The Nutmeg’s Curse, by Amitav Ghosh, is one such book, that aims to burst our bubbles just enough for us to see beyond our post-modern, neo-liberal, capitalist lives, that we’ve all not only taken for granted as the only way to function in countries and in societies but that we also defend and propagate as the only ‘right’ way for the future. Amitav Ghosh takes us into a journey of the past, as a means to find the answers to our collective future. And puts in words beautifully, what many of us already feel in our bones every day - the way the world functions today does not work for the world and the people living in it, and will continue to not work in the future.
This book is extremely ‘timely’, because we can get all the help we need if we are to save the world, and because it offers an alternative way to do it, beyond delegations, promises, COP26, and activism. But more importantly, the book is ‘timeless’, because it takes a deeper and longer time perspective that shows us a more human, a more fundamental, and a more holistic re-orientation that has always existed and can perhaps show us the way into the future.
Amitav Ghosh makes a few simple but deeply powerful reflections, towards finding answers to our planet crisis
One, that history is always seen as an idea of ‘time’. Events that happened against a timeline in the past. And because our understanding of history is what conditions us on how we think about the world and where we came from, this narrow idea of history as ‘time’ leaves an essential aspect of history that is equally, if not more important. And that is history as an idea of ‘space’ - of how the people, the flora, the fauna, and the environment all existed inter-dependently at a moment in time. And what these memories give us in our understanding of the world. And therefore, what lessons does that give for the future.
Two, the neo-liberal capitalist systems that we all function within today, is a legacy of only the last 400 years of imperialism, from Portuguese to the Dutch to the British, and across most of the world from the Americas in the west to the Indonesian end in the East and everywhere in between. It is the fundamental belief system and the entire conscious strategy of self-proclaimed civilized-and-therefore-superior colonial-settlers conquering lands for exploiting their resources for the benefit of the empires, at the expense of local people, animal-plant ecosystems, and the environment. And it is this colonial-settler mindset that is being repeated over and over again (including an acceleration in the last 50 years), much after the end of ‘formal’ imperialism, and being practiced also by the same countries in modern times, that were the victims earlier.
Three, the entire language and approach to sustainability and environment today, is steeped in logic and science, and jargon and morality and politics and activism. But, what moves people and societies are stories, not facts. And what’s missing in the world today is these stories of the plants, and the animals, and the air and the water, and the wind and the sun. Stories that we can all feel and therefore connect with, enough to save it.
A skill and a way of life, and the answers, that today live with the one section of humanity (the farmers, the indigenous population, the tribals) that itself has been marginalized in society by the same capitalist forces that are responsible for our current planet crisis. The one set of people that can save us is the one people who have no say in the environmental discourse. The irony is painful. Ghosh calls to storytellers of all kinds to take this mantle on.
Four, one of the fundamental reasons for our planet crisis is our conditioned world view of seeing the earth and its elements as ‘resources’. The language and the ethos of a resource imply something that needs to be used for the benefit of humans. Couple that with the incessant ‘growth obsession’ of the capitalist world (which inherently is in contradiction with planet Earth), and is it any surprise that we find ourselves in the situation we are in. The solution lies in what Ghosh calls thinking of the earth as ‘Gaia’, a living entity and that we need to live in harmony with, and not as a ’resource’ to manage.
Finally, Ghosh argues that all of this has shaped the geopolitics of energy and all other resources of the earth. The power and politics of different countries around oil, fossil fuels, renewables, materials that make greedy-growing modern human life possible, will continue to be the biggest barrier to the reality of any meaningful action ever being taken towards a more sustainable future. And therefore, any real future solution to the planetary crisis needs to take into account not only dismantling some of these existing structures across countries, working together, but also including ground level, people-planet-poverty solutions.
Immersing into this brilliant narrative, it becomes clear to us that our current preoccupation with the science of environment sustainability (for example, preventing carbon footprint to keep the temperature increase to under 2 degrees) is too simplistic, and therefore not, the only answer. Which one-sided relationship ever works? No wonder then, the earth as a one-way resource for human beings is a self-fulfilling disaster we are now living in. Consequently, a one-sided solution of reducing greenhouse gases or carbon footprint or any of those will also not be a sustainable answer.
The real solution lies in a socio-economic-political-environmental approach that starts from the stories of plants and animals and people, living interdependently, with a harmonious multi-way relationship of give-and-take and balance. What Ghosh calls a ‘Vitalist’ approach.
Here’s hoping more people read this book, for all of us to make a collective impact to save the future of our planet together. So that many years from now, we and our children can tell the stories of how the world shed its divisiveness and came together to ’pivot’ towards building a vitalist, sustainable, monstrous, beautiful, and thriving Gaia.
No comments:
Post a Comment