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

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

1 " As far back as 1992, the Union of Concerned Scientists warned that humanity faced a stark choice between spending its resources on war and violence, or on preventing catastrophic environmental damage. The report was signed by 1,700 scientists, including the majority of Nobel Prize winners in the sciences.17 In 2017 the warning was reissued, and this time it was signed by more than 15,000 scientists: it concluded that the state of the world was even worse than before. The first UCS report attracted a good deal of attention; the second one passed almost unnoticed. "

― Amitav Ghosh , The Nutmeg's Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis

2 " THE PREVALENCE OF the word “New” in maps of the Americas and Australia points to one of the most important aspects of European expansion: ecological and topographic transformation. "

― Amitav Ghosh , The Nutmeg's Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis

3 " In addition, tastes had begun to change in Europe. Anxieties about sexuality led to the shunning of dietary items that were thought to overstimulate the body and create propensities for the “solitary vice.”2 The poet Percy Bysshe Shelley denounced spices as well as the spice trade as “harmful to the moral fibre” of the body and the nation.3 Upper-class Europeans, who had once relished spicy food, now began to take pride in the blandness of their cuisine. "

― Amitav Ghosh , The Nutmeg's Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis

4 " The end of the world is seen, as Tennyson puts it, as the “far-off event” that allows Man to realize his true self, as pure Spirit, disencumbered of all fleshly and earthly ties. These ideas may appear deranged, but they continue to constitute a vital substrate of contemporary imaginaries. Signs of this substrate are everywhere around us: in the evangelical Christian idea of the “Rapture”; in the apocalyptic visions of ecofascists; in the dreams of those who yearn for a world “cleansed” of humanity; and in the fantasies of the billionaires who, having grown tired of this surly Earth and its sullen inhabitants, aspire to create a tamer version of it by terraforming some other planet.20 Their dream may be wrapped in futuristic cladding, but it is in fact nothing but an atavistic yearning to put in motion once again the processes of terraforming by which settler-colonials turned large parts of the Earth into “neo-Europes. "

― Amitav Ghosh , The Nutmeg's Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis

5 " is morbid individualism that turns crises into tragedies. "

― Amitav Ghosh , The Nutmeg's Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis

6 " furious growth of Covid- 19 cases in those parts of the US where many people regarded masking as an infringement of their individual liberties suggests that it is morbid individualism that turns crises into tragedies. "

― Amitav Ghosh , The Nutmeg's Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis

7 " it is a grave error to imagine that the world is not preparing for the disrupted planet of the future. It’s just that it’s not preparing by taking mitigatory measures or by reducing emissions: instead, it is preparing for a new geopolitical struggle for dominance. "

― Amitav Ghosh , The Nutmeg's Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis