Dipesh Chakrabarty is the Lawrence A. Kimpton Distinguished Service Professor of History and South Asian Languages and Civilizations and is affiliated with the Committee on Environment, Geography and Urbanization. He is a founder of the editorial collective Subaltern Studies, a consulting editor of Critical Inquiry, and a founding editor of Postcolonial Studies.

I came to the problem mainly as a historian. The discipline flourishes on the assumption that human history is different from natural history. In the nineteenth century they used to think that nature obeys its own laws, whereas humans have choice. So human history has been celebrated as the domain in which we effectively document, celebrate, and critique notions of human freedom.

Some geologists say that our impact on the planet is comparable to that of the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs. We consider ourselves to be more than a thing, but a geologist comes along and says, collectively, we, with our levels of consumption and technical capabilities, are like a huge thing hitting the planet. That questions the fundamental separation between natural and human history.

There was a time when we would say, “The planet is just too big. It’ll take care of itself.” And it may in the long run take care of itself. But in the short run we are changing it. Look at the history of technology through the last 500 years, the expansion of Europe, the colonization of non-European people’s lands, the making of some people into slaves, the appropriation of the land of Indigenous people. To do that, Europeans had to build ships that could navigate deep seas, build technologies for warfare and communication across the globe. That produced the genealogy of today’s connectivity—telephones, telegraph lines, oceangoing ships.

I have said that’s what the globe is. The globe is human-made. Humans are the protagonists of that story. What we are waking up to through the climate crisis is another entity called the planet. We created an infrastructure through technology. That human-made infrastructure is sitting on—and now interfering with—another infrastructure nature produced, which is the life-support system of the planet, or what the scientists call the earth system. The globe is thus a story of the triumph of our technologies, including those that save human lives. But the state of the planet tells us about some of the downsides of that triumph. We are at a stage where we have to look at ourselves from both global and planetary perspectives.

Privileged humans in growing numbers have lived in the last 75 years as they never have in history. We didn’t realize there was a bill to be paid for living this well. What gives me hope is that humans are a learning species. They can be collectively rational.

The undergraduate program of the Committee on Environment, Geography and Urbanization trains our students to question such a sense of complacency. And it is a good thing the University’s Institute for Climate and Sustainable Growth wants undergraduates to go to places in Africa and India. If you go there, you will have questions. One is, “Don’t the poor people need more energy?” And another is, “Do the rich make sustainable use of the energy that allows them to live ‘the good life’?”—as told to Lucas McGranahan

Victoria Saramago is associate professor in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures. Her first book, Fictional Environments: Mimesis, Deforestation, and Development in Latin America, was awarded the Roberto Reis Book Award by the Brazilian Studies Association and was short-listed for the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment Book Award in 2022.

Part of the challenge of making sense of climate change is that it happens in a highly diffuse way. We have not had one single cataclysmic event that changes everything. Instead, we see a progressive intensification of droughts, hurricanes, fires, and other events. This intensification enacts what has been called a “slow violence” through harmful conditions that often affect the world’s most vulnerable populations. By centering fiction set in the Global South, I want to shed light on the varied forms of environmental and human exploitation that receive little attention from media outlets, even those based in large urban centers in Latin America, Africa, and Asia.

In my first monograph, Fictional Environments: Mimesis, Deforestation, and Development in Latin America (Northwestern University Press, 2020), I was concerned with how fiction influences our perception of environmental change. When we think of rainforests, for example, many of the elements, images, and tropes we associate with them come from novels or movies. Fictional Environments focuses on novels by canonical mid-twentieth-century Latin American writers to understand how images of environments that appear in their books continue to shape our perception of these areas. Sometimes these works also sparked more direct interventions, such as the creation of national parks. By highlighting fiction from the 1940s to the 1960s, I also wanted to excavate the emergence of this environmental imagination before terms such as climate change gained currency.

Fiction’s power to shape how we make sense of climate change is not limited to its informative role. Besides learning about what happens on different parts of the planet, we gain imaginative tools from fiction, which help us grasp an increasingly uncanny present. People who share their experiences of environmental devastation, such as those affected by the Los Angeles fires in January 2025, often describe scenes that recall dystopian literature or apocalyptic movies. Fiction mediates our connection to lived experiences that can feel unprecedented.

In my current book project, I turn to a component of contemporary life so ubiquitous that it has become nearly invisible to us—except when it becomes the cause of destructive environmental events, such as wildfires: electricity. I reveal how our increasing reliance on electricity to perform a multitude of tasks and to connect us to the world has been both celebrated and questioned within Brazil’s twentieth-century cultural production. In contrast to the question of how environmental fiction can shape our perception of climate change, I now ask the opposite. Why have literature and cultural studies scholars not followed the lead of writers who have interrogated our dependence on electrical energy? How can we connect these interrogations to our narratives of climate change to help us better understand our present and potential avenues for action?—by Victoria Saramago