The celebrated writer Amitav Ghosh won the Erasmus Prize this year. His acceptance speech, delivered in Amsterdam last month, combined literary flair and political activism in equal measure.

Ghosh made several important points.

First, the fundamental blame for the world's ecological crisis today rests on the organised violence that created Eurocentric high modernism, a way of life and thought that constitutes the benchmark of contemporary global civilisation. "It is important to note that violence was not incidental to the geopolitical ascendancy of Western empires; it was central to it," Ghosh said, citing the American political theorist Samuel Huntington, who had noted that the West "won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion" but rather by its superior application of organised violence. "Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do," Huntington had added.

Second, the American ascendancy to global power in the aftermath of decolonisation, a rise cemented at the end of the Cold War, caused American political elites to believe that they had achieved "absolute and permanent geopolitical supremacy". This is a reference to the so-called End of History thesis, whose laughable hubris led impressionistic Americans to argue for the application of force to change the economic and political contours of the known world (much, as it might be added, European imperialism had sought to do at the advent of the colonial era). The result? "A swath of destruction that stretched from Afghanistan and Pakistan to Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Libya, Somalia and Palestine". Ghosh singles out NATO's bombing of Libya as "a particularly egregious example" of Western short-sightedness because it created a wave of miss migrations in which hapless refugees from the Middle East arriving in Europe - what else could they have done? - drew the hostility of neo-fascist movements that claimed that affluent Europe was a victim of "invasions by black and brown foreigners" when "the preconditions for these mass migrations were created by none other than the West itself" through invasions and regime change operations.

Third, the moment of American unipolarity in particular and Western ascendancy in general "is lurching towards its end" because of the erosion of the West's financial and industrial dominance, which provides the basis of its incursive military power, and the decline of its governing political structures.

Given the coming end of high modernity predicated on the Western exploitation of land and humans, it is important for the world to address the climate catastrophe realistically, which means acknowledging how we all got into this mess. Ghosh argued in his speech that "it is no longer possible to cling to the fiction of a strict division between the natural and the political: it is clear now that wildfires, rain-bombs and the like are also deeply political creatures in that they are the by-products of historical processes that have hugely benefited a small minority of human beings at the expense of the great majority of the world's population".

Fourth, however, not everything is lost. The "discrediting of modernity's anthropocentrism" has "made it possible to contemplate, and even embrace, possibilities that were denied or rejected during the age of high modernity - for example the idea that plants might possess something akin to intelligence; that rocks might be sentient; that rivers might be regarded as persons; that certain topographical features might possess qualities and attributes that cannot be reduced to their geological composition." Ghosh, one of the literary and moral hopes of the world today, remarked in his speech: "Such vitalist conceptions have been widely prevalent in human cultures since the infancy of our species and they still continue to exist in many different forms across the world." For Ghosh, humans who want a future - and who does not? - have to recognise that "we have never been alone on this planet, that the Earth itself is watching, and judging, us".

The judgement is all-important. If we look at climate negotiations, there is a clear message: all the parties to them are working from the existing materiality of a doomed fossil-fuelled civilisation. The global North - whose international rise benefited foundationally from the Industrial Revolution that depended on the massive exploitation of finite natural resources - should bear the primary burden of correcting a historical imbalance by moving to a green economy as the template for the global South as well.

However, as the results of the recent COP29 conference in Azerbaijan show, incrementalism is killing a globe-saving effort. It has been reported that developed nations have agreed to help provide at least $300 billion a year into developing countries by 2035 to underpin their attempts to deal with climate change. Developing countries are bitterly disappointed with this new climate-finance goal.

And so the game will continue. Instead of the major powers of the developed world and the developing world deciding to face up to an existential problem as a common one, one side will seek to buy time and the other to snatch time from the Western clock of high modernity.

This is where public interventions by intellectuals such as Amitav Ghosh could make a difference, should anyone be willing to heed them. Lovers of the world such as Ghosh listen to the world: to its intelligent plants, to its sentient rocks, to its human rivers. They are not members of the party of exploitation, which does not care for what will become of the world because it will not be around to witness the world's downfall. They are members of the party of existence, for whom the world would be very sad to end because that would spell also the extinction of plants, rocks, rivers and animals, including humans.

Ghosh's love for the world is replicated by the world itself. The world loves us. Let the world live. Let us live.

The writer is Principal Research Fellow of the Cosmos Foundation. He may be reached at epaaropaar@gmail.com