‘The Nutmeg’s Curse’: Amitav Ghosh on the silencing of nature

On Wednesday, March 25, in Barnard’s LeFrak Theatre, Amitav Ghosh gave a lecture following the story of the nutmeg, tracing how colonialism is intrinsically tied to the planetary catastrophe.

Photo provided by Aradhana Seth

By Julieta Skallman

April 2, 2026

By following the story of the nutmeg, from its beginnings in the Banda Islands to the spice trade and beyond, acclaimed author Amitav Ghosh, invited by Barnard’s English Department, gave a lecture about how the climate crisis is connected to the history of colonialism. The lecture, which took place in Barnard College’s LeFrak Theatre on Wednesday, March 25 at 7:30 p.m., was titled “The Nutmeg’s Curse: Non-human Voices, More-than-human Stories” and took inspiration from Ghosh’s 2021 book, “The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis.”

Photo by Julieta Skallman/The Barnard Bulletin

Ghosh began by speaking about the Banda Islands in Indonesia. He mentioned that they were formed by the Ring of Fire, and, though they are so small that they are shown as only dots on a map, all nutmegs in the world originated from here. And, in following the course of their history, Ghosh spoke about the colonization of the Banda Islands and how these colonizing societies highly valued the spices grown on these tiny islands in the Pacific. Thus, they commodified what the Banda people, like a lot of indigenous and colonized societies throughout the world, worshipped.

In order to make the audience truly understand the significance of spice and the spice trade, Ghosh humorously connected them to what he believes is a modern equivalent, saying, spices “were like the Teslas of that time!” and “The spice trade was the Space Race of its time.” While both of these quips earned chuckles from the audience, the topic of the lecture was a generally solemn one.

Throughout the talk, Ghosh highlighted the idea that all things in nature have souls, which are silenced. He mentioned how trees communicate, giving each other pollen when needed. He insisted on the importance of hopefully understanding and, at the very least, acknowledging nonhuman voices.

Victor Zarour Zarzar, adjunct assistant professor at Barnard College, who was in the audience for the lecture, reflected, “I was really struck by how expansive his thinking was, how he links these very recent events to very long, long histories.” He added, “He’s not the first to bring up this issue of plants communicating. I just don’t know how to listen to them, if that makes sense. I don’t know how to listen to them, so encountering thinkers like him who are pushing us, or trying to illuminate the ways in which these organisms speak, is always puzzling but really helpful for me.”

Ghosh told the audience that, in classrooms, students might be taught the history of the nutmeg or the biology of the nutmeg, but they would not be taught to sing about the nutmeg. We, as students, are not generally taught to elate at nature — to revere and revel in it.

“For me, specifically, the lecture was transformative because my research, my Ph.D. research, is on more-than-human mentors, so I’m advocating for expanding our mentorship frameworks for teachers to include more-than-human influences,” said Edith P. Middleton, who was also in the audience and is a third-year doctoral student in English Education at Teachers College, as well as a teaching assistant in Foundations of Education for Professor Fawziah Qadir. Middleton added, “I truly believe that everything has agency and, in my research and how I view the world, everything mentors us in some form. It could be good; it could be bad. It could come in; it could go out. It doesn’t have to be constant at all times, kind of what he was saying about the trees that have been around for so much longer [than us] … so [it’s] like, ‘Do we not have agency in their world?’ It was just this other way of thinking. I found it transformative.”

“The idea that the modern man has freed himself from the planet [is a] delusion,” Ghosh said, and the silencing of the natural world is something the Western dominion of the world is reliant on. In deciding who is a brute and who is fully human, the Western world has silenced nature, and this, Ghosh believes, is the core of the planetary catastrophe.

This lack of nonhuman voices is a flaw in our world worth fixing, and Ghosh challenged the audience to stop viewing nature as a worthless backdrop to humanity. If the problem is that humanity is not in touch with the planet, then we should all learn to listen to the voices we have spent centuries trying to drown out. We — as students, thinkers, and members of the world — should, as Ghosh suggested, revere and revel in nature, and learn, perhaps, to start turning an open ear toward it.