Amitav Ghosh: How Should We Think About Climate Change?

"How should we think about climate change?" was a public lecture delivered by Amitav Ghosh on Sunday 01 December at 3 pm. Q&A followed the lecture, chaired by Stephen Rea. This event was co-sponsored by the University of Notre Dame Dublin and Field Day, hosted at the Royal Irish Academy of Music. Amitav Ghosh is widely regarded as one of the finest thinkers on climate change and colonialism. His book The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (2016) "established climate change as the most crucial question ever to confront human culture." In 2021, Ghosh released The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis, tracking our contemporary planetary crisis back to the discovery of the New World and the sea route to the Indian Ocean. Foreign Policy magazine named him as among our most important global thinkers. Ghosh merges the themes of colonialism, environment and art, showing the climate crisis is equally a crisis of culture, of imagination, of science and of conscience. Conversation following the lecture was be chaired by Stephen Rea, stage and screen actor and co-founder of the Field Day Theatre Company. Since the mid 1990s, Field Day has become synonymous with the development of Irish Studies. It has acted as a focus for scholars seeking to question the paradigm of Irish history and literature and in so doing, it has contributed to the international debates in postcolonial theory and various strands of cultural history. This lecture is the flagship Notre Dame Dublin event for the 2024 Notre Dame Forum, a campus-wide dialogue about issues of importance to the University, the nation, and the larger world. The 2024 theme is "What Do We Owe Each Other?" Around the world, many observers are alarmed about a collapsing sense of community as fewer and fewer people feel a responsibility to care for others. With a growing and often welcome emphasis on individual rights and freedoms, how should we—individually and collectively—think about our responsibilities to one another? In a world where ideological and cultural divisions seem to have deepened and wars in Ukraine, Israel/Gaza, and elsewhere have caused such terrible suffering, how can we bring people together to face the challenges of our times? How can Catholic social thought help us engage in fruitful dialogue with those whose perspectives are different from our own, bridge social divides, and promote healing in the midst of suffering, division, and injustice?