How Empire and Environmental Destruction Go Hand-In-Hand

KATHLEEN DAVIS: This is Science Friday. I’m Kathleen Davis. A new book called The Burning Earth– A History takes on a massive question. How did we get here? here being this point in environmental history and decades deep into human-fueled climate change.

Over the span of 800 years of history, this book connects the dots on how the pursuit of empire, environmental destruction, and human migration led us here.

Joining me is the author of The Burning Earth, Dr. Sunil Amrith, historian at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. Welcome to Science Friday. Thank you for being here.

SUNIL AMRITH: Thanks for having me, Kathleen.

KATHLEEN DAVIS: Sunil, how did the idea for this massive book come about?

SUNIL AMRITH: So some of the themes in The Burning Earth I’ve been writing about, teaching for two decades. Though that was primarily focused on one part of the world, and that’s India and Southeast Asia, which is where I do most of my primary research. So some of these questions, some of these themes have really been with me for a long time.

But the question of what made me want to take on the story at the truly epic scale, as I do in The Burning Earth, was the coming together of various things. One was my own children, who are 10 and under, starting to ask me questions about how we’ve ended up in a place where the environment around us is in such peril, and I found that I didn’t really have a clear answer for them. And so I thought I’d go away and put my historian hat on and my citizen slash parent hat on, and it’s really the synthesis of those two things that produce The Burning Earth.

KATHLEEN DAVIS: OK, let’s start at the beginning. So if you had asked me to pinpoint an origin for the climate crisis, I think I would give you an answer something like the Industrial Revolution or something a little bit more recent. But you start us off with the Mongol Empire in the 13th century. Why is this the start of the climate crisis, in your opinion?

SUNIL AMRITH: I think it’s the start of a heightened level of environmental transformation. I don’t think it becomes the climate crisis until later. But the broader question of, When is it that human societies or some human societies acquire the capability to transform not only their local environments, which human beings have always done, but to amplify and accelerate and spread those environmental transformations? In this case, in the case of the Mongol Empire, across most of the Eurasian continent. I thought that would be a moment of not origin but of acceleration.

The way that the Mongol Empire served as this catalyst for environmental transformation actually had to do with the fact that the Mongol Empire was very ecologically aware, if I can use that term, which is to say that its power and its profit actually came from throwing different ecologies together. It was the ability to trade, for example, in goods that were unique to distinctive parts of the world, to distinctive soils and ecologies, so much that we associate with modern globalization, and the seeds of that are there in this earlier moment of empire.

KATHLEEN DAVIS: So as your book progresses and you go through all these different parts of human history, your book keeps going back to this theme that the climate crisis stems from the idea of setting ourselves free from nature. What do you mean by that?

SUNIL AMRITH: Well, first of all, even today, that is not an idea that would make much sense to most people in the world because it’s a luxury that most people in the world do not have, to be able to ignore natural limits to what we can be and what we can do. But I do see the beginnings of that idea held initially by those who held wealth and power in the world, a sense that the limits to human life are starting to be transcended, and some of that is demographic.

So there’s a massive expansion of life expectancy in Europe. If you take the beginning of the 19th century and you look at the end of the 19th century, people are living longer. Many of the most devastating infectious diseases are now understood and can be treated. And there is this sense that some of the enduring limits to human existence, including limits to the accumulation of wealth, are being shattered by technology.

And I think with that comes a very powerful idea that shaped how we live in the 20th century, the idea that we are outside nature, the idea that technology can solve any problem, the idea that we can insulate ourselves. That idea is always a fiction, and we see that so clearly with the climate crisis. And yet that fiction shapes institutions. It shapes ideas. It shapes images and visions of the future.

KATHLEEN DAVIS: You spend a solid part of the book writing about war, especially World Wars I and II. Let’s start with the first. Why was the First World War such a turning point in climate history?

SUNIL AMRITH: The First World War, even if it was primarily fought in Europe, was a truly global war in terms of its search for resources. It’s been described as the first industrial war, the first carbon-fueled war. And by resources, I mean everything from fertilizer to wheat to timber and, of course, to petroleum. The First World War is the first war in which petroleum is absolutely crucial to military action, and that was a shift that happened during the war itself. At the beginning of the war, very few military planners would have thought that oil would be as decisive as it was. By the end of the war, you have Allied leaders saying, we’ve essentially floated to victory on a sea of oil, most of which was coming from the US and Mexico at that time.

KATHLEEN DAVIS: And one of the literal elements at play in World War I is nitrogen. How did the demand for nitrogen shape the outcomes of that war?

SUNIL AMRITH: So profoundly and in a multifaceted way because, of course, the two key uses of nitrogen come together in the First World War. One is as fertilizer for food production, and the other is in the production of explosives. And it was a few years before the First World War that the so-called Haber-Bosch process to capture nitrogen first was devised and implemented. A lot of that chemical knowledge is also then, in a particularly dark way, being used to manufacture the chemical weapons that are used by both sides in subsequent battles during the First World War.

And there is also a sense that it’s a war over food and that, ultimately, one of the big explanations for why the Allied side prevails in the First World War– and, in fact, the same could be said of the second. We’ll come to that– is the access that the Allies have to American, Canadian, and Australian grain.

KATHLEEN DAVIS: Let’s talk about World War II. I was really surprised to learn how famine in Europe created this cascade of events that eventually starved people quite far from there, places like Bengal and Indonesia. How did that happen?

SUNIL AMRITH: The colossal impact of famine in Asia during the Second World War is really one of the less-discussed aspects of that conflict, and we’re talking about famines that took the lives of millions of people, particularly in India and Bengal, in Vietnam, in China, and as well as in Indonesia. And it was really the distorting effects of the war economy that brought these disasters about. There certainly were natural triggers, so to speak. In Bengal, it was a cyclone. In Java, it was drought, as it was in parts of China.

But I don’t think one can say that the famines were a direct result of those natural events. It was the breakdown of systems of distribution and supply. It was the deliberate policy of the ruling powers, both the British in India, the Japanese in Vietnam and Java, to divert food supplies to theaters of war, for example, to not provide relief, even when the warning signs were there that starvation was imminent. But it was also the disruptive effect the war had on everyday social and economic relations and the fact that those without land, for example, suffered particularly.

I mean, it’s not an accident that it was the Bengal famine that was a key case study for the great economist Amartya Sen’s work on famine in the 1980s, which argued that famine is not necessarily about an absolute shortage of food. It’s about the decline in certain social groups’ ability to access food, and I think that’s very much what you see across Asia at the time.

KATHLEEN DAVIS: So bringing us to a more modern time, you, throughout the book, describe this sort of violence as twinning. Violence against people is violence against the Earth. Where there’s genocide, there’s ecocide, and we are seeing this play out in places like Ukraine, Lebanon, the Congo, Sudan, of course, in Gaza. How does this idea of twinning help us make sense of this point in time where it just seems like there is so much violence?

SUNIL AMRITH: I think, in some ways, one of the truly appalling and tragic features of what we’re living through in terms of mass violence in the world today is that it’s almost as if we’d forgotten war. When we talked about the obstacles to climate progress, for example, a lot of that had to do with the stance that different powerful nations would take about cutting emissions. That had to do with perhaps vested interests in the fossil-fuel industry. And, in some sense, the fundamental obstacle to any kind of environmental progress, war, had never gone anywhere and had never gone away, and it has reasserted itself with a vengeance. At the simplest level, reminding ourselves that warfare has always been a driver of both human suffering and environmental harm is something we need to just keep very firmly in our minds when we think about all of these contemporary wars.

I think it can be difficult to focus on the environmental consequences of war because it can feel like that is somehow turning our attention away from the appalling human suffering that we’re seeing all around us. And, in fact, I think it does the opposite. I think if we take into account the environmental consequences of our current wars in Gaza, in Ukraine, and so many other parts of the world, what we realize is that the environmental injuries only prolong the human suffering. There are many estimates that scientists on the ground have made that the damage of these wars is going to be intergenerational. So even when, finally, peace comes, the task of environmental repair will be a forbidding and a very, very long-term one.

So I think that’s what twinning does. It reminds us that human suffering and environmental harm very often accelerate together.

KATHLEEN DAVIS: And it almost sounds like you’re saying peace has to be part of climate progress. Is that right?

SUNIL AMRITH: That’s a beautiful way of putting it, Kathleen. I would wholeheartedly sign up for that as a key message in The Burning Earth. I think, in some ways, war and peace have been issues that have not come up so very much in COP gatherings and even in just the way in which the climate debate is framed, but without peace, the first year of the conflict in Ukraine generated more emissions than Bangladesh produces in a year– Bangladesh, a country of more than 100 million people, which is more climate vulnerable than most. So what does it mean to talk about environmental justice if we’re not grappling with the fact that, at the very same time, military action is itself a colossal driver of environmental injustice?

KATHLEEN DAVIS: This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. If you’re just joining, I’m talking with historian Dr. Sunil Amrith about how we got to this point in the climate crisis.

Throughout your book, you come back to the similar themes of greed, power, and money over and over again. Do you think that the future of our planet will be different?

SUNIL AMRITH: I think the future of our planet could be different, and I think one of the things that I was very determined to do in The Burning Earth is to reckon with what is a very dark and difficult history of greed and destruction and domination but, at the same time, to remind us that that history has never been linear and it’s never been unchallenged and that there have been voices that have provided an alternative vision of how we might live more peacefully and less violently on this Earth. They’re up against a formidable challenge, but the very fact that the environmental movement has grown from almost nothing in the 1970s to what is probably the single cause that mobilizes more people, especially young people, than any other is, for me, at least a source of hope that we could write a different story.

We’re in the middle of this history. I suppose that’s the thing about The Burning Earth. This is not about a closed chapter. This is a book that provides a historical account of a story that we are still writing, that we’re still right in the midst of. And that, to me, is a source of hope.

KATHLEEN DAVIS: So how do we take what we learn in this book and actually funnel it into climate action? Is there a concrete action that you would like to see the world take?

SUNIL AMRITH: I think there are two parts of how I’d answer that. The first is one of the key themes in The Burning Earth is that one thing that has changed very little, whether we’re talking about the Mongol Empire or we’re talking about today, is that it remains the case that how and what we eat and produce food is a fundamental driver of our impact on the planet, including on the climate crisis. And agriculture accounts for about a quarter of all greenhouse-gas emissions.

I was stunned. Of all the things I found when I was doing the research for The Burning Earth, I think the single statistic that has stayed with me is the idea that if the carbon emissions from food waste were a country, they would be the third-largest emitter in the world after the US and China.

KATHLEEN DAVIS: Whoa.

SUNIL AMRITH: So that’s one level, I think. And another is I think that taking a historical perspective reminds us that we need joined-up thinking. We need to think about the climate crisis and the crisis of biodiversity and the crisis of human inequality, really, all as part of the same story. I think we miss things when we start to isolate any one of these problems from the others.

KATHLEEN DAVIS: How can people take the lessons from this book and incorporate them into their day-to-day lives?

SUNIL AMRITH: I think one of the things I have concluded at the end of the process of researching and writing The Burning Earth is that our actions matter, and I think we need a better reason for rationalizing why they matter. I think it’s very easy to say, well, my recycling more is not going to make a dent in any of the environmental challenges we face.

And that might even be true, but I think our actions matter intrinsically. Our actions towards environmental protection matter, first of all, because they make us who we are. They reflect the values that we have about the way we want to live in the world. Second of all, because they bring about a shift in collective consciousness. The more people we have in our communities, in our schools, on our campuses, in our cities, in our countrysides who are thinking about a more sustainable future, the more that becomes part of the currency, that becomes part of the ways in which we imagine and craft more hopeful futures. We should be thinking in grand, maybe even cosmic ways about shifting towards a more ecological consciousness. And in that sense, I think everything matters.

KATHLEEN DAVIS: You mentioned at the beginning of our conversation that your kids were an inspiration for this book. You wanted to answer their question of how we got here. What do they make of your answer? Have they read the book? Have you told them about what you found?

SUNIL AMRITH: My daughter, who is seven, was particularly excited that I mentioned Blackpink at the end of the book because there are ways in which, actually, the mobilization of musicians and artists and video-game designers and filmmakers are moving us forward. They are moving us towards a different way of imagining our place in the world. And a whole group of Blackpink fans got together to create a group– which I found very inspiring– called Kpop4planet. And my kids are very taken with that level of action, where the enthusiasms of young people come together with causes that matter to all of us.

KATHLEEN DAVIS: Well, what a lovely place to end off. Thank you so much for joining me today. I really appreciate it.

SUNIL AMRITH: Thanks so much for having me, Kathleen.

KATHLEEN DAVIS: Dr. Sunil Amrith is the author of The Burning Earth– A History. To read an excerpt from the book, head to sciencefriday.com/burning.

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