If, 500 years ago, travellers from a far universe had happened to fly past Earth, they might have noted its clean oceans, its wildlife-rich woodlands and jungles, its ice caps. They’d have seen a human population still confined by the natural forces of season and photosynthesis. No space-flight here. If humans travelled at all, it was on their own two feet, or by using animals or wind. Passing again today, the aliens might ask: what the hell happened? In answer, we could beam them up this book, The Burning Earth, and tell them to take a very deep breath because it’s a fast, frightening and relentless history of how we got into this mess, this “densely woven braid between inequality, violence and environmental harm”.
What happened? In a nutshell, desire and our quests for “freedom”. Today, the aliens would behold a planet shaped toward the needs and desires of, on the one hand, a few powerful humans pursuing wealth and its symbols, and on the other hand, the forgivable dreams of the masses for food and security – a combination that now takes us beyond the confines of nature.
Sunil Amrith yokes both kinds of freedom together, both the Beveridge-ite freedom from want and disease, and the freedom to amass wealth and go where you please. The latter type includes, of course, the assumed freedom of some to colonise and exploit others. Of the former there are huge successes: Amrith notes that nowhere on Earth now suffers the child mortality rates of London in 1900, a time when Britain was the world’s greatest power. But now, Amrith says, all these freedoms, for good and ill, are collapsing in on us. Taken together, they have triggered the planetary crisis that confronts us all.
Who is “us”? Humanity, of course, but which humans and where? Although it follows a conventional chronology, what sets Amrith’s history apart is that he gives himself no fixed place to stand. He refuses to occupy a Eurocentric viewpoint, or any other, developing instead a planetary awareness. (Understandably, as he was born in Kenya to parents from Tamil Nadu, raised in Singapore and now resides in the US.) He has tried likewise to avoid an anthropocentric stance. Some of his most awful passages on violence or environmental harm concern the fate of buffalo in America or sparrows in China.
His strategy in tracking his dreadful “densely woven braid” is to zoom in on the words or deeds of a named individual, then from that microscopic focus pan out to planetary level. So we may encounter a medieval scholar, a Chinese poet-official, or a 20th-century politician such as Indira Gandhi. Or he may begin with an artwork such as a scene from a Akira Kurosawa film, or the murals of Diego Rivera, and use them to illustrate a global phenomenon. Hence, one thinks of spacecraft – his perspective is rather like that of an observer on the Space Station, or perhaps a sorrowing god, with the Earth rolling beneath every 90 minutes.
Amrith’s reading is astonishing: now we see gold mines in Johannesburg, now fires in Manila, now Alfred Wallace shooting an orangutan. It can feel precipitous, and to the Eurocentric this planetary overview certainly yields surprises. One small example: if asked to name an important modern invention, few in northern Europe would say “air-conditioning”, though Singapore’s prime minister Lee Hsien Loong did. Air con is an invention whereby “even the climate was moulded to the nation’s needs” and which, Lee said, “changed the nature of civilisation by making development possible in the tropics”. It is a good example of Amrith’s concern, which is to show how natural limits of climate and geography globally have been broken down in this human quest for “freedom”.
He presses questions. Again to take an almost random example, he gives us a glimpse of Rudyard Kipling walking down a street in Chicago. (Kipling, who could speak of his horror at the slaughter of pigs at the Chicago stockyards, but pen an ode in praise of a musket, the “Brown Bess” which won “most of the empire which now we possess”.) The cries of the city’s street vendors, Kipling wrote, reminded him of starving people in famine relief camps in India. He hated the street vendors’ clamour but the starving Indians, he said, he “understood”. Amrith queries this: how could Kipling “understand” famine camps in India? So we’re beamed from a Chicago sidewalk to satellite level to discuss global famine in the 1870s and 1890s.
Amrith is constantly alert to the effect of climate on history, and it is now known that these famines were caused partly by fluctuations caused by El Niño. Some fortunates could ride out the famines, especially those with access to the new-fangled fossil-fuelled railways which could transport food. Others, however, especially those subject to colonialist mismanagement or unconcern, found themselves crying out in relief camps. This was a state of affairs understandable to Kipling, because it was deemed “natural” for Indians to starve in India, or so its British rulers claimed. The British were quick enough to break the bounds of nature on the one hand, with their coal-powered railways, then blame “nature” when it suited.
Because it dips to Earth now here, now there, the effect of the book is both dizzying and deracinating, but also, even in its grimness, quite thrilling. It gets worse. We are presently living in the “Great Acceleration”, the massive, fossil-fuelled surge in human activity that has taken place since the mid 20th century, and surely Amrith’s panopticon-like vision is one we need to adopt as we must assume responsibility for the health of the planet. “Think global, act local”, environmentalists say, and never has the global been so available to us. As the author writes, his is a history for “an urban, globalised and divided planet from a position of empathy for the all-too-human dreams of fossil-fuelled escape that now lie in ruins”.
Having read this book, our passing aliens might decide to scoot on by, and leave Earth to burn. They will not read much of human joy, music, love, or humour – nor of how we live by hope, which surely drove much of our desires for freedom. We have to wait a long time for it, hundreds of pages of violence and plunder, but the hope Sunil Amrith does find resides in environmentalism, rewilding, in “movements of repair and restoration”, especially in the cities. Despite all the horror, he is no misanthropist. He is intent on human flourishing – and animal too: “Every act of care for other species is an assertion of a fuller vision of human life.” He notes the work of those urban ecologists who accept “a world that embraces the density of cities, celebrating their human and more-than-human diversity”. Optimism comes from the fact that we are becoming very quickly aware of the state we’re in. The message is being spread via everything from K-Pop in Korea to computer gaming in Canada. Yes, there is movement, yes the science is clear, but given the murder elsewhere of environmental activists and the appallingly long sentences handed down here in the UK, who can tell if things will change? But hope we must. Will we douse the flames?
Please come back, we want to say to our observers from outer space. Give it another 500 years and see what happens next.
Kathleen Jamie’s most recent book is “The Keelie Hawk: Poems in Scots” (Picador)
The Burning Earth: An Environmental History of the Last 500 Years
Sunil Amrith
Allen Lane, 432pp, £30
Purchasing a book may earn the NS a commission from Bookshop.org, who support independent bookshops
[See also: The power of place in tackling climate change]
Content from our partners
Related
This article appears in the 25 Sep 2024 issue of the New Statesman, All-out war