The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable was Amitav Ghosh’s first book of nonfiction after his marvellous travel memoir and quest to unpack history, In an Antique Land (1992).

The opening chapter contains this passage on the Sundarbans, that mangrove forest region where three rivers run into the Bay of Bengal:

The Sundarbans are nothing like the forests that usually figure in literature. The greenery is dense, tangled, and low; canopy is not above but around you, constantly clawing at your skin and your clothes. No breeze can enter the thickets of this forest; when the air stirs at all it is because of the buzzing of flies and other insects. Underfoot, instead of a carpet of softly decaying foliage, there is a bank of slippery, knee-deep mud, perforated by the sharp points that protrude from mangroves roots. Nor do any vistas present themselves except when you are on one of the hundreds of creeks and channels that wind through the landscape—and even then it is the water alone that opens itself; the forest withdraws behind its muddy ramparts, disclosing nothing.

That description transports me there, forces me to care when it would be so much easier to back away from the book’s big questions.