In The Great Derangement, Amitav Ghosh takes on the question of why climate change, the great challenge of our time, is entirely absent from the modern novel. One of the novel’s many tasks is to take on the human stories of social change, and if you only read modern novels for information, you’d think the greatest crisis modern humans are facing is that husbands and wives seem to hate one another. One reason for this erasure, Ghosh posits, is the manner in which globalized capitalism has propagated the bourgeois idea that the world is reliable. He looks for instance, at the way…
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I started LivingSmall in 2002 not as a lifestyle blog, but as a political statement. My original tagline was “Thoughts on Literature, Food, Faith, and the Subversive Power of Living Small.” I moved to Montana not only because I could afford a house here, a house I managed this summer to pay off, but because I wanted to deliberately disconnect from the terrifying engine of consumer capitalism that I saw devouring the Bay Area (and pretty much the rest of America). This has always been a political project, and now, as we see the monster who is us — the big…