Donald Trump and Elon Musk do not agree about the climate emergency. In their X pre-election livestream, Musk argued that fossil fuels will run out in the long term, and rising CO2 levels will give people “headaches and nausea … [making it] uncomfortable to breathe”. He thinks we “should just generally lean in the direction of sustainability”. Trump’s line is erratic rather than specious: he praises Musk’s EVs but rambles about “nuclear warming” and the need to expand energy infrastructure to feed AI – literally “Drill baby, drill.” The only thing they really seem to agree on is that they don’t believe environmentalism should mean that you have to suffer.
This view floods the political spectrum. Keir Starmer’s recent announcements about strengthening the UK’s climate targets were couched similarly: “It’s not about telling people how to live their lives.” Resistance to environmental policies that affect a perceived status quo is rising. Many environmentalists hyperfocus on the potential positive benefits of climate action. Others are more concerned about the long-term consequences of inaction. How the beholder understands the interaction between achieving a certain way of life and the health of the planet varies hugely, and permeates their stance on climate action.
Sunil Amrith’s new epic, The Burning Earth, is a powerful and refreshing investigation of this dynamic. It is, he says, the story of the “impossible quest to continue to expand the frontiers of human possibility while disregarding the health of the planet”.
Amrith leads us through a global history of efforts to conquer lands and their peoples, to mine and harness resources, and to overcome disease. Like other environmental histories, he draws on climate data and a rich suite of primary sources that show how deeply environmental conditions have shaped human development, and vice versa. “Our fathers had plenty of deer and skins, our plains were full of deer, as also our woods,” says Indigenous Narragansett leader Miantonomo, “but these English having gotten our land, they with scythes cut down the grass, and with axes fell the trees; their cows and horses eat the grass, and their hogs spoil our clam banks, and we shall all be starved.”
The book offers a more precise overarching argument than other recent environmental histories, which, given that all human life is inseparable from resources and land, can descend into a dense pack of examples. Amrith is interested in how any ‘arcs’ of progress that can be gleaned in modern history have been powered by the subjugation of the planet: from the Mongols’ change to lucrative agrarian administration over nomadic life on the Steppes to the muscular, digital plunder of today, practised and justified through centuries of intersecting imperial, capitalist and colonial ideology. That wave is breaking, he argues, as ecological damage catches up with us, and the lasting effects of injustices wrought on different peoples and places reach boiling point.
This makes environmental history about freedom, or lack of it. The devastation of the planet has, he says, usually been in service of attempts to break free from the shackles of Nature: sourcing more resources, finding protection from climatic conditions, and increasing trade, power and wealth. It has underpinned efforts to live prosperously that he professes empathy with, without losing sight of its costs, or instances where intentions were malevolent.
The Mongols, for example, seem to have supported a “late-Song [era] idyll of a harmonious society” and promoted organised agriculture, but their quest for wealth through trade facilitated the spread of plague. In the world wars, justified by ideas of freedom and security, animals, timber and fossil fuels were exploited in vast numbers alongside immense human suffering. In recent decades, “Governments sped up their quest to conquer nature: they built or licensed more dams, more roads, more mines, more wells – all to deliver development, to pay off loans, to enrich their supporters, or sometimes just to show that they could. Animals, trees, and birds died by the billions.” Why people plunder the planet is properly examined.
So when Amrith writes, “History is environmental,” he is not simply saying that the role of the environment has been underplayed in historical accounts. He is probing the limits between freedom, injustice and environmental destruction, insisting that these tensions be better understood. “When I first started out as a historian,” he writes, “I saw environmental concerns as secondary to political rights, economic empowerment, and social justice. I now believe that they are inseparable, and that the pursuit of environmental justice extends and builds on those earlier and still-unfinished struggles for human freedom.”
He doesn’t answer the question of whether and how we ever lived both well and harmoniously with the planet, or suggest clearly what forms of environmental destruction we might be able to leave behind while living well. Positive examples are relatively thin, and as such he has been criticised by some reviewers for a lack of ‘solutions’ in the work. The Burning Earth is not about what has gone wrong so much as what has always gone wrong. It is about the complicated role of the environment in the human pursuit of safety and power. In a similar spirit to Naomi Klein’s Doppelganger, it is an honest attempt to understand the dangers on all sides.
Trump and Musk’s conversation was derided, understandably, as “dumb” and “mind-numbing” by environmentalists. But the two men’s fundamental gripe with climate action is potentially shared by most. There are few books and forums willing, as Amrith does, to hold in such precise tension the extreme importance of a revolution in how we relate to the planet and the very real question of how to protect people through such a shift. And by his work, the throughline between Musk and Trump’s flippant rejection of any sort of urgent climate action and their joshing about immigration, militarism and freedom is made ever clearer. The Burning Earth is a useful contribution to difficult and truthful environmentalism.
The Burning Earth: An Environmental History of the Last 500 Years by Sunil Amrith. Allen Lane, 2024. ISBN: 9780241461983
