivers, in my opinion, of this enormous movement of people that we are now seeing across the planet.
SIMON: As you note, you're Bengali, and you see the migration kind of fitting a historical tradition of young Bengalis going far across the world.
GHOSH: Yes. Absolutely. You know, it's a little-known fact that during the age of sail, a very large percentage of the world's seamen were actually from Bengal. So what happens with these migrations is that they set up networks, you know, people right back to their villages. That creates, as it were, a sort of model of aspiration, you know? So for the young kid in the village, he thinks, OK, my cousin or my grandfather made this journey, so maybe I should set off on this journey as well, just as happened with Europeans in the United States. You know, I mean, these networks become really an engine for moving people. And essentially, I think this has become also - these preexisting networks are a very important element of the migrations that we are now seeing.
SIMON: We cited the afterword in introducing you because it's a thought that really shook me up when you say it is the elevation of human above all other species, indeed above the Earth itself, that is responsible for our current planetary crisis. How so?
GHOSH: Yes. You know, our culture has become more and more anthropocentric, that is centered upon human beings, to the point where we really don't even recognize that other forms of sentience might exist. But recent work in botany, for example, shows us that trees communicate with each other, that they have languages, that they work as communities, that a forest is much more than just a collection of trees there, that it's a living entity which makes history, which adapts to changes of various kinds. And I think we are beginning to see, increasingly, more and more kinds of ascensions, you know, in the world around us, more and more kinds of consciousness.
SIMON: This is a question I can't even believe I'm even posing, but should we put our human species and our survival, our welfare above that of well, fill in the blanks - animals, plants?
GHOSH: Well, what we know about life now is that it's a very complex web, so that everything is dependent on everything else. For example, if we do end up exterminating all the bees, all our systems will collapse. All our food systems will collapse. We know that now. So it's not really a question of, even out of the purest self-interest, we find ourselves in a position of care, where we must care for these other entities all around us because our own lives absolutely fundamentally depend on them.
SIMON: Amitav Ghosh - his new collection of essays, "Wild Fictions." Thanks so much for being with us.
GHOSH: Thank you for having me.
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