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

by Amitav Ghosh

Adam Smith’s insight that wealth is something that is “desired, not for the material satisfactions that it brings but because it is desired by others.”14

Bacon’s reasoning may appear archaic, but it continues to animate the workings of empire to this day. In essence he was making the argument that a well-governed country (“any nation that is civil and policed”) has an absolute right to invade countries that are “degenerate” or in violation of the “laws of nature and nations.” This is, of course, the fundamental doctrine of “liberal interventionism,” and it has been invoked many times in recent decades to justify “wars of choice” launched by Western powers.

“Only once we imagined the world as dead could we dedicate ourselves to making it so.”

In this lies a fundamental difference between settler-colonial conflicts and the colonial wars fought by Europeans in Asia and Africa. The wars waged by the British in India, for example, conformed to the usual patterns of Eurasian warfare: soldiers fought each other with human-made weapons, and the wars were usually limited in duration. Settler-colonial conflicts were of a completely different order of warfare. Indigenous peoples faced a state of permanent (or “forever”) war that involved many kinds of other-than-human beings and entities: pathogens, rivers, forests, plants, and animals all played a part in the struggle.

The planet will never come alive for you unless your songs and stories give life to all the beings, seen and unseen, that inhabit a living Earth—Gaia.

it becomes necessary to identify the properties that make a kilowatt produced by fossil fuels different from the same quantity of energy generated by solar panels and windmills. For it isn’t only because they produce energy that fossil fuels have come to be established at the core of modern life: it is also because the energy they produce interacts with structures of power in ways that are specific to fossil fuels. In this lies their uncanny vitality.

This combination of functions was reinforced when capitalism developed a formal economic doctrine in the ideology of “Free Trade.” This complex of ideas is as much a geopolitical as an economic ideology: it has served as a rationale for war from the time of the First Opium War, and continues to do so to this day. Its advocates see no contradiction between their belief in the absolute autonomy of free markets and their embrace of state intervention in the form of war. Capitalism is, and has always been, a war economy, repeatedly rescued from collapse by geopolitical conflagrations, as was the case after the Great Depression.

Today the Pentagon is the single largest consumer of energy in the United States—and probably in the world.

Military and security assessments of climate change fit this pattern perfectly in the sense that they project images of catastrophe into the future in a fashion that negates the possibility of confronting climate change in the present day.

There is, I think, an important question here for the climate movement. Activists have long sought to appeal to the conscience of the privileged by emphasizing the message that the costs of climate change will largely be borne by the world’s poor, mainly Black and brown people. It now needs to be considered whether these appeals to the conscience may not have had exactly the opposite of the intended effect. Is it possible that this message has actually persuaded the privileged to think they need do nothing about climate change because they will be insulated from the worst impacts of global warming by their affluence, and indeed by their bodily advantages? Some may believe that climate change is just another of the periodic challenges of the business cycle; others may have convinced themselves that they will ultimately reap some rewards from climate change, just as their ancestors benefited from the process of continental terraforming.

Would the West have embarked on its reckless use of resources if it had imagined that a day might come when the rest of the world would adopt the practices that enabled affluent countries to industrialize, just as the West had itself adopted innumerable non-Western practices and technologies? If this possibility had been acknowledged a century ago, then maybe some thought would have been given to the consequences. But through the nineteenth and much of the twentieth centuries it was an unstated assumption among those who ruled the world that most non-Westerners were simply too stupid, too brutish, to make the transition to industrial civilization on a mass scale. Concealed by abstractions, these assumptions undergirded a range of academic disciplines like development studies, and some branches of economics and sociology, in which poverty was ascribed to “culture,” a term that was often laden with racial baggage. These assumptions have penetrated so deep into these disciplines that they can perhaps never be expunged.