29 October 2021. History | Columbus
The history of climate change is a history of violence. What Columbus told Isabella
Welcome to Just Two Things, which I try to publish daily, five days a week. (For the next few weeks this might be four days a week while I do a course: we’ll see how it goes). Some links may also appear on my blog from time to time. Links to the main articles are in cross-heads as well as the story.
#1: The history of climate change is a history of violence
I’ve had a pre-COP26 week focussing on stories relating to climate change, and the last one is about Amitav Ghosh’s new book, The Nutmeg’s Curse, a long history of climate change—going back over the 400 years of global expansion and colonialism that has led us to our present crisis. You get a different perspective on the global emergency from Asia.
There’s a longish interview with Ghosh at Mint magazine by Bibek Bhattacharya.
This is Ghosh’s second book about climate change. His 2016 book, The Great Derangement, was driven by concern, even anger, about the impact of climate change. By Bhattacharya’s account, in contrast,
The Nutmeg’s Curse is a forensic examination of how we got here, and the myths we need to debunk if we are to avert catastrophe. Not surprisingly, a proper study of the reasons behind rising greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in the atmosphere, and the resulting galloping increase in global average temperatures, inevitably leads to the twin pillars of Western modernity: colonialism and capitalism. As Ghosh narrates the story, a clear line of causality emerges, beginning with the genocidal European push for resource and empire 600 years ago, to the horrific present of wildfires, cyclones, melting Arctic ice and all the other markers of the climate catastrophe.
The nutmeg gets the starring role because it is, in a nutshell, a parable for the whole story. The nutmeg had been traded by the Bandanese, in the Indian Ocean, for hundreds of years, until Europeans developed a taste for them and their value went through the roof. The Dutch laid waste to the islands and destroyed its people in a generation to profit from the nutmeg.
The English don’t come out well either—Ghosh writes about their brutal conquest of North America and the erasure of its indigenous peoples. (This is also a theme of Braiding Sweetgrass, which I finished recently and hope to come back to here.)
The role of the United States in protecting and promoting the petrodollar economy in the 20th century is, on this reading, the hidden history of climate change. As he says somewhere in the interview
As usual, I’m just going to pull out a couple of highlights here.
For example, he makes a contrast between the people who tend to protect the environment, and those who want to exploit it, as in India, where the forest people of Odisha tried to prevent bauxite mining:
They were the conservators of the hills and the mountains, which were sacred to them. And then mining companies come in to extract bauxite, which is one of the most destructive forms of mining, where you remove an entire mountain to extract some bauxite. The people who have really been struggling to save these forests and save these mountains are the poorest, most vulnerable people in India. Who is defending Earth today? It’s so often just the poorest and most vulnerable people who have this incredible apparatus of state power ranged against them.
One theme of the book and interview is that colonialism is a process of ‘terraforming’ the earth—a word that is more commonly associate with science fiction. Again, he particularly associates this with English colonialism in North America. I had thought that ‘New England’ was just a name, but no:
When the English colonised North America, their whole project was to remake the landscape in the image of England. That’s why they called it New England, that’s why you have so many places named after England. It was a monumental project. It meant creating these networks of dams, and the project just went on until really the mid-20th century. But they kept building these huge dams in the Midwest. And now we see that what is actually happening is that the environment has woken up and it’s striking back.
Bombay, too, as happens (his usage):
Bombay was just six or seven islands and a large parts of these islands only appeared above water during low tide. But Bombay was terraformed into a peninsula. That’s exactly why we see the vulnerability of Bombay today.
Finally, for Ghosh, the history of climate change is a history of violence, a perspective that is elided in much of the discourse about it:
Within the Western discourse, climate change is almost always spoken about as a technological and scientific thing. Whereas to anyone from Asia it’s perfectly clear that climate change is primarily a political reality.
So when we talk about the historical emissions of the US, we are in effect also talking about this history of violence that made it possible.
It’s a connection that is never made, and yet it is the elephant in the room. I sometimes think that because so much of this discourse of climate change comes out of universities, it takes a certain shape and a certain form. Within university culture there is an aversion to sort of confronting the violence as such. And therefore this aspect of a history of extreme violence and how that has led to this moment in time becomes obscured.
#2: What Columbus said to Isabella
Marking Black History Month, I thought I’d share Lorna Goodisn’s poem ‘Reporting Back to Queen Isabella.’ I found this on the Poetry Unbound podcast, where it comes with some light touch analysis by Padraig O’Tuama.
Lorna Goodison, for her part, is one of the Caribbean’s most eminent contemporary poets.
(John Duillo, Christopher Columbus and Queen Isabella, ca. 1993, lithograph, Smithsonian American Art Museum)
Reporting Back to Queen Isabella
by Lorna Goodison
“When Don Cristobal returned to a hero’s welcome,
his caravels corked with treasures of the New World,
he presented his findings; told of his great adventures
to Queen Isabella, whose speech set the gold standard
for her nation’s language. When he came to Xamaica
he described it so: ‘The fairest isle that eyes ever beheld.’
Then he balled up a big sheet of parchment, unclenched,
and let it fall off a flat surface before it landed at her feet.
There we were, massifs, high mountain ranges, expansive
plains, deep valleys, one he’d christened for the Queen
of Spain. Overabundance of wood, over one hundred
rivers, food, and fat pastures for Spanish horses, men,
and cattle; and yes, your majesty, there were some people.”
Update: No sooner had I written yesterday’s Just Two Things on Squid Game than the excellent American blogger Noah Smith published a long piece on why South Korea had become a global cultural power. One observation: Korea is the first country to achieve this without having imperial reach first.
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