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

by Amitav Ghosh

If we put aside the myth-making of modernity, in which humans are triumphantly free of material dependence on the planet, and acknowledge the reality of our ever-increasing servitude to the products of the Earth, then the story of the Bandanese no longer seems so distant from our present predicament. To the contrary, the continuities between the two are so pressing and powerful that it could even be said that the fate of the Banda Islands might be read as a template for the present, if only we knew how to tell that story.

These questions bring us to the limits of a certain way of telling stories about the past. The empirical, documentary methods of historical scholarship—the methods that allowed me to construct a timeline of what happened in the Bandas in 1621—depend critically on language, literacy, and writing. The evidence for those methods comes primarily from written records. In the stories they tell, entities that lack language figure only as backdrops against which human dramas are enacted. Nutmegs, cloves, and volcanoes may figure in these stories, but they cannot themselves be actors in the stories that historians tell; nor can they tell stories of their own.

To envisage the world in this way was a crucial step toward making an inert Nature a reality. As Ben Ehrenreich observes: “Only once we imagined the world as dead could we dedicate ourselves to making it so.”

In such acts of renaming, the adjective “New” comes to be invested with an extraordinary semantic and symbolic violence. Not only does it create a tabula rasa, erasing the past, but it also invests a place with meanings derived from faraway places, “our dear native country.”

The differences between European and Indian conceptions of living on the land have never been more eloquently summarized than by the Oglala Lakota chief Standing Bear: “We did not think of the great open plains, the beautiful rolling hills, and winding streams with tangled growth as ‘wild.’ Only to the white man was Nature a ‘wilderness’ and only to him was the land ‘infested’ with ‘wild’ animals and ‘savage’ people. To us it was tame. Earth was bountiful and we were surrounded with the blessings of the Great Mystery.”9

But it bears asking: of what exactly is the Earth “exhausted”? The planet’s riches may be depleted, but they are very far from being completely spent. And in any case, the imagining of the Earth’s exhaustion occurred long before the absolute depletion of its resources was even distantly envisaged as a possibility. Which is only to say that what the Earth is really exhausted of is not its resources; what it has lost is meaning.

“The practice of doing real science,” writes Kimmerer, “brings the questioner into an unparalleled intimacy with nature fraught with wonder and creativity as we try to comprehend the mysteries of the more-than-human world. Trying to understand the life of another being or another system so unlike our own is often humbling and, for many scientists, is a deeply spiritual pursuit.”38

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.18

AN ESSENTIAL STEP toward the silencing of nonhuman voices was to imagine that only humans are capable of telling stories.

Jane Goodall: “It is all but impossible to describe the new awareness that comes when words are abandoned. . . . Words are a part of our rational selves, and to abandon them for a while is to give freer reign to our intuitive selves.”

In many respects, therefore, India’s recent history is a cautionary tale about the very real dangers that “mysticism” can present when it is mixed with exclusionary right-wing politics. Nor is this coincidental: the ideologues who laid the foundations of Hindu fundamentalism explicitly embraced fascistic theories of race, Aryanism, and so on. They may have invoked ancient symbols and images in their writings, but their ideas were very much products of colonial modernity, which is why they have now morphed so easily into an ideology of rapaciously extractivist nationalism.

In its simplicity and power the idea of protecting “all our relatives” may well be the key to creating bridges between people across the globe. An important indication of this lies in the many significant legal victories that Indigenous peoples around the world have won in recent years, precisely on vitalist grounds, by underscoring the sacredness of mountains, rivers, and forests, and by highlighting the ties of kinship by which they are bound to humans.

This is a profoundly hopeful development, because it indicates that even courtrooms, which are among the most redoubtable citadels of official modernity, are increasingly susceptible to the influence of that subterranean river of vitalism, which, after having been driven underground for centuries, is now once again rising powerfully to the surface around the world.

I do not need to be Bandanese to understand what Gunung Api means to the islanders, just as I do not need to be Greek to be moved by the Iliad. It is empathy that makes it possible for humans to understand each other’s stories: this is why storytelling needs to be at the core of a global politics of vitality.