Chronicles of Collapse

Erik Loomis reviews “The Burning Earth: A History” by Sunil Amrith.

By Erik LoomisNovember 11, 2024

• History

• Environment

• Nonfiction

THE HISTORIAN SUNIL AMRITH both begins and ends his magisterial new history of human progress and environmental disaster, The Burning Earth: A History, by noting that “all history [is] environmental history.” I agree. But today, environmental historians have an unenviable task. How do you write the history of an issue where impending doom leads to responses that include depression, denial, and shrugs by much of the public?

Historians are used to writing tough stories. It’s not pleasant to write about the carceral state, knowing that the prison system remains as strong and racist as ever. Labor historians struggle to find histories that help find a path forward today, as Trump-appointed judges threaten to overturn the entire National Labor Relations Act and union density continues to shrink to its lowest levels in at least a century. But at least we can imagine a path forward. Enough activism and political work and solutions to the prison crisis seem possible. For however mixed the record is, Oregon voters did decide to decriminalize most drug activity. Labor historians can point to the huge gains made in the 1930s as a history that imagines a revival.

Environmental historians used to write in a similar vein. They bemoaned ecological decline and argued for stricter laws around wilderness, wildlife, and pollution. For all the apocalyptic language around saving wilderness in the 1980s and 1990s, Congress protected a lot of wildernesses. At both the state and federal level, government could legislate pollutants out of existence. Implementing the Endangered Species Act in 1973 did in fact lead to the end of most old-growth forest logging in the Pacific Northwest. Environmental historians advocated for all these things.

Amrith and other contemporary environmental historians face a much larger task. Is the human history of the last 500 years a march of decisions leading a species smart enough to transform the world but not smart enough to control those transformations into oblivion? Increasingly, environmental historians have struggled to articulate meaningful responses to these questions, and many have moved into scholarly rewarding but somewhat less politically urgent subfields, such as the history of animals.

This is the contradiction at the heart of Amrith’s book. He writes a brilliant global history, one of the very best I have read in many years. He truly synthesizes large fields of research into a compelling narrative that places a great conundrum at the heart of modern human history—how the use of fossil fuels has opened up unprecedented levels of human freedom that threaten the very heart of that project in the near future. But, having diagnosed the problem and explained it in language any reasonably educated reader can easily understand, Amrith almost completely drops the ball on thinking through a concrete path toward solutions, which is what readers most desperately need.

Amrith’s work over the past 20 years has seen him take on conceptually larger projects. He started as a historian of colonialism and public health. In 2013, he expanded his horizons, publishing Crossing the Bay of Bengal: The Furies of Nature and the Fortunes of Migrants, brilliantly placing environmental history at the center of labor migration across South Asia. His horizons extended more broadly through Asia with his 2018 book Unruly Waters: How Rains, Rivers, Coasts, and Seas Have Shaped Asia’s History, where he brought climate science into a sweeping history of the continent, particularly India.

Now, Amrith approaches the entire planet over the last half millennium. He tells a great story. His narrative starts across the globe—King Henry III of England’s issue of the Charter of the Forest in 1217, the Mongol Empire’s rapid expansion in the 13th century, the spread of rice through Asia, then the Black Death and the arrival of Europeans in the Americas in 1492. In telling these stories, he avoids the pitfall of too many environmental narratives that romanticize a preindustrial past. Rather, “the transformation of the world began with desire,” as those with power looked for better food, medicinal plants, and the world’s luxuries. Columbus stumbling upon the Americas and the naval expansion around Cape Horn and into Asia vastly extended the appetites and possibilities for these newly powerful Europeans, which then transformed life and labor in the Americas, Africa, and Asia. It created vast new inequalities too, driven by the increased demands for energy to spur freedom. Eventually, that led to fossil fuels, the Industrial Revolution, and the invention of new forms of nature to fight wars.

Within this narrative, Amrith tells powerful stories. He frames his urban chapter using Albert Kahn, the European banker and mining investor. Amrith’s story depicts Kahn bringing the vast resources of the world to Paris, before the narrative moves to the South African gold mines that made both Kahn and Europe rich, created an overnight city in Johannesburg, and brought Chinese and African migrants to the mines. Miners fought for labor rights and basic living conditions, including the right to breathe. Denying that created more profit, so it didn’t happen. Then Amrith stops in Baku, Azerbaijan, where similar conditions defined the rise of the oil industry. Here the Nobel brothers enter the story, not only the dynamite-and-peace-prize-creating Alfred but also his father, the ammunition capitalist Immanuel, and brother, the oil investor Robert, who brought the Baku oil to the global market. That created another round of migration and exploitative labor conditions, as profit rolled into the West. Kahn responded by sending photographers abroad to document a globe on the verge of change due to his own investments. The establishment of the Archives de la Planète remains today one of the great documentary projects of the early 20th century. Capital, migration, exploitation, and beauty all help define what the unlocking of mineral and fossil wealth unleashed.

Or take Amrith’s chapter on three 20th-century women: the philosopher Hannah Arendt, the scientist and writer Rachel Carson, and the president of India, Indira Gandhi. He weaves their contradictions and insights into a brilliant chapter titled “The Human Condition” after Arendt’s 1958 book of the same name, written after the splitting of the atom and at the very start of the space race. She noted that humans had cut all ties with nature so completely that we might remove ourselves from our planet. Carson, previously known for her beautiful writing on shorelines, synthesized the latest scientific research on the consequences of humans’ unmooring from nature into 1962’s Silent Spring, which demonstrated the terrible impact of DDT and other pesticides. Both women were prophets, but neither had to apply these insights to governing, especially in the Global South. Amrith thus makes Gandhi the true centerpiece of the chapter: she sums up the paradox of freedom and environment in the 20th century. Gandhi was a great environmentalist in a way that appeals to many of us today, taking on the racist anti-population rhetoric of Paul Ehrlich and urging a redistributive global economy. But she also faced extreme drought and then the fear of ecological and political crisis that led to her Emergency. That massive violation of human rights, effectively a war on the poor and minority groups, sterilized eight million Indians in the mid-1970s. Arendt had warned that control over natural resources in a complex world could create irreversible consequences, and while Carson’s advocacy created space for legislative environmentalism around the world, Gandhi demonstrated how a leader could support antipollution legislation and still respond to internal and external pressures by using environmental crises for terrible political projects.

The clash of freedom and repression, both framed by environmental change, flows through Amrith’s narratives. He provides oft-cited statistics on increased lifespans in Asia, Africa, and Latin America since 1900, the powers of disease prevention, and the revolution of sanitary engineering. The Green Revolution did feed billions of people. DNA technology has provided unprecedented medical advances. Humans do live vastly longer lifetimes than they did two centuries ago. Fossil fuels have created opportunities for unprecedented leisure time, travel, computing, modern music, and art. All of this is predicated on climate change–causing energy sources. After all, as Father John Misty sings on “Now I’m Learning to Love the War”:

Try not to think so much about
The truly staggering amount
Of oil that it takes to make a record
All the shipping, the vinyl, the cellophane lining
The high gloss
The tape and the gear

Try not to become too consumed
With what’s a criminal volume
Of oil that it takes to paint a portrait
The acrylic, the varnish
Aluminum tubes filled with latex
The solvents and dye

Let’s just call this what it is
The gentler side of mankind’s death wish

So how to have our oil painting and a functional planet too? Amrith sees human failure as threefold. First, he correctly blames the wealthy for their ever-increasing greed that uses up the planet’s resources. Second, he notes how the modern state turned nature into commodities, as true of socialism as of capitalism. Third, he blames our species’ failure to imagine “kinship” with each other or other species.

I agree with all these points. But this leads me back to my original point—what are we supposed to do with this history? If labor historians can point to stronger labor law, and queer historians to enshrining gay rights in the law, how do we as environmental historians use our powers to provide lessons to those wanting something to do with this today?

This is where Amrith falls short. After writing a sweeping synthesis of human history up to the moment of publication, he tries to put together a conclusion that provides a bit of hope. This is the list of what he sees as reasons for hope: the films of Hayao Miyazaki; the anti-war writings of Rabindranath Tagore; the protest of an Indonesian mine by 150 women; the 2008 Constitution of Ecuador, which wrote ecological rights into the law; video games with ecological messages; and an Instagram video from a K-pop band in support of fighting the climate crisis.

This is all … nice? None of it even begins to address the issues seriously, except perhaps the Ecuadoran Constitution, and even here, the nearly 20 years since its ratification have seen that nation deal with other pressing crises such as gang warfare and political assassination over prosecuting violations of these provisions. Amrith admits that the mining company in Indonesia just found somewhere else to mine. His inability to articulate meaningful paths forward to our burning earth is hardly unique in the field. Environmental historians, and sometimes environmentalists themselves, have often struggled in discussing responses.

This isn’t good enough. It is also far too common. So many solutions articulated today revolve around the small. I’m sorry—your community garden is going to do nothing useful except provide you with tasty vegetables and some satisfaction at growing your own food. And we hear many calls these days about Indigenous knowledge and thinking through preindustrial ways of interactions with nature; that’s fine, as far as it goes, but there are eight billion people on this planet who all need food and water, and who are unlikely to reject consumer goods. Calls to “degrow” the economy that come out of this rhetoric have no answer to what that would mean materially for people.

The only solution is the state. Yes, the same state that brought us colonialism and imperialism, DDT and thalidomide, the atomic bomb and the Emergency in India. For these reasons, scholars and activists have largely devalued the state as a site of solutions in recent years. With scholarship, much of this goes back to the deep influence of James C. Scott and his suspicion of the governmental apparatus, especially in his brilliant 1998 book Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. That book, in its critique of high modernism, certainly diagnosed the worst the state can offer, but Scott also chose the most extreme examples to make his points. We see the lack of trust in state solutions throughout our politics and our society. Small-A anarchism has more punch today than state socialism. Environmental activists have often turned from big political fights to backyard gardens, a theme reflected in a lot of scholarship as well across the social sciences, where articles and books on this subject flower like my father’s astounding roses in July. Compare the response to vaccinations between Jonas Salk’s polio vaccine in 1955 and the COVID-19 vaccines that developed by late 2020. The latter was one of the great successes of the modern state, but unlike in the 1950s, enormous swaths of the country and then the world avoided vaccination as conspiracy theories filled the void.

If any historian could move the public on environmental activism, it might be Sunil Amrith. The Burning Earth is that good. To put his prose in conversation with Rachel Carson or Loren Eiseley or even Aldo Leopold might be high praise, but I will defend this claim. Yet without a greater articulation of solid paths forward, environmental historians just become doomsayers. I do not undersell how much work we must do to center the state once again as the only institution large enough to create scalable solutions. I do not know if we have enough time to make that happen. I do know that it has a better chance of working than Instagram messages from K-pop bands.