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

by Amitav Ghosh

Wars of terraforming were thus biopolitical conflicts in which entire populations were subjected to forms of violence that included massive biological and ecological disruptions.

Wars of extermination were precisely biopolitical wars, in which the weaponization of the environment was a critical element of the conflict.

The Western idea of “nature” is thus the key element that simultaneously enables and conceals the true character of biopolitical warfare. Echoes of this history can still be heard, as for example when American climate denialists claim that fluctuations in climate are “natural,” and are therefore impervious to human intervention.

Why then did Native Americans succumb in such vastly disproportionate numbers? Quite possibly it was because their susceptibility to disease was greatly increased by the multiple kinds of structural violence that accompanied European colonization, such as: “overwork in mines, frequent outright butchery, malnutrition and starvation resulting from the breakdown of Indigenous trade networks, subsistence food production and loss of land, loss of will to live or reproduce (and thus suicide, abortion and infanticide).”32

“immunological determinism can still assuage Euroamerican guilt over American Indian depopulation, whether in the conscious motives of historians, or in the semiconscious desires of their readers.”36

displaced large numbers of people, who were then, through military means and acts of legal exclusion, pushed beyond a notional border into zones of containment. Yet even these zones were never stable;

Indeed, this worldview goes much further than either ecocide or genocide: it envisions and welcomes the prospect of “omnicide,” the extermination of everything—people, animals, and the planet itself.

Blessed by empires, Linnaeus’s system became the foundation of a way of knowing that would claim, from very early on, a monopoly on truth, discounting all other knowledge systems and their methods.

Early joint-stock corporations like the VOC and the EIC were entities that combined the functions of warfare and trade in accordance with Jan Coen’s famous dictum.

like the pandemic, exposed was a range of systemic inequities that interact with one another to create extreme vulnerability. It is increasingly clear now that it is these inequities, rather than GDP or per capita income, that will determine how countries are impacted by the planetary crisis.

Native Americans and African Americans were never indifferent to the past, not least because they had to deal with its legacies of violence

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.31

Thus the urgency of terraforming conquered terrain, of ridding the land of its hidden forces, of transforming it into a tame and familiar repository of resources.

It is essential now, as the prospect of planetary catastrophe comes ever closer, that those nonhuman voices be restored to our stories. The fate of humans, and all our relatives, depends on it.