To identify how this happens is, I think, a task of the utmost urgency: it may well be the key to understanding why contemporary culture finds it so hard to deal with climate change. Indeed, this is perhaps the most important question ever to confront culture in the broadest sense—for let us make no mistake: the climate crisis is also a crisis of culture, and thus of the imagination.
-- Amitav Ghosh (Part I, Section 4 paragraph 3)

Importance: The author explains that the lack of representation of the climate crisis in literature and other forms of art creates a disconnect in the global culture as a whole because it is primarily through art and literature that we come to understand the world. If this subject is ignored by those with a direct line to the popular imagination, that imagination will invariably be constrained. We cannot fully grasp the issue or respond to it without encountering it in our...