Welcome to Emergence Magazine's podcast. I'm Emanuel Vaughn Lee, executive editor of Emergence

magazine, located on the unseated ancestral lands of the Coast Mewalk people of present-day

Marin County. Each week, we feature a new interview, narrated essay, or story, exploring the threads connecting

ecology, culture, and spirituality.

When we invited writers, artists, poets, to contribute to this volume. One of the questions we asked was,

how can stories return us to what is essential as we navigate an uncertain future? In our

exploration of roots, I spoke with scholar and writer Amitav Ghosh about his latest book, The Nutmeg's

Curse, Parables for a Planet in Crisis.

In this conversation, Amitav calls on storytellers to lead us in the necessary work of collective reimagining,

decentering human narratives and re-centering stories of the land.

The nutmeg's curse takes you on a remarkably deep journey into our collective past, exploring the root causes of climate change and the ecocide, and how climate change is intimately linked to colonialism,

the genocide of indigenous peoples, and structures of organized violence that you describe as being

foundational in forming the modern geopolitical order. And you take us on this journey through the

story of the nutmeg, the spice that originated in the Banda Islands in Indonesia.

And the nutmeg really becomes the lens through which you explore so much in this book.

How and why did you end up choosing the nutmeg to tell this story?

Well, I think the nutmeg's history really encapsulates the history of the planet in some bizarre way, you know, the modern history of the nutmeg.

Because really what the nutmeg was is that it was a gift of volcanic earth.

It was a gift of the incredible forests of Maluku.

And in the end, you know, for more than a millennium,

it made the people of this tiny archipelago, the Banda Islands.

It made them rich and prosperous, and they had good lives.

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