Arts & Humanities

‘Burning Earth’: Assessing centuries of ecological and human exploitation

Yale’s Sunil Amrith explains why historical abuses of the planet for profit are also linked to human injustice — and why he nonetheless remains hopeful.
12 min read
The Burning Earth book cover and Sunil Amrith

Sunil Amrith (Portrait by Bram Belloni)

In the 15th century, amidst a prolonged era of imperial violence, a damaging chain of events played out on the island of Madeira, located in the northern Atlantic, that would repeat itself over and over around the world for centuries to come.

Portuguese explorers had conquered the island and immediately set fire to it to make way for the cultivation of sugar, an increasingly coveted substance. Flush with capital from outside investors who were eager to cash in, they established sugar plantations that generated big profits from the labor of enslaved Africans and Indigenous peoples. Madeira became the largest producer of sugar in the world — temporarily.

“Sugar laid waste to the island so that within a few decades the boom collapsed,” writes Sunil Amrith, in his new book “The Burning Earth: A History” (W.W. Norton & Company). “A thoroughly deforested Madeira was left to cultivate wheat and wine. Madeira’s ruin marked a new phase in the history of human exploitation: a tightening of the knot that ties human suffering to the destruction of other forms of life.”

The South Asian Studies Council and Yale Environmental History are hosting a conversation with Sunil Amrith about his book Tuesday afternoon (Oct.8) at 4:30 at Henry R. Luce Hall, 34 Hillhouse Ave.

PDF transcript

“The Burning Earth” is a global history of the human destruction of the Earth in the pursuit of profit, as well as a sweeping account of how major technological advances have both improved and decimated human life. It’s a richly detailed story that tries to explain how we got to where we are today, so imperiled by the impacts of climate change, while also offering the possibility of new ways of flourishing on the planet.

The paradox of the story I’m telling is that many of us now realize that it is an impossible quest to continue to expand the frontiers of human possibility while disregarding the health of the planet.
Sunil Amrith

The overarching message, Amrith says, is that the long-held notion that humans can be free from the constraints of nature is an illusion, as evidenced by the deadly weather extremes we are experiencing today as a result of, and indeed in spite of, all our advances powered by fossil fuels.

Amrith, who is the Renu and Anand Dhawan Professor of History in Yale’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences and a professor at the Yale School of the Environment, said the book builds on all his scholarship over the last 20 years.

He sat down with Yale News to talk about the historical connection between human injustice and environmental harm, the devastating ecological impact of the two world wars, and why he nevertheless remains hopeful about the future.

Sunil Amrith
Sunil Amrith, Yale’s Renu and Anand Dhawan Professor of History. (Photo by Dan Renzetti)

The opening line of the book’s introduction is stunning: “Once upon a time, all history was environmental history.” The more I read beyond that, the more I came to understand that line as a beautifully simple way of summing up the book’s perspective.

Sunil Amrith: That’s right. And of course, I come back to that in almost the last line of the book. The paradox of the story I’m telling is that many of us now realize that it is an impossible quest to continue to expand the frontiers of human possibility while disregarding the health of the planet. Part of the book is about a period of human history when, at least some parts of the world, or some sections of society, people began to behave as if that wasn’t the case. You could see it as a kind of forgetting. That’s why I decided to start and end with that.

We need to think about what is really essential to human flourishing and a fulfilled human life.
Sunil Amrith

There’s a fundamental tension throughout the book, which is that as humans are reshaping the planet through various technological advances, doing real and lasting damage, at the same time they’re learning to stave off disease and extend human life.

Amrith: That is the tension that is at the very heart of the book. I think there are two stories we can tell about how we arrived at the climate crisis. We often hear one or the other, and my book insists that it’s both. One story is that this is about the disproportionate impact on the planet of the greed or desires or extractions of a small minority of humanity. This is a story we can trace back, really, through the history of imperialism going back several hundred years. And we continue to see elements of that in the vast inequalities of resources that we confront in the world today.

Then the other story is one of human liberation in the most visceral sense. One of the things I point out in the introduction is the change in human life expectancy. In most of the Global South in the 1940s, it was 35 years at best. And we are witnessing still an expansion of the possibilities of human life in parts of the world where those possibilities were denied for a very long time.

The question my book poses, both implicitly and explicitly, is how much of the disposition of our planet do we take as necessary for those human ends which many of us continue to value very deeply? The right to life, first and foremost, but also the right to education and flourishing. We need to think about what is really essential to human flourishing and a fulfilled human life. I certainly don’t think that it requires the sheer level of destruction that we have brought upon the forests and other species that share this planet, particularly since that is now imperiling the very things which we consider the great successes of the second half of the 20th century.

You expose this devastating, repetitive pattern over the centuries: the plundering of the earth’s resources and major industrial advances, like the railroad, that are accomplished on the backs of or at the expense of humans who are devalued for some reason — they’re poor, they’re migrants, they’re of a different race. What’s the connection between abuse of the planet and abuse of human beings?

Amrith: I insist that the story of human injustice is inextricably bound up with the story of what we’ve done to the planet. One of the key things that I want readers to take away is the sense that our human struggles for justice and equality, which continue to unfold around us, need to be connected more with what we might see as environmentalism. In some sense, recognizing that human injustice and environmental harm have been really intertwined together. The periods of the book where you see the most rampant environmental devastation are exactly the periods where you see the deepest forms of human injury. My aim is to put these pieces together and to think about contemporary struggles for equality, justice, rights, as necessarily having an environmental dimension to them as well.

If we’re asking the question, how did we get to our current planetary crisis, we have to see [the two world wars] as having brought about steep changes in what level of environmental harm was possible.
Sunil Amrith

I did not set out to write a bleak book. In my mind it’s an uncomfortable book, but it is also, in its own way, hopeful. One of the elements that I was most inspired by or drawn to as I wrote it were the stories of efforts by people all around the world, some of them going back centuries, some of them much more recent, to stand against what seems to be a relentless path of destruction and exploitation. People who have offered alternative visions of human life on Earth that are less exploitative and less violent.

You devote considerable attention to the impact of the two world wars, which you describe as “ecological catastrophes,” not just in the countries where the wars were fought, but globally.

Amrith: I never expected to write as much about the world wars. These are, of course, very well-known historical topics on which brilliant books have been written and much research has been done. But I started to see that there’s an interesting environmental history of these wars, which scholars have started to uncover. Part of what I wanted to do was to bring those works together and put them in the larger context. The two world wars were ecological catastrophes, including for places which were not direct sites of conflict. This has to do with the sheer speed and scale of extraction that the wars made necessary. You see this even in the First World War, where the search for mineral resources is truly global, even while the war is initially confined mostly to Europe.

By the time we get to the Second World War, this is truly a worldwide assault on forests, on rivers, on ecosystems, with a real sense of acceleration. If we’re asking the question, how did we get to our current planetary crisis, we have to see these conflicts as having brought about steep changes in what level of environmental harm was possible.

Another interesting aspect of the book relates to “climate migrants,” people who make a choice to leave or are forced to leave their homeland because of climate change. Contrary to what is often predicted in the media, you say we are unlikely to see hordes of climate migrants knocking on the doors of wealthy countries in the future. Why is that?

Amrith: There will be widespread migration. I think the overwhelming majority of it — and this is certainly what the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [IPCC] says and what other studies have shown — will be within the Global South and will take place within national borders. The level of displacement that we are already seeing because of extreme weather is unquestionably growing. What concerns me about the way we talk about climate refugees is the assumption that it’s the Global North that will host or have to adapt to these changes. Most migrants who are finding their homes unlivable, particularly in rural areas, are likely to move to the nearest large city. If they do cross a border, it is most likely to be the closest border to where they live, and all over the world, borders are becoming more and more dangerous militarized places, including here in the U.S.

My long-term perspective is that we need to consider that the inability to migrate or the unwillingness to migrate are just as much a part of the scenario that we’re confronted with as a large-scale migration. That is to say, some people do not want to move, even as conditions become more difficult and riskier. That may be for reasons of attachment, of kinship, of belonging, of not wanting to abandon a homeland, of not wanting to abandon a place that is of deep cultural and maybe spiritual significance. We should also understand that people who might wish to leave might be stuck in place. Older people and people with disabilities are less likely to be able to make these moves. And long-distance moves are not always within reach of some of the poorest people in the world. So I do worry about oversimplifying this narrative.

You end the book on a hopeful note. Do you truly believe that the increasing impact of climate change will be enough to change the pattern you’ve outlined throughout time, this sort of fundamental human instinct to go fast and hard for whatever is the next potentially lucrative thing, regardless of the earthly damage done?

Amrith: In any work of history, we see in the past patterns that continue and persist to this day and which are very likely to find new forms and new manifestations in the future. But I’m not fatalistic about it. I do think that the scale of the environmental movement is something we shouldn’t take for granted. This only really emerged in the 1970s. It probably motivates more people than any other single cause in the world at the moment. And if we look at the sheer number of local actions and responses, we can’t say that there isn’t change happening or that change isn’t possible. I do think it’s worth reminding ourselves that the obstacles to change are formidable… There are very powerful forces obstructing a move towards a more just and sustainable world. Identifying those forces is the first step.

Are you in talks with Ken Burns to do a documentary based on the book? I’m only half joking.

Amrith: (Laughs) I am not. But one of the things I’m excited about is the range of media with which we can and should be telling these stories of environmental history and environmental justice. I’ve written a book, but I’m excited by the work that so many others at Yale are doing, including the wonderful students who take my environmental history classes, whether it’s podcasting or making documentaries or across the whole range of the creative arts. Finding multiple ways of telling these stories is more important than ever before.