Ace History Desk – Everything Is Interconnected’: Author and History Professor Sunil Amrith on Facing the Climate Crisis

“As a citizen and then as a parent,” he says, “the climate crisis just became unavoidable in my mind.”

His first books, notably Crossing the Bay of Bengal and Unruly Waters, focused on the history of migration and ecology in Southeast Asia. The Burning Earth takes a global tack, covering the history of the climate crisis from hundreds of years ago, when the Industrial Revolution ignited the mass commodification of natural resources, to now, with the elimination of CFCs and recent climate tech. He sees history through the lens of human needs and desires, precisely, the luxurious wants of a small slice of elites. 

Sunil Amrith is the Renu and Anand Dhawan Professor of History at Yale University, with a secondary appointment as Professor at the Yale School of the Environment. 

“The desires of a small elite, and the violent pursuit of inequality through empire, has turbocharged our impact on the planet,” Amrith says. As he writes in the prologue: 

I can no longer separate the crisis of life on Earth from our concerns with justice and human freedom that inspired me to become a historian in the first place. 

What is the main focus of the book?

The core question in The Burning Earth is really: How much is human freedom dependent on the destruction of our planet? I do not think that human flourishing necessitates the sheer and irreparable harm that we have done to our planet. I think a lot of that has been driven more by the desires and the consumption of a small elite amongst human beings. 

You write about need, want and desire and how it relates to the climate crisis. How have those base human traits contributed to the climate breakdown? 

There are two main pathways regarding the long-term implications of our climate crisis. The first focuses on human needs, particularly food and shelter, which significantly impact our environmental footprint. Access to these essentials is highly unequal, creating a divide in availability. This continuous struggle for sustenance contributes to greenhouse gas emissions and plays a significant role in the ongoing degradation of biodiversity.

The second narrative we need to examine is that for over five centuries, the aspirations of a privileged elite, coupled with the aggressive enforcement of inequality through imperialism, have significantly exacerbated our environmental footprint. This impact is mainly attributable to the extensive and disproportionate resource consumption by those in positions of wealth and power. Historically, this elite has predominantly comprised Northern Europeans; however, in contemporary contexts, this demographic has become increasingly global in nature.

You write in the book that elites looked at groups of people who are close to nature as being less human. 

I think one of the questions we ask ourselves as we face this climate breakdown is, how did we ever come to believe that the health of the planet didn’t matter to all of us? And yet, I think there has been a period in global history where proportions of people worldwide have acted as if it wasn’t true – that we could disregard the health of rivers and forests and consume at any rate we chose. That is a mentality that I also associate with a mentality that imposes a hierarchy on other human beings. 

If you look at, for example, the early colonization of the Americas, the language that the Iberian colonizers used to talk about Indigenous people is very often: they are close to nature. They are not fully human like we are. That legitimizes plunder and exploitation and violence, but it also legitimizes mass deforestation and extraction. 

Was there any way, historically, to stop the inevitable march towards our climate crisis? 

The motivations that are driving people to want to expand their lifespans, to improve the conditions and the security with which their families live – I never want to lose sight of those kinds of baseline human aspirations. 

A fundamental aspiration emerges throughout various cultures: the desire for one’s progeny to experience improved living conditions and for family legacies to endure. This phenomenon reflects a deeper existential pursuit inherent to humanity. Furthermore, there is a discernible trajectory in our species’ capacity to manipulate environmental variables, enhancing the adaptability and sustainability of our habitats to better serve societal needs.

Then, there are parts of the story that I think weren’t inevitable. There was nothing ordained about plantation production, for example, which is a very particular kind of cultivation that exploits nature as quickly as possible for rapid gain. I think that is a particular kind of innovation. 

I think there are technologies that could have had multiple different kinds of uses. And what we’ve tended to see is that their use has been towards maximum extraction. 

You write about silver mining and sugar plantations. How were these some of the earliest environmental catastrophes?

The extensive silver mining operations in the Americas have unequivocally resulted in significant environmental degradation, with recent archaeological and genetic studies illuminating the severe health repercussions for labourers. The introduction of mercury in the silver extraction process has been particularly detrimental, causing profound negative impacts on ecosystems and human health. This extraction of silver ultimately catalysed the development of a global economy, highlighting its far-reaching consequences.

One could probably make the argument that no single crop has caused greater harm than sugar both to human beings and to nature. Sugar began as a very, very rare luxury. It was treated as one of the fine spices in medieval Europe. And it’s only when you start to get large-scale plantation production combined with the social and economic transformations of early modern Europe that it becomes an item of mass consumption. 

What effect did large-scale steel and iron production have?

It’s largely a 19th-century story. The age of industrialisation coincides with the fossil fuel era because if we begin with coal in the second half of the 18th century, we start to see widespread use of coal in England, then in northwestern Europe and North America. 

I think what changed more than anything else is the scale of resources needed for factory production and the scale of impact that can be had. I think the story of the railroads is a classic example of this. One of my favourite works of environmental history is Bill Cronin’s book Changes in the Land, which shows how the city of Chicago really reshapes the entire American Midwest. And it does so through the rail lines. Suddenly, Chicago’s markets and exchanges become accessible. And that hastens the destruction of forests and the expansion of wheat production and monocrop production. And I think we see similar stories all over the world, which is what happens is that as people can travel further, as goods can travel further, you start to get global markets for commodities. That pushes forward the commodification of nature, the idea that this is not a forest but timber and that shifts in mentality. 

You describe how the “war machine” is a mechanism of climate destruction. 

That is the part of the book that was the biggest surprise to me. I did not expect that I would conclude that of all the forces driving climate breakdown, warfare is possibly number one. I think the two world wars came to strike me as being pivotal transformative moments, not just because of the scale of resources which went into both of those wars, but also because of the scale of destruction that those wars then made possible, culminating in atomic weapons by the end of the second world war.

Military emissions are not counted in most of our climate targets and most international contributions that have been agreed to. The best estimate we have is that military missions account for about 5% of greenhouse gas emissions, but that is a guess because we don’t know.

You wrote about the data project of 1957 and 1958, one of the first climate data projects. Tell me about the through line between that and the sheer amount of data we have now. 

This is the International Geophysical Year, and it was this year that the Mauna Loa Observatory was set up in Hawaii, which is, to this day, the gold standard that we have for measuring cumulative concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. 

The Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii in 2008. Ken Dewey / University of Nebraska-Lincoln School of Natural Resources

This data came during the height of the Cold War. This project is drawing in countries from both sides, drawing in countries that don’t necessarily get along. This is the data that first makes us aware that we are living through a period of unprecedented climate change.

With the acceleration of data today, does it not seem to reason that more data would help our imperilled planet? 

More data is undeniably important to climate scientists as they make projections and formulate their models. But more data hasn’t necessarily led to more consensus. More data has not necessarily changed the overall narrative about climate change. I think the data is essential, but I’m not sure that we’re at a point where more data is going to change more people’s minds. Those are political questions, those are cultural questions, and those are much harder to shift.

Why won’t more – and better – data change more people’s minds?

Firstly, in the U.S., more than anywhere else, there has been a politically motivated scepticism of that data. We know that fossil fuel companies have been directly involved in promoting that sort of distrust all over the world. We’re in a broader populist moment of distrust of expertise. That is one reason why I think more data won’t necessarily change people’s minds.

Another is that data is complicated, and how climate scientists and other earth scientists think about uncertainty doesn’t translate smoothly into broader general consciousness. 

In conclusion, the scale of data we’re dealing with can often exceed our capacity for comprehension, rendering it almost alien to our daily experiences. This disconnect highlights the necessity for effective translation of complex information. It may be that creative practitioners, such as novelists like Richard Powers, play a crucial role in transforming and enhancing public awareness and consciousness more profoundly than mere data presentation alone can achieve.

I’ve been teaching environmental history for about 15 years. There are certain classes where the questions students have asked, the projects they’ve completed, and the conversations we’ve shared in the classroom have left a lasting impact on me. It’s not just what I contribute to the classroom; it’s also what I gain from it that has directly influenced this book.

I think we need to bring the environment into everything, not just into environmental history, but I think we need to be thinking about these questions across our humanities curriculum. I mean, in that sense, that’s partly what I was trying to do with The Burning Earth, which was to say, let’s not separate the environmental story from perhaps more familiar stories about the rise and fall of empires, about unfree labor, about migration, about global transformations. And I think more broadly, that’s what I would love to see happen, which is a kind of weaving in of the more-than-human, the planet, the ecology into how we study literature, into how we study philosophy. 

Might one of the hopes of this book be for people to look at the world around them and to realize that everything that’s made here possibly comes from a place of environmental destruction? 

I would love readers of The Burning Earth to make connections between the material that I present, especially that which is most unfamiliar in their everyday lived experience. My aspiration is not to make people feel guilty. Quite the opposite. I want to give readers the impression that everything is interconnected. 

This is about looking at choices with a sense of hopefulness, which means that a shift in consciousness or new forms of collective action can bring about change and perhaps even bring about change quite quickly. 

As a historian, do you have any intriguing predictions for what the future might hold?

We are currently experiencing an exhilarating decade filled with unpredictable change! So many paths lie before us, each brimming with possibilities—some thrillingly daunting and others sparkling with hope. It’s a time of remarkable transformation; the future is ripe with potential!

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