For Amitav Ghosh, it was the extraordinary violence experienced in the era of Western colonialism from the 15th to 17th centuries that led European elites to think of the world as “an inert repository of resources that existed primarily to be exploited by those who were powerful enough to do it.”
What is the curse of nutmeg and what does it have to do with climate change?
The inhabitants of the Banda islands were exterminated because they were blessed with the nutmeg tree. Therefore, the Bandanese were among the first peoples on the planet to suffer the impacts of what we now call the resource curse. In a sense, climate change can be understood as the globalization of the resource curse. The entire world is now suffering from this curse.
What did the chief of an Indian tribe say to US President Franklin Pierce and why should he have listened?
In 1855, Chief Duwamish Seattle, for whom the city is named, wrote a letter to President Franklin Pierce saying, “Continue to pollute your bed and one night you will suffocate in your own waste. When all the buffalo have been slaughtered, the wild horses tamed, the secret corners of the forest are charged with the smell of men and the sight of lush hills stained by telephone wires, where will the bush be? Missing. Where will the eagle be? Missing. And what does it mean to say goodbye to the swift and the hunt, to the end of life and the beginning of survival? It is increasingly clear that the chief, like many Native Americans, understood that the “American way of life” was ecologically unsustainable.
In the book he attributes the current planetary crisis to a centuries-long history of colonial terraforming.
When Europeans saw North America, especially at first, the forests and swamps seemed frightening. They thought this land was ugly and neglected and they wanted to completely transform it. Much of the conquest was done through livestock and pathogens that were sometimes spread quite deliberately. And all of that is very far from over. These wars of ecological transformation still continue in the Amazon, because what is at stake is the attempt to convert the entire Amazon into a kind of Midwest. But what we are seeing today is the crumbling of landscapes that have been terraformed. It is the parts of North America that have been most broadly designed to resemble European models that are most affected by climate change.
What is traditional ecological knowledge and how is it applied?
Indigenous ways of using controlled burning are a good example of traditional ecological knowledge. In California, for example, there is a big push to use these ancient techniques. In a way, there is a commodification of indigenous knowledge, which is being fetishized and seen as similar to Western forms of knowledge. But they are not: these are forms of knowledge that depend absolutely on stories, legends, myths and various types of beliefs. In reality, the part that applies to ecology cannot be abstracted from the rest of the beliefs.
He claims that the free market alone will never encourage the adoption of renewable energy. Why do you consider that “capitalism and neoliberalism are powerful obstacles to the energy transition”?
It is evident that capitalism, and especially the hyper-extractive neoliberal form of capitalism that now dominates the world, is greatly aggravating the climate crisis. But in my opinion, it is very important to remember that global geopolitics is an equally important factor in the crisis. Defense activities around the world can account for up to a quarter of all greenhouse gas emissions.
Europe is immersed in two great wars. Why is militarization “the most ecologically destructive human endeavor”? What does war have to do with climate change?
The links between climate change and militarization are even clearer and more obvious now than when I wrote The Curse of the Nutmeg. In the book you can read: “It is a serious mistake to imagine that the world is not preparing for the disrupted world of the future. “What is happening is that it is not preparing by taking mitigation measures or reducing CO₂ emissions: instead, it is preparing for war.” In recent years, there has been a massive global increase in military spending and military activity, while spending on climate mitigation remains negligible. It is clear that my prediction was correct.
