The Burning Earth

September 1, 2024
Broadly ranging history of how we arrived at "this point of planetary crisis." The human destruction of nature began a long time before the Industrial Revolution hastened the process along, writes Yale historian Amrith. Taking an appropriately long view, he considers such events as the British enclosure of the commons and forests, "landscapes on the margin of settled cultivation," leading to wide-scale deforestation; the Mongol invasion of Central Asia and western Eurasia, with its horse-borne warriors scorning agriculture; conversely, the Chinese importation of rice from Indochina, where farmers had developed more than 100,000 varieties of the grass; and so forth. All of these events speak to want and greed. So do Amrith's more recent cases, such as the indenture of Black South Africans to work the mines of the Transvaal, leading to a global trade in gold, the development of gold standard economies, and London's emergence as a leading financial center; just so, the discovery of the Azerbaijani oil fields, which preceded the first American well by a decade, transformed the czarist economy and helped usher in centuries of fossil fuel dependence, exemplified by not just car-crazy America but also petrochemically addicted East Germany, with its mania for plastic goods that "embodied a future where anything was possible." Today, Amrith writes, the contest for resources increasingly includes water. Gaining a handle on the planetary crisis is complicated by the fact that the wealthy nations, having got theirs, have precious little moral high ground to occupy in making the case that the poorer nations need to stop their clamoring demand for the stuff of wealth: cars, consumer goods, and perhaps above all meat (ecologically disastrous and fostered by government handouts), for "now it was others' turn to eat." A far-reaching survey of the central role played by human needs and desires in the destruction of Earth.

COPYRIGHT(2024) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Starred review from October 7, 2024
The past 500 years have been defined by humanity’s attempts to free itself from the constraints of nature, only for nature’s constraints to have tightened like a noose, according to this impressive account from historian Amrith (Unruly Waters). Aiming to untangle how human beings’ “creaturely quest for survival” came to so drastically shape Earth’s environment, Amrith argues that over the past half millennium there has formed a “densely woven braid between inequality, violence, and environmental harm.” Ranging across the globe, Amrith tracks how extractive colonialism implemented by a small subset of elites led to enormous gains for some populations while others were enslaved and impoverished. He suggests that the “freedom over nature” that accrued to the populations of colonial powers over this period—longer life spans, better health, more freedom of movement—were generally at the expense of the colonized as much as they were the result of domination of nature, in ways both obvious (like the Transatlantic slave trade) and subtle (wetland railroad construction led to an influx of malaria in India). Amrith sees hope for a different path emerge with the environmental and human rights movements of the 20th and 21st centuries (though at this point humans will likely have to rely on yet more technological alterations to the environment to survive as a species, he asserts). It’s an elegant and sweeping look at how humanity has brought itself to the brink.