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

by Amitav Ghosh

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.

To be “civilized” was to accept that the Earth is inert and machine- like, and that no aspect of it, in principle, can elude human knowledge. A defining characteristic of “savagery,” on the other hand, was the “belief in the vitality of natural and celestial objects.”5

amongst a group of advanced students who had learned a great deal about pollution, climate change, and habitat loss. Many of them had even opted for careers in environmental protection. Yet when asked for examples of interactions between people and land that were positive rather than negative, most of them could not think of even one.

it is a grave error to imagine that the world is not preparing for the disrupted planet of the future. It’s just that it’s not preparing by taking mitigatory measures or by reducing emissions: instead, it is preparing for a new geopolitical struggle for dominance.

It is largely in affluent countries, then, and mainly among the more privileged, that climate change is perceived as a techno-economic concern oriented toward the future; for the have- nots of the world, in rich and poor countries alike, it is primarily a matter of justice, rooted in histories of race, class, and geopolitics.

When the idea that the selfish pursuit of individual interests is a universal feature of human nature is adopted as a basic tenet, it can become a self- fulfilling prophecy.

So it is only in that they lack language— a human attribute— that trees are mute. But in that humans lack the ability to communicate as trees do, could it not be said that for a tree it is the human who is mute?

except for one small part of Africa, nowhere on Earth can people be said to be truly native, in the sense of having come into being on that soil.