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

"He starts with the nutmeg, and the naturally occurring ecosystem which it springs from on an island in Indonesia . Then he looks at the history of how the cultivation, harvesting, transportation, and ultimately the commodification of the nutmeg let to both environmental degradation and the political domination of the island. It formed a key part of Dutch colonialism. From there, he tells the story of capitalism and colonialism, the intertwining of the two, and how the global system of trade we’re currently left with has its roots in both of those things. There’s the exploitation of natural resources and, by necessity, a throwing under the bus of all the people who get in the way. But it’s so much more than that. I read short reviews that focused on the nutmeg on its own, but that’s really just the starting point. What was most powerful in the book, for me, was the way he talks through the reasons fossil fuels became embedded in our lives and why it’s so hard to disentangle them. A key element here is the military; he talks about the role of fossil fuels in transforming naval power, in the first instance in Britain, through Churchill and the Royal Navy, and then it being a key part of America’s victory in the Second World War and its subsequent control of world trade regimes. “Climate adaptation is synonymous with systems change” There are some astonishing facts in there. More than half of global shipping is the movement of petroleum products. So it gives a sense of both the historical depth of this entanglement and the scale of the interests and networks, the hard wiring that underpins our systems and civilisations. He finishes by returning to Indonesia, and all the culture and songs and worldview of the people for whom the nutmeg was a key part of their cosmology. And by visiting some of the refugees, for whom it’s not very many generations back when this culture was still alive. And of course, the nutmeg and the culture has all the solutions embedded within it in terms of how we must live with nature—all those ideas that are now very popular in mainstream politics in the global north are still to be found alive in indigenous cosmologies, so there’s a nice circularity to the argument. The seeds of the future involve reclaiming a lot of those cosmologies. I think that’s increasingly the case. Even a few years ago, people wouldn’t have seen it that way. But, and this also gets to another book on the list, Reconsidering Reparations , the moment we are in now forces us to look afresh at history. How did we get here? We have to grapple with the histories that have brought us to this point. And the histories that have brought us to this point are incredibly violent, very unjust. Fossil fuels and natural exploitation and the exploitation of people as well as nature. So, yes, increasingly to care about the environment means to look critically at history, at how we got into this mess. I think what that’s doing is, globally, causing a sea change. In the political centre of gravity, incredible numbers of people are now concerned about climate change. Across the board you find concern with plastics, with consumption of hydrocarbons, emissions, and so on. Green policies are massively popular in most countries. The drag on action is actually the conservatism of governments, not populations in most cases."