By Amitav Ghosh, The Nutmeg’s Curse, Parables for a Planet in Crisis, John Murray 2021
Review by NPA Book Club
Some of us knew Ghosh as a fiction writer with a Bengali background and nature friendly perspective. Here he takes a scholarly and passionate approach to the current crisis of imminent planetary collapse. He begins with the Dutch finding nutmeg in the Banda islands in the 17th century and their subsequent dispossession and extermination of the human inhabitants.
Group review by NPA book group
The NPA book group had a very interesting discussion of this rich book on February 8. Members brought different perspectives. Some had farm backgrounds but most of us had not. One member had a family connection to the author. Another has a son considering farming as a career. A third found it valuable to read the book twice.
Our July Environmental Book Club reading was Sunburnt Country; the History and Future of Climate Change in Australia by Joëlle Gergis. In this history of Australia’s climate and the meteorology that recorded and analysed that climate, Gergis brings understanding to climate fluctuation through natural forces and demonstrates how human action is intensifying climate variability and exposing us to new climate extremes.
Review by Meron Wilson and Anne Dickson
Our land is not something to be tamed, made efficient and converted to a European concept of farmland, but something to be understood and nurtured. The emerging effects of a changing climate challenge us to rethink where and how we produce our food. Indigenous author Bruce Pascoe, in his book Dark Emu, gives us some insight into what Australia was once like, and what we can learn from the economy, culture and agricultural methods of Indigenous Australians.
Reviewed by Meron Wilson, NPA Sydney Environmental Book Club
Sunlight and Seaweed by Tim Flannery looks at the mess we have gotten ourselves into, fouling our planetary nest by living beyond our ecological means, and offers a few rays of hope we can yet put things right-ish.
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