Recommendations from our site
“He starts with the nutmeg, and the naturally occurring ecosystem which it springs from on an island in Indonesia. Then he looks at the history of how the cultivation, harvesting, transportation, and ultimately the commodification of the nutmeg let to both environmental degradation and the political domination of the island. But it’s so much more than that. I read short reviews that focused on the nutmeg on its own, but that’s really just the starting point. What was most powerful in the book, for me, was the way he talks through the reasons fossil fuels became embedded in our lives and why it’s so hard to disentangle them. More than half of global shipping is the movement of petroleum products. So it gives a sense of both the historical depth of this entanglement and the scale of the interests and networks, the hard wiring that underpins our systems and civilisations.” Read more...
The best books on Climate Adaptation
Ben Rawlence, Environmentalist
