Mark: Half of all the greenhouse gases currently in our atmosphere were emitted in just the last 30 years. But what if the real story of our climate crisis didn't start with the steam engine, but with a tiny, fragrant nut, 400 years ago? Michelle: Whoa, hold on. A nut? You’re telling me the origin of our planetary emergency isn't fossil fuels, but something I sprinkle on my eggnog? That feels like a huge leap. Mark: It’s a massive leap, and it’s the explosive idea at the heart of Amitav Ghosh's The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis. And Ghosh isn't just an environmental writer; he's one of India's most celebrated novelists, the first English-language writer to win their highest literary honor, the Jnanpith Award. He’s been wrestling for years with why we can't seem to tell the story of climate change, and this book is his answer. He argues the real story starts with a mindset, a curse, born from the quest for that little nut. Michelle: Okay, a celebrated author, a widely acclaimed book... I'm intrigued. So take me to these Spice Islands. How does a story about nutmeg become a story about genocide?

Mark: It starts, as Ghosh tells it, with a seemingly tiny, almost absurd event. The year is 1621, on the Banda Islands in modern-day Indonesia. These tiny volcanic islands were, at the time, the only place on Earth where nutmeg grew. It was more valuable than gold. People believed it could cure the plague. Michelle: So this wasn't just a baking spice, it was the 17th-century equivalent of a miracle drug. Mark: Exactly. And the Dutch East India Company, the VOC, was determined to control it. They sent an official named Martijn Sonck to a village called Selamon to enforce their monopoly. The atmosphere is incredibly tense. The Dutch are paranoid, the Bandanese are resentful. Then, in the middle of the night, a lamp falls to the floor. Michelle: A lamp falls. That’s it? An accident? Mark: An accident. But in that atmosphere of paranoia, Sonck and his men immediately assume it’s a signal for an attack. They grab their guns and start firing indiscriminately into the darkness. Ghosh uses this moment as a microcosm for the whole colonial project: a pre-existing agenda of violence just waiting for a pretext, no matter how small. Michelle: That’s chilling. So the falling lamp becomes the excuse. What happens next? Mark: It gives Sonck's superior, the infamous Governor-General Jan Pieterszoon Coen, the justification he needs. Coen is a man who literally wrote, "There is nothing in the world that gives one a better right than power." He saw the Bandanese people, with their decentralized politics and open trading networks, as an obstacle. So he proposed what he called a 'final solution'. Michelle: He used that exact phrase? Mark: The book points out the chilling resonance. Coen wrote to his directors that it would be best to "completely chase all the Bandanese from the land." To do this, he assembled a massive fleet and, in a detail that sounds like something out of a Tarantino film, he hired 80 Japanese ronin—masterless samurai—as mercenaries, specifically for their expertise in decapitation and dismemberment. Michelle: Wow. Japanese samurai, hired by a Dutch corporation, to commit genocide over a spice. The globalized brutality is staggering. Mark: And it was systematic. On May 8th, 1621, Coen had forty-four Bandanese elders, their leaders, publicly executed by these ronin. They were beheaded and quartered, and their remains were impaled on stakes as a warning. Within weeks, the islands were depopulated. The original inhabitants were almost entirely wiped out. Michelle: That's horrifying. And what’s even more disturbing is the next step Ghosh describes. The idea of enslaving the few survivors to teach the new Dutch settlers how to cultivate the very thing their people were killed for... it's just monstrous. Mark: It's the ultimate expression of what Ghosh calls the 'world-as-resource' worldview. The people, the land, the trees—they are all just cogs in a machine for generating profit. The Bandanese weren't people; they were an inefficient part of the supply chain. And this brutal logic, Ghosh argues, didn't stay on that tiny island. It became a template for the modern world.

Michelle: Okay, so this brutal, mechanistic worldview is born in the Spice Islands. But how does that connect to the broader planetary crisis? How does it jump from nutmeg to, say, the Amazon burning? Mark: It jumps by scaling up. Ghosh argues that what happened on Banda was a prototype. The next step was to apply that logic to entire continents. He takes us to North America, where he introduces this brilliant, terrifying concept he calls 'terraforming'. Michelle: Terraforming? Like, what we talk about doing to Mars? Mark: Precisely. But he's using it to describe what European colonists did to Earth. They didn't just conquer the people; they waged war on the landscape itself. They saw the Americas as a "hideous & desolate wilderness, full of wild beasts & wild men," as one colonist put it. It wasn't 'improved' in the European style. Michelle: What does 'improved' even mean in this context? Mark: It means fenced-in fields and cattle. The Puritan leader John Winthrop argued that Native Americans had no right to the land because "they inclose no ground, neither have they cattle to maintain it." It's an ecological justification for conquest. If you don't use the land like we do, you don't own it. Michelle: That’s a great way to put it. It’s not a legal argument, it’s an ecological one. So the very act of changing the land becomes the act of claiming it. Mark: Exactly. And this is where it gets even darker. The colonists' 'companion species'—their cows and pigs—became weapons. Ghosh shares this heartbreaking appeal from a Narragansett sachem, Miantonomi, in 1642. He’s trying to build an anti-colonial alliance, and he says, "the English having gotten our land, they with scythes cut down the grass, and with axes fell the trees; their cows and horses eat the grass, and their hogs spoil our clam banks, and we shall all be starved." Michelle: Wow. He's describing ecological warfare. The pigs destroying the clam banks—that’s a direct attack on their food supply. It's not a side effect of settlement; it's a weapon. Mark: It's a weapon. And it was a deliberate one. This 'slow violence' culminates in one of the most shocking examples in the book: the extermination of the Great Plains buffalo. The US Army realized they couldn't defeat the highly mobile Lakota and Cheyenne warriors with conventional tactics. So, they targeted their food source. Michelle: They killed the buffalo to kill the people. Mark: Yes. Between 1865 and 1883, an estimated 10 to 15 million buffalo were slaughtered. The Lakota scholar Nick Estes is quoted in the book, saying, "The Indian problem’ was also a ‘buffalo problem’ and both faced similar extermination processes... The destruction of one required the destruction of the other." This is terraforming as total war. You're not just killing the enemy; you're annihilating their entire world. Michelle: And that connects directly to today. The idea of a 'sacrifice zone'—a place we deem disposable for mining or waste—it’s the same logic. We're still terraforming. We're still deciding which landscapes, and which people, are expendable. Mark: That's the core of the curse. It’s a pattern, a logic of extraction and elimination that started with a fragrant nut and now encompasses the entire planet.

Michelle: So we have this history of extreme violence and ecological destruction. But what's the deep, philosophical thread connecting it all? What is the 'curse' in The Nutmeg’s Curse? Mark: The curse is a particular way of seeing the world. It's the belief that the Earth is a dead, inert machine, and we are its masters. Ghosh calls this the mechanistic worldview. And he shows its most absurd and terrifying conclusion back with the Dutch and their spices. Michelle: How so? Mark: After they secured their monopoly, the Dutch faced a new problem: oversupply. Too much nutmeg and clove was driving the price down. A rational actor might adjust production. But the VOC, in its purely mechanical logic, came up with a policy called 'exterpatie'—extermination. For over a century, they sent expeditions to other islands to systematically burn and destroy any 'unauthorized' spice trees. Michelle: They were literally at war with trees. To keep profits high. That’s insane. Mark: It's the logic of the machine taken to its extreme. The trees have no value in themselves; they only have value as a commodity. If they threaten that commodity's price, they must be destroyed. This, Ghosh argues, is the mindset that now threatens the planet. We see forests not as living systems, but as board feet of lumber or obstacles to a new mine. Michelle: So what's the alternative? If that's the curse, what's the blessing? Mark: The blessing is what Ghosh calls 'vitalism'. It’s the Indigenous worldview that the Dutch tried to exterminate in the Banda Islands, and that colonists tried to terraform out of existence in the Americas. It’s the belief that the world is alive. It’s filled with agency, with spirits, with what he calls 'hidden forces'. Michelle: Okay, 'vitalism' is a big word. Can you break that down for me? Is it just... a spiritual belief, or something more? Mark: It's a fundamental way of relating to the world. He tells this amazing story from the Banda Islands, long after the massacre. A new, mixed population of formerly enslaved people from all over Asia created a new culture. They didn't have shared ancestry, but they developed a deep sense of belonging. Why? Because they believed the land itself was alive, animated by the spirits of 'founder-figures,' the datu-datu. The land made them Bandanese, not the other way around. Michelle: That’s a complete reversal of the colonial idea. The colonist says, "I make the land English." But the Bandanese say, "The land makes us Bandanese." Mark: Exactly! It’s a land-centric, not a human-centric, worldview. And this is the perspective Ghosh argues we desperately need to recover. He quotes Pope Francis's encyclical, Laudato Si, which says a true ecological approach must "hear both the cry of the earth and the cry of the poor." The curse was that we 'muted' both. We called them 'brutes'—people and nature alike—and declared them silent, inert, and ready for exploitation.

Michelle: So the book is really a call to 'un-mute' the world. To recognize that the planet isn't a dead rock we live on, but a living entity we are a part of. Mark: Precisely. The book's ultimate argument is that our climate crisis is a crisis of relationship, born from a history where a small minority of humans 'muted' the voices of both other people and the planet itself. They were all categorized as 'brutes'—things without minds, without stories, without agency. The path forward isn't just about solar panels and carbon taxes; it's about restoring those voices to our stories and recognizing that we are part of a living world, not its masters. Michelle: It’s a profound shift in perspective. It’s not about 'saving the planet' as if it's a passive victim. It’s about repairing a relationship with a powerful, living entity that we have profoundly wronged. Mark: And that entity is now responding. The wildfires, the floods, the super-storms—Ghosh frames these not as malfunctions of a machine, but as the Earth's own 'hidden forces' reasserting themselves, shrugging off the forms we've tried to impose on it. The curse of the nutmeg is coming home to roost on a planetary scale. Michelle: It really leaves you wondering... what 'hidden forces' and living voices in our own landscapes have we been taught to ignore? And what might happen if we started listening? Mark: A question that feels more urgent every day. Mark: This is Aibrary, signing off.