> More opium is grown today than at any other time in human history, despite every major state trying to control this production. But #opium has defied all of them.
...
> The saddest and most devastating consequence of #ClimateChange is that it has shown us that these #WesternStructures of #governance, which were presented to us as the ultimate achievement of #humanity, are in fact completely hollow. They cannot do what they claim to do.
https://www.downtoearth.org.in/interviews/climate-change/there-are-so-many-problems-with-the-anthropocene-definition-amitav-ghosh-90928
#AmitavGhosh #SmokeAndAshes

#AnthropoceneDefinition
> it might lead to greater political action or awareness of the problem. But I do feel that it is important to note that there have been several resignations from #AWG over the narrowness of this definition because effectively, it ignores the prehistory of this problem which goes back three or four centuries to the invention of an #ExtractivistEconomy, which is what my book The #NutmegsCurse is about.
https://www.downtoearth.org.in/interviews/climate-change/there-are-so-many-problems-with-the-anthropocene-definition-amitav-ghosh-90928
#AmitavGhosh on #TheAnthropocene

'A necessary first step toward finding solutions is to find a common idiom and a shared story - a narrative of humility in which humans acknowledge their mutual dependance not just in each other, but on' all our relatives'.

#AmitavGhosh #TheNutmegsCurse #MustRead #WorldView

This article mentions the extreme energy damage of industrial beef production(rightly) but the extremely extreme energy damage of the military is not. The article is by #MichaelKlare, some sort of energy/fossil-fuel expert and the advertisement next to the text is for his book about the Pentagon. #AmitavGhosh points out that a small-city's yearly energy use is burned up in a day by and aircraft carrier, and hour by a fighter jet. War is the health of the State, death of humanity

Santa Claus is really a Bengali man that reads minds and grants wishes. AiSalami does Amitav Ghosh, or the other way around:

> A priceless exchange on ChatGPT, from OpenAI. I'm soon going to be out of work.

https://twitter.com/GhoshAmitav/status/1600883942193651712

#AmitavGhosh #GhoshAmitav If Amitav Ghosh has a longer piece about #AI #ChatGPT #stories and #Nukes it probably won't be full of irritating cliche's like #YuvalNoahHarari's work. #SantaClaus

> During the Second World War the American military’s consumption of petroleum amounted to one gallon of petroleum per soldier per day; during the first Gulf War this rose to four gallons per soldier per day; in the recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the rate of consumption surged to sixteen gallons per soldier per day.
--- #AmitavGhosh #NutmegsCurse #FossilFuelMilitary #FossilFuelsWar #GulfWar #SecondWorldWar

La natura ostile. Visioni e prospettive nella narrativa contemporanea https://www.carmillaonline.com/2023/04/21/la-natura-ostile/ #post-apocalittico #MatteoMeschiari #SerenellaIovino #EugeneStoermer #NiccolòScaffai #eco-distopico #Segnalazioni #JamesBallard #PaoloZanotti #UrsulaLeGuin #AmitavGhosh #AnnieProulx #antropocene #PaulCrutzen #ecocritica #MartinAmis #PaoloLago #natura

#USPol #Warfare #Military #ClimateChange "the Pentagon is the single largest consumer of energy in the United States — and probably in the world. . . . In the 1990s the three branches of the US military consumed approximately 25B tons of fuel per year." [#AmitavGhosh]

I found #FloodOfFire and and the pages about battles. It was the #BattleOfAssaye that concerned one of a main characters, an Indian mercenary, Kesri Singh. Another character, a disgraced rajah, Neel Rattan Halder, watches a British/Chinese battle in Hong Kong and muses about how unfair it is that battles determine so much. Along with the #BattleOfKerbala he mentions #Panipat and #Plassey.
#AmitavGhosh
#Battles #Assaye #Kerbala #Gaugamela
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/30/books/review/amitav-ghoshs-flood-of-fire.html
https://www.worldliteraturetoday.org/2015/november/flood-fire-amitov-ghosh

Can Newspaper headlines about inflation and crypto corruption use this excuse?
> Global warming’s resistance to the arts begins deep underground, in the recesses where organic matter undergoes the transformations that make it possible for us to devour the sun’s energy in fossilized forms. Think of the vocabulary that is associated with these substances: naphtha, bitumen, petroleum, tar and fossil fuels..
#AmitavGhosh #TheGreatDerangement
#ClimateChange

I'm reading this book titled Sea of Poppies by Amitav Ghosh in which there's a character called Paulette who reminds me of @oh :blobcatgiggle:​ 🤭

#SeaOfPoppies
#AmitavGhosh

🔖 "the mountains, the creek, the trees, the animals – all gone"

speculative text and image-making with machine learning algorithms trained with a corpus of climate fiction books.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/13548565221135715

🏷 #machinelearning #ai #artificialintelligence #climatechange #future #speculativefiction #clifi #climatefiction #literature #tarot #environment #sts #commondon #anthropocene #generativeart #GPT2 #openaccess #amitavghosh

@babelcarp Important article! But I felt frustrated not to read of broader views, policies, and models to avoid feeling futile and hopeless. I was enticed by mentions of #RebeccaSolnit and #AmitavGhosh but then left hanging without hints that we can build a #ParadiseInHell and avoid the #GreatDerangement with a decent conception of the #GoodLife that Ghosh says is "mimetic." I guess NYT is limiting, hopefully he'll fill out the promising parts as a book, #RobDietz's #EnoughIsEnough would help!

@fu
> .. [oil's] effects.. have been the opposite.. of coal..the case was.. understood by.. Churchill and other leaders.. they.. promote[d] the large-scale use of oil... in urgency after the.. strikes of the 1910s and ’20s.. fear of working-class militancy.. US aid to Europe, after the Second World War, went to.. the switch from coal to oil. ‘The corporatised democracy of postwar Western Europe was to be built'..'on this reorganisation of energy flows.’
https://mstdn.jp/tags/TimothyMitchell
#AmitavGhosh

> The #nutmeg tree is not a metaphor. It is living being.. a vital part of a vital nested system that includes humans, volcanoes, weather, soil.. organisms. The tree has ways of dealing with perturbation. For all we know, nutmeg trees, volcanoes, soil, cultures — this whole interpenetrating system, it may all have intent.. [#AmitavGhosh] shows us that this project of turning the world into an inert machine has blinded us to the obvious — that the world is alive.
https://www.resilience.org/stories/2022-03-21/the-nutmegs-curse-review/

I had forgotten which mining town he was talking about, probably because there are similar vignettes about other places in #Galeano's later, more poetic work. It's nice to find this again after #AmitavGhosh's more recent non-fiction work. The same pattern is seen in #Toroku #Takachiho, it boomed with silver in the Edo period, and then Arsenic in the early 1900's and now the beautiful place is struggling for survival, like much of the rest of Japan's countryside...

#AmitavGhosh made me senstive how #DavidBahr talks of the #GreenlandIceSheet as a living thing, trying to recover and regulate itself. In #GreatDerangement and #NutmegsCurse Ghosh gets us to see the landscape, mountains, forests.. as makers of meaning,: participants in stories. There are a lot of little mountain shrines in Japan, and sacred little spots by the seas. Maybe we all need a place we choose as a center, and refuse to let it be sold or damaged. Gotta read #BecomingNativeToThisPlace.

> .. the #Pentagon is the single largest consumer of energy in the #UnitedStates.. the world. The #USMilitary maintains vast fleets of vehicles, ships, and aircraft.. [that] consume huge amounts of #FossilFuels. A non-nuclear aircraft carrier consumes 5,621 gallons of fuel per hour.. as much fuel in one day as a small midwestern town.. in a year.. a.. F-16 aircraft consumes a third as much fuel in one hour.. around 1,700 gallons.. [with] afterburners.. 14,400 gallons.
#AmitavGhosh #NutmegsCurse

> The U.S. military is by some accounts the largest single consumer of petroleum in the world. In 2011, the Department of Defense released, at minimum, 56.6 million metric tons of CO2 equivalent into the atmosphere, more than the U.S.-based operations of ExxonMobil and Shell combined.
#NaomiKlein #ThisChangesEverything is great to read along with #AmitavGhosh. She has me, after #GreatDerangement, re-reading pages of #NutmegsCurse . I ended up reading the books in reverse chronological order.

In The #GreatDerangement, #AmitavGhosh quotes U Thant. The above quote is from when I was a one-year old but I have vague memories of the name U Thant... A quick search showed me that my image of him got confused with other images of Asians, or maybe mean comic depictions or something. A quick search shows that the previous post's quote already a meme on #AZquotes, along with another by Buddhist U Thant about everyone deserving respect, like in #Catholic #LaudatoSi by #PopeFrancis: #dignity.