Ben discusses climate change and his new book Tiger Work with Perspective Magazine

Human denial is a powerful thing… We put off phone calls and avoid tackling that mountain of washing. We avoid going to the doctor because we don’t want to face our health problems. Our refusal to face the climate crisis is another example of that, but writ large. It’s almost as if there is a denial gland somewhere in our brains.” says Ben Okri.

Our ostrich-like tendencies about the climate crisis are the theme of Tiger Work, Okri’s new book of poems, essays and short stories. Intense, evocative and frequently chilling, it is a literary howl of frustration at our inaction in the face of existential threat. In the short story And Peace Shall Return, a future civilisation stumbles on tattered evidence of a “vanished species” who “altered nothing in their lives to try to avert the disaster that they saw coming and which was evident every day.” In Existential Creativity is a polemic in which Okri proposes that all his writing “should be directed to the immediate end of drawing attention to the dire position we are in as a species.”

“Climate change is the most important crisis to face us within the memory of human consciousness”.

Read the full Article at Perspective Magazine