The Nutmeg's Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis

by Amitav Ghosh

This was a radically new way of envisioning the Earth, as a “vast machine made of inert particles in ceaseless motion.”19 Even in Europe, the mechanistic vision of the world had only just begun to take shape, and then too, only among elites that were directly or indirectly involved in the two great European projects of the time: the conquest of the Americas and the trade in enslaved Africans. It was the rendering of humans into mute resources that enabled the metaphysical leap whereby the Earth and everything in it could also be reduced to inertness. In

As Ben Ehrenreich observes: “Only once we imagined the world as dead could we dedicate ourselves to making it so.”

Then too, much of the destruction occurred far from those who had set the processes in motion; advancing settlers would stumble upon overgrown cornfields and depopulated villages. “I have been assured,” wrote de Tocqueville, “that [the] effect of the approach of the white man was often felt up to five hundred miles from their frontier. Their influence is thus exerted over tribes whose names they hardly know and who suffer from the evils of invasion long before they know the perpetrators.”6 Often it was noise that was the cause of long-range environmental disruption. “Colonial farms and villages could probably be heard before they could be seen. The sounds of trees crashing to the ground, saws and axes shaping timber into planks and boards, hammers rapping on the beams and clapboard of houses, and men grunting while digging postholes for fences all announced colonists’ occupation of another tract of land.”

Now, as before, the fact that the devastation is being effected by nonhuman, “natural” forces makes it possible for many people, especially in the West—and especially in countries with settler-colonial histories—to claim that climate change is occurring independently of human intentions and agency.

Indeed, common lands existed everywhere in the world, with no tragic consequences, until Europeans, armed with guns and the ideas of John Locke and his ilk, began to forcefully impose draconian regimes of private poverty. An accurate title for the history of common lands would therefore be “The Tragedy of Enclosure.”

A Cornell study has demonstrated that students of economics are markedly more selfish, more prone to dishonesty, and less willing to cooperate with others than their peers in other fields.13 What the study demonstrates, in effect, is that selfishness, uncooperativeness, and dishonesty are not “naturally” dominant aspects of the human personality; they become dominant only through processes of indoctrination into certain modes of thought.

Colonization was thus not merely a process of establishing dominion over human beings; it was also a process of subjugating, and reducing to muteness, an entire universe of beings that was once thought of as having agency, powers of communication, and the ability to make meaning—animals, trees, volcanoes, nutmegs. These mutings were essential to processes of economic extraction—because, as the philosopher Akeel Bilgrami observes, in order to see something as a mere resource, “we first need to see it as brute, as something that makes no normative demands of practical and moral engagement with us.”19 It