Reading Amitav Ghosh’s book “The Great Derangement” changed the way I thought about our ability to respond to climate change.

He argues that we have failed to even imagine it.

Born in Calcutta, Ghosh grew up in India, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. He’s a globally acclaimed novelist and one of the most prominent writers on climate change today. Along with “The Great Derangement,” a collection of lectures released in 2016, his work includes the novels “Sea of Poppies” and “The Hungry Tide” and the new essay collection “Wild Fictions.”

Ghosh visited Baltimore to deliver the keynote address at the Loyola University Maryland 2025 Humanities Symposium Thursday. I sat down with him ahead of time to talk about U.S. responses to climate change.

His thoughts are illuminating, if not especially encouraging.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

You’re speaking tonight at Loyola University about the role of climate change in global migration. How much of a factor is climate?

There are many millions of people who already have been displaced, and many millions more who will be displaced. The projection I saw for the United States is that 55 million people are going to be displaced within the borders of the United States by 2050.

Most of these people, I think, will be from the coasts, and the impacts will be because of rising sea levels and intensified hurricanes and that kind of thing. I think within the United States it won’t be a sort of mad rush from one place to another. People will try and sell their houses and then move on.

Do you think we overrate the role of climate change as a driver of migration?

I do think it has become the case that sometimes we hugely overemphasize climate. There are many other vectors of the planetary crisis: There’s biodiversity loss, there’s species extinctions, there’s the microplastics crisis, there’s the soil deterioration crisis. That’s one of the factors that’s most actively displacing people in Bangladesh — because of the overuse of fertilizers and herbicides like glyphosate, it’s resulted in a massive loss of fertility in the soil.

Rather than thinking of a certain kind of migration as being forced by climate, we should also see it as an effect of the same processes that are creating climate change.

Yesterday on WYPR’s “On the Record,“ you said you agree with some of President Trump’s efforts to dismantle the so-called “deep state” in Washington.

I’ve been reporting on the consequences to agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. What are the implications of this for climate change?

I think NOAA, EPA are not “deep state.” They’re like, “front of state.” I have so many friends who are connected with those agencies. They’re in tears. They’re just breaking down because, for them, it’s just an absolute catastrophe.

But the single largest greenhouse gas emission that happened was with the Nord Stream pipeline [which ruptured in a Ukranian attack in 2022, resulting in what’s estimated to be the largest human-caused methane release]. And it seems fairly clear now that there was deep state involvement. So on the one hand, you have the Biden administration talking about the Inflation Reduction Act, talking a good game on climate change. But under his watch, the greatest greenhouse gas emissions event in history occurs.

You’re not very optimistic about these things right now.

Do I think that we are going to find solutions that will permit us to carry on living as we are? No, I don’t think so. I think we are heading towards a kind of collapse scenario. ... It’s very hard to turn your eyes away from it. Politically, what’s been happening, especially in the West, would have been unthinkable 10, 15 years ago.

And we should have no doubt that these developments, they’re not disconnected from the planetary crisis. In Europe: migration. Brexit: migration. In the USA: migration.

If we look back at the last 10 years, we are just seeing an intensification of catastrophe. In the face of that, how do we actually say that, “It’s okay. All will be well”? It’s just not plausible. When people do say that, you have to wonder, what are they selling?

You have talked about the problem of oxygen dead zones in the Bay of Bengal, an issue here, too, in the Chesapeake Bay. Are there parallels between those two ecosystems?

This is a worldwide problem now. [In the Bay of Bengal], these enormous dead zones have now appeared, but mainly it’s fueled by agricultural runoff.

Is it possible that we’ll be able to change course on this? I’ve been talking to friends of mine who are working on agricultural ecology here and in India, and it just doesn’t seem feasible. Because we’ve become so addicted to industrial agriculture, and industrial agriculture itself is so much dependent on fossil fuels.

If you withdrew all fertilizers, they tried this in Sri Lanka, and they had an absolute agricultural collapse. And that led to their political upheaval that they had over there.

How prepared are cities in this part of the U.S. for sea level rise?

Very unprepared. Very, very unprepared. You saw what Hurricane Sandy did to New York City. Boston is built on reclaimed land, like Bombay. And Bombay and Boston and New York are almost of the same dates. It’s very interesting. At that point in time, because there were so many Dutch people also coming in amongst the settlers, they thought that they could terraform the landscapes without paying any cost. And now we see that it’s the most terraformed landscapes that are being most rapidly undone.

On the plus side, New York City already has a managed retreat program from parts of Staten Island where they’re buying out houses. So I think that’s what we’ve really got to aim for.

You seem to think materialism has a big role to play in these challenges.

Absolutely. And that’s why I’m glad to be speaking at Loyola University today. Because I really do think that the one person who’s addressed these issues from a point of view that I’m entirely in sympathy with is Pope Francis in Laudato Si’ [the pope’s encyclical on global warming and environmental degradation]. No Western leader ever speaks of lifestyle changes or anything like that. He was the only person who talked about lifestyle changes, who talked about finding other meanings other than that of materialism.

He wrote [Laudato Si’] in collaboration with a whole team of scientists. It’s incredibly well-informed scientifically, but he’s written it for ordinary people.

Anything else?

I think it’s a certain sort of pointlessness in being Pollyannaish about this. Things are, as we can see, getting bad already. And instead of hitting the reverse gear, we are, in fact, accelerating towards the abyss. There’s nothing else one can say.

But within that, I would say that it’s not all bad. COVID was devastating for many of us, but we also rediscovered certain things, like the importance of friendships, of families, of just rediscovering community. And I think as these crises accelerate, I think it’s already happening, that young people are beginning to discover that life is not all about just buying the next gadget or buying the next set of clothes.