{"id":60157,"date":"2021-10-30T06:27:57","date_gmt":"2021-10-30T11:27:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=60157"},"modified":"2021-10-30T06:27:57","modified_gmt":"2021-10-30T11:27:57","slug":"colonialism-climate-crisis-and-the-forever-wars","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=60157","title":{"rendered":"Colonialism, climate crisis, and the forever wars"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Colonialism, climate crisis, and the forever wars<\/a><\/h3>\n<\/header>\n
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Two rounds of negotiation take centre stage, about halfway through Amitav Ghosh\u2019s new masterwork\u00a0The Nutmeg\u2019s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis<\/i>.<\/p>\n

In one, US State Department and Pentagon officials win agreement that carbon emissions connected with the military are to be kept out of the Kyoto Protocol \u2013 an omission that has been preserved in international climate agreements to this day.<\/p>\n

At the opposite end of the global power hierarchy, Khokon, a refugee from the Kishoreganj district of Bangladesh, has engaged in desperate negotiations simply to stay alive. His family\u2019s low-lying land had been flooded for six months, followed by long droughts, hailstorms, and unseasonal downpours. The environmental degradation was followed by political depredations, as well-connected people seized increasingly scarce arable land including part of Khokon\u2019s family\u2019s farm. Eventually there was no better option than to sell some land and send Khokon to France \u2013 but he was quickly deported back to Bangladesh. There was no paid employment for him so after seven months of hopelessness,\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201chis family sold the rest of their land and paid another agent to send him abroad again. Dubai was Khokon\u2019s chosen destination, and he paid accordingly; but the agent cheated him and he ended up in Libya instead. For the next several years he had to endure enslavement, beatings, extortion, and torture. But somehow he managed to save up enough money to pay traffickers to send him from Libya to Sicily in a ramshackle boat.\u201d (all quoted material in this article is from\u00a0The Nutmeg\u2019s Curse<\/i><\/strong>\u00a0by Amitav Ghosh, published by\u00a0University of Chicago Press<\/a>, October 2021)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Khokon was penniless, traumatized \u2013 but unlike many others he survived the voyage. Assisted by support groups for refugees and by relatives, he was able to stay in Italy and get a job at a warehouse in Parma.<\/p>\n

\u2026click on the above link to read the rest of the article\u2026<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Colonialism, climate crisis, and the forever wars Two rounds of negotiation take centre stage, about halfway through Amitav Ghosh\u2019s new masterwork\u00a0The Nutmeg\u2019s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis. In one, US State Department and Pentagon officials win agreement that carbon emissions connected with the military are to be kept out of the Kyoto Protocol […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,5,6],"tags":[11879,11876,141,1053,3641,32043,17084],"class_list":["post-60157","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-environment","category-geopolitics","category-liberty","tag-an-outside-chance","tag-bart-hawkins-kreps","tag-climate-change","tag-climate-crisis","tag-colonialism","tag-forever-wars","tag-power-structures"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60157","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=60157"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60157\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":60158,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60157\/revisions\/60158"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=60157"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=60157"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=60157"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}