The roots of planetary peril

The title of the book would lead you to expect a conventional history, like Mark Kurlansky’s Salt and Cod, James Walvin’s Sugar or Sven Beckert’s Empire of Cotton. These books focus on an agri-commodity to trace a global history. Sugar and Empire of Cotton, for instance, take a hard look at colonial power struggles to control both commodities by institutionalising slavery. Amitav Ghosh puts the nutmeg at the centre of an extended discourse on climate change.

Climate change and the West’s indifference to it have been bothering Mr Ghosh for some years. At the launch of his 2016 book apocalyptically titled The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable he wondered why this palpable crisis had not created a vibrant culture of literature or music. True, I can recall only one hit song on the subject. That was called Nature’s Disappearing, by the British blues-rocker John Mayall in 1970, a response to the environmental destruction he saw around him. But for the most part, climate change is a stealthy enemy, impacting lives in insidious ways.

To make up for this lack, Mr Ghosh has marshalled his storytelling talents to create a tour de force that places capitalism at the epicentre of planetary peril. From this angle, colonialism becomes a virulent force of ecological intervention and global power politics, the engines of climate disaster. Mr Ghosh does not restrict himself to the lofty perch of geopolitics. He links the tectonic forces of global capitalism to the lives of ordinary people — American Indians, Bangladeshi migrants, the Amazon tribes — though he sometimes underplays the role of corrupt regimes in global migration patterns.    

The nutmeg on the Banda Islands in Indonesia is a good starting point. Together with pepper and cloves, it formed part of the spice trading networks that enriched Mediterranean Eurasia in the 15th and 16th centuries. The European spice race that brought Vasco D’Gama to India drew the Dutch East India Company to the Bandas. Their efforts to force reluctant Bandanese to establish a monopoly on the nutmeg trade to the exclusion of the Spanish and Portuguese resulted in a massacre, which may well have been called genocide today, and with the introduction of the plantation business inevitably left a degraded landscape.  

Mr Ghosh covers the familiar arguments to underline the man-made nature of climate change but instead of relying on the standard template of dying polar bears, rising sea levels and fossil fuel dependency, he offers updated interpretations that alter the historical prism. For instance, he writes of alternative theories of the onset of the Little Ice Age of the mid-17th century. We know its causal links to “natural” factors such as solar and seismic activities. Newer research suggests that massive depopulation caused by European onslaughts on Amerindians — between 75 and 90 per cent died across two continents — turned vast tracts of cultivated land to forest and sharply lowered global temperatures.

Received wisdom has Amerindian tribes annihilated by diseases such as smallpox and cholera that the Europeans brought with them because they lacked the resistance to these alien infections. But studies suggest that Amerindians were, in fact, extremely healthy with well-developed immune systems. Their vulnerability to European diseases was the result of systemic exploitation and malnourishment by settler colonialists. Not all of this was deliberate; noise pollution from settler colonies, with whom peace treaties had been made, scared away deer and bison from Amerindian hunting grounds, for example. Most strikingly, Mr Ghosh points to the ecological cost of militarisation, a less discussed aspect of climate destruction. The Pentagon is the single largest consumer of energy in the US and generates more toxic waste annually than the top five US chemical companies combined. The irony: Early evidence of climate change came from research funded by the department of defence, and it is more acutely aware of the crisis than most other institutions. Yet, as

Mr Ghosh writes, the quandary for the US is reducing its dependence on the resources on which its geopolitical power is founded (cue a quick explanation of the petrodollar). Now, the armed forces of China, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Russia and India are expanding rapidly and these countries, too, are spending vast amounts on energy-intensive systems, raising misgivings about the credibility of commitments made at Paris.

He questions an economic model that encourages the developing world —tomorrow’s polluters — to emulate Western consumption patterns. His book invites an exploration of the non-temporal elements of the natural world without making his discourse appear too flaky. He brings us down to earth to the intersection of folklore, ecology and modernity where people develop and lose their intuitive feel for the environment. “What does it mean to live on Earth as though it were Gaia…a living vital entity in which many kinds of beings tell stories?” he asks in a chapter that describes how a shaman in the Amazon briefly became a force of conservation.

Mr Ghosh has offered the non-expert reader an accessible explanation of the role of human activity in our existential crisis. Climate experts may find much to argue over, and given the level of political polarisation on this topic this lyrically written book is unlikely to alter mind-sets. But it is worth a read if you can’t afford a ticket to Mars.