Sunil Amrith On 'The Burning Earth' And The Unequal Costs Of Environmental Destruction

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. He serves as Director of the Macmillan Centre for International and Area Studies and Yale’s Vice Provost for International Affairs.He has received the 2016 Infosys Prize in Humanities, a 2017 MacArthur Fellowship, and the 2025 Toynbee Prize in Global History, among others. He has authored five books that put Asia at the heart of global history. In this conversation, he discusses his book, ‘The Burning Earth’.Excerpts from the interview.Q: Why did you feel this book needed to be written?A: It was a coming together of my academic life and the rest of my life. For close to 20 years, I had been researching some of the themes that do make it into ‘The Burning Earth’. I’ve particularly been interested in the relationship between migration, the movement of people and environmental change. So I wrote a book more than 10 years ago called ‘Crossing the Bay of Bengal’, which I think was my first foray into environmental history, in which I was really thinking about the enormous movement of people, particularly from Tamil Nadu, to southeast Asia in the 19th and 20th century, many of them to work on rubber plantations, but also to work in port cities, places like Singapore and Penang and Rangoon, and understanding that that was actually a moment of fundamental transformation in the environment… At the same time, as a teacher, but also as a parent, as a citizen, the climate crisis became quite unavoidable in my own consciousness. And so for me, that prompted me to scale things up beyond my areas of specialisation towards perhaps the biggest question, which is how did we get to this point of planetary crisis? And that’s really what’s at the heart of ‘The Burning Earth’.Q: You also bring in a kind of storytelling which positions itself in different geographies as if to say, the inherited narratives of Eurocentric histories are not what we’re going to look at. A: If the question is what is it about my own perspective that may make this book a little bit different from some of the other books out there on this big theme of the environment, it is the fact that my own training is not in European and North American history. And I think most of what is called global history continues to take as its starting point and as its default, a kind of familiar North Atlantic history. And so by starting the book in China and ending it in Indonesia, I was really trying to write it anchored in Asia... Asia has always been home to the majority of humanity. It still is today. And so it seemed to me completely fitting to really think about the history of this planet with a firm anchor in the part of the world, the part of the planet which has been the most inhabited by most people throughout the longest period of time.Q: How do you bring in a methodology which ensures that what you’re positioning and presenting can be as accurate as possible? A: That’s the biggest challenge of a book like this. There’s no possibility that I can have the primary expertise in all of these areas that I write about in the book. And so in some ways that was a leap that I took. Academia is a collective enterprise. And this is very much a book that builds on my own work in some areas. And in other areas, it’s really sort of bringing together my reading in multiple fields of scholarship and different disciplines as well. So I’m a historian, but some of the most exciting new scholarship which I draw on and interpret is actually coming from the physical sciences.There’s some phenomenally interesting work in paleoclimatology, for example, which is trying to reconstruct past climates using ice cores, using lake bed sediment, using tree rings. And of course, these disciplines traditionally and even still within the walls of the university barely meet. But what’s been very interesting about recent work on climate and environment in particular, is you have this forcing together of completely different ideas of what the archive is.Q: You use the word ‘elite’ a few times when you’re talking about social stratification for a very specific economic growth touted as well-being of a community, but usually you see it as exploitative. A: I don’t use the word that many times, but when I do, I think it’s doing a lot of work for me. ‘The Burning Earth’ is not an activist book, which is to say that it is just that bit muddier and less clear about the villains of the piece than activist writing necessarily has to be. And yet there is such a strong core in my own thinking of awareness of just how stark environmental inequalities are and just how much the scale of planetary destruction that has been achieved over the last two centuries has been disproportionately, not exclusively, but disproportionately driven by the elite pursuit of luxuries and of accumulation... There is a story of human need in this book and there’s also a story of human greed… I think we need to think about desire, we need to think about states, we need to think about liberation, we need to think about the genuinely liberatory promises that led to some of this environmental destruction which can’t be reduced to a question of greed or even of capitalism…There’s no question that the social and economic system that has been a driving force in the climate crisis is the capitalist system. But the socialist system in some sense was even more environmentally profligate and wasteful. It was just less successful. And so in terms of its longevity, in terms of the scale on which it was operating, it kind of doesn’t compare with what a particular capitalist mode of production does to our ability to treat all of nature as commodity and to lead to this kind of constantly expanding frontier of production.

Share your thoughts in the comments