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.

Amitav Ghosh is an Indian-born scholar, novelist, and non-fiction writer.

His many books include The Groundbreaking, The Great Darrangement,

Climate Change and the Unthinkable,

in which he explored our imaginative failure in an age of ecological crisis.

I recently spoke with Amitav about his newest book, The Numbags Curse, Parables for a Planet

in Crisis, and how the widespread silencing of non-human voices is deeply entangled in capitalism

and the geopolitical structures that sustain it.

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

reimagining, de-centering 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

...