Why we need to value our low-carbon pastimes more | Susanna Rustin

Remodelling our lives around creativity and participation will ease the transition that the climate crisis demandsCan we fully absorb the scale of the climate crisis without becoming paralysed by fear? This is a big question, with more than one answer. But it helps, I think, to recognise the extent of the challenge to our imaginations. The Indian writers Arundhati Roy and Amitav Ghosh have expressed this best. Roy used the image of a mountain filled with valuable bauxite to ask whether we could ever care enough about our environment to leave resources in the ground. Last year she spelled out her belief that the answer goes beyond politics, since what is needed is an "imagination that neither the left or the right has. To decide how you're going to manage without" the wealth derived from mineral resources.Ghosh's book The Great Derangement argues that humanity's alienation from nature is a delusion more than two centuries in the making - and one that writers and artists have proved as unable to resist as everyone else. "Let us make no mistake," he writes, "the climate crisis is also a crisis of culture, and thus of the imagination." Continue reading...