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Uncanny and Improbable Events by Amitav Ghosh

As Hurricane Ida pummels New York, we turn to Penguin Classics’ Green Ideas series with a sinking feeling

Uncanny and Improbable Events by Amitav Ghosh is one of twenty short books which focuses on the environmental movement. This is an extract from The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable, first published in 2016. Ghosh once saw an entire tea stall fly past him as a tornado wreaked havoc across Delhi on March 17, 1978. It was the first of its kind to have hit Delhi in recorded meteorological history and the traumatic experience of it left its mark on the writer. Even in its abridged version of his original narrative, Ghosh explores how human beings have been unable to comprehend the magnitude of the environmental crisis we are faced with. 

The Green Ideas series by Penguin Classics also features Greta Thunberg, James Lovelock and Naomi Klein, amongst other writers.