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1Repair Windows errors before they cause bigger problems2Scan for outdated or missing drivers - takes under a minute3Clear out junk files and repair common Windows errors“The Earth is judging us” is Amitav Ghosh’s literary and political formulation, not a scientific claim that the planet literally judges people. It comes from his acceptance speech for the 2024 Erasmus Prize, in which he links ecological disruption to political history, inequality and the modern view of nature as a resource for human use.
Where the phrase comes from
The phrase appears in Ghosh’s 2024 Erasmus Prize acceptance speech, published by Scroll on 29 November 2024. It is the speech’s headline; The Wire also published the address in full under a headline about inequality. The headline uses British spelling, “recognise,” while the quoted passage in Scroll uses “recognize.”
Ghosh describes the present as a time of overlapping ecological, political and economic upheaval. His warning is that a future for humanity requires a different understanding of our place on Earth—not that the planet has human-like intentions or a literal system of judgment.
What Ghosh means by “the Earth is judging us”
Modernity’s view of nature
Ghosh argues that high modernity taught people to regard Earth as inert and primarily available for exploitation. In his account, that outlook narrows our sense of humanity’s relationship with other living beings. He contrasts it with a more relational understanding in which humans have never lived alone on the planet.
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At the Erasmus Prize ceremony, he put the argument this way: “High modernity taught us that the Earth was inert and existed primarily to be exploited by human beings: in this time of monstrous anomalies, we are slowly beginning to understand that in order to ensure a future for humanity we must learn to recognize that we have never been alone on this planet, that the Earth itself is watching, and judging, us.”
This is Ghosh’s philosophical and literary interpretation. The speech presents renewed attention to agency, spirit or sentience in the more-than-human world as a possibility for rethinking human responsibility—not as empirical proof of any one philosophical position.
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Ecological disruption and political history
For Ghosh, climate disruption cannot be separated neatly from politics. Fossil-fuel dependence, historical advantage and unequal exposure to harm belong to the same human systems. He argues that the consequences of ecological crisis fall within a longer history of unequal power rather than affecting everyone in the same way.
He frames that argument in the speech as an “epochal struggle” between those seeking to preserve historical advantages and those resisting them. In an Outlook India interview, he made the historical connection more directly: “Climate change or the planetary crisis are part of a historical pattern of geopolitics where the great majority of the world was subjugated by a tiny minority.” That sentence is from the interview, not the acceptance speech.
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Why he calls this a “time of monstrous anomalies”
The phrase invokes Antonio Gramsci’s idea of a “time of monsters,” a period of transition in which an old order is dying and a new one has not yet taken shape. Ghosh extends the image to a present in which political violence and severe weather appear together as signs of profound disruption.
His point is not that extreme weather is simply “natural” or disconnected from human choices. He argues that human-caused greenhouse gas emissions intensify climate hazards, while the causes and consequences of those hazards are unevenly distributed. The metaphor joins political and ecological upheaval; it is not a substitute for scientific attribution of any particular event.
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What the argument asks readers to reconsider
Ghosh’s central challenge is to the assumption that the human world can be understood apart from the rest of life. He suggests that the discrediting of strict human-centeredness could make room for learning from traditions that recognize forms of agency, spirit or sentience beyond humanity. This is offered as an opening for thought amid crisis, not as a replacement for addressing material causes such as emissions and inequality.
Readers interested in Ghosh’s related writing on climate, history and the “time of monsters” can turn to Wild Fictions, discussed in Down To Earth’s interview with the author.
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