The Nutmeg's Curse

Summary

Writer Amitav Ghosh reads the planetary crisis through the Dutch conquest of the Banda Islands, once the nutmeg’s only home. Climate change, he argues, is “the Earth’s response to four centuries of terraforming”, and that remaking required muting a living world first. Awareness of a living Earth “did not wither away of itself”; “it was systematically exterminated”.

Rationale

Ghosh wonders whether warnings that the poor will suffer most taught the privileged to sit climate change out. Part 1 shares the worry: well-meant framing can feed what it opposes.