You are invited to SEACoast’s last event this Fall!
On December 2, Thursday, 5-7pm PST, we will discuss Amitav Ghosh’s new book, The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis. We are thrilled to have Prof. Noriko Aso, historian at UCSC and member of the SEACoast Advisory Board, join and start us off with a few questions. We would like to ask participants to read the book in advance of the seminar. RSVP by filling out this form. The event flyer is attached. Please forward to colleagues and students who might be interested in attending. Participants will receive a Zoom link at least 30 minutes before the event.
A few words about this book from the University of Chicago Press: “A powerful work of history, essay, testimony, and polemic, Amitav Ghosh’s new book traces our contemporary planetary crisis back to the discovery of the New World and the sea route to the Indian Ocean. The Nutmeg’s Curse argues that the dynamics of climate change today are rooted in a centuries-old geopolitical order constructed by Western colonialism. At the center of Ghosh’s narrative is the now-ubiquitous spice nutmeg. The history of the nutmeg is one of conquest and exploitation—of both human life and the natural environment. In Ghosh’s hands, the story of the nutmeg becomes a parable for our environmental crisis, revealing the ways human history has always been entangled with earthly materials such as spices, tea, sugarcane, opium, and fossil fuels. Our crisis, he shows, is ultimately the result of a mechanistic view of the earth, where nature exists only as a resource for humans to use for our own ends, rather than a force of its own, full of agency and meaning.”
