The Burning Earth

Starred review from October 7, 2024
The past 500 years have been defined by humanity’s attempts to free itself from the constraints of nature, only for nature’s constraints to have tightened like a noose, according to this impressive account from historian Amrith (Unruly Waters). Aiming to untangle how human beings’ “creaturely quest for survival” came to so drastically shape Earth’s environment, Amrith argues that over the past half millennium there has formed a “densely woven braid between inequality, violence, and environmental harm.” Ranging across the globe, Amrith tracks how extractive colonialism implemented by a small subset of elites led to enormous gains for some populations while others were enslaved and impoverished. He suggests that the “freedom over nature” that accrued to the populations of colonial powers over this period—longer life spans, better health, more freedom of movement—were generally at the expense of the colonized as much as they were the result of domination of nature, in ways both obvious (like the Transatlantic slave trade) and subtle (wetland railroad construction led to an influx of malaria in India). Amrith sees hope for a different path emerge with the environmental and human rights movements of the 20th and 21st centuries (though at this point humans will likely have to rely on yet more technological alterations to the environment to survive as a species, he asserts). It’s an elegant and sweeping look at how humanity has brought itself to the brink.