9 ideas
The present ecological emergency is not a recent technical accident but the direct extension of centuries of colonial extraction and the worldview that enabled it. Viewing climate change through this lens shows that the same patterns of who consumes and who is sacrificed persist into the carbon economy.
Indigenous and non-European traditions that treat mountains, forests, and animals as living, communicative beings constitute a form of resistance to extractive logic. Restoring the recognition that the nonhuman world has agency and voice undermines the very premise that makes limitless plunder thinkable.
What appears as the neutral operation of global markets is sustained by military force, with wealthy nations maintaining access to resources through armed power while presenting outcomes as natural economic results. The nutmeg monopoly shows that scarcity and value in commodities are manufactured through violence, not discovered through trade.
Fossil fuel dependence is maintained less by market logic than by military and strategic power, since control of energy flows underpins Western, especially Anglo-American, global dominance. The same hierarchies that organized empire now decide who is protected from climate impacts and who is left exposed. Climate negotiations therefore stall because decarbonization threatens an existing structure of geopolitical power, not only because it costs money.
Ghosh urges taking seriously the idea, held by the Bandanese and many Indigenous traditions, that volcanoes, rivers, plants and even the nutmeg have agency and can 'speak' in historical events. Seen this way, climate disasters, pandemics and wildfires look less like random external shocks and more like the Earth responding to how it has been treated. The lens moves nonhuman beings from backdrop to actors in the story.
The early modern view of Earth as inert matter, with no agency, spirit or meaning, made it possible to treat land and the peoples tied to it as resources to be emptied and reorganized. This view took hold together with colonial conquest: people who saw landscapes as alive and meaningful were labeled 'brutes' or 'savages' and eliminated. The climate crisis is therefore rooted in a metaphysics of domination, not merely in carbon accounting or technology.
Under Jan Pieterszoon Coen, the Dutch East India Company invaded the Banda Islands, then the world's only source of nutmeg, and killed, enslaved or expelled most of the roughly 15,000 Bandanese to secure a monopoly. The islands were then carved into plantations worked by enslaved labor, turning a living, inhabited landscape into a production machine for a single commodity. Ghosh treats this as the template for the modern relationship between capital, violence and land.
Settler colonialism worked by deliberately destroying native ecologies and the peoples whose ways of life depended on them, then remaking the land in the image of the colonizer's homeland. Examples include clearing forests, killing bison herds and introducing European crops and livestock. The environmental transformation of the Americas and elsewhere was not a side effect of conquest but one of its main instruments.
Ghosh names a process in which both colonized humans and the natural world are reduced to mute 'brutes', beings without voice, reason or rights that may be used without limit. Dehumanizing people and de-animating nature are presented as one operation, each justifying the other. Undoing the climate crisis therefore requires restoring voice both to marginalized peoples and to the nonhuman world.