Lambert here: “Original accumulation” is such a neutral-sounding term.
By Ramin Skibba, an astrophysicist turned science writer and freelance journalist who is based in the Bay Area. Originally published at Undark
Humanity’s dependence and impact on nature have never been more clear than today, in a world enveloped by climate-driven storms and wildfires, air pollution, and dwindling natural resources. But the relationships societies and empires have had with the environment, especially exploitative ones, go back a millennium, and that tumultuous history has shaped the rapidly warming planet we live on now.
Sunil Amrith, a history and environmental professor at Yale University, chronicles these global changes in his wide-ranging new account, “The Burning Earth: A History.” It’s his second book since winning a prestigious MacArthur Fellowship in 2017, and much broader in scope and ambition than his South Asia-focused previous work, “Unruly Waters.“
Here, Amrith follows disparate, and often disastrous, efforts to conquer and control nature in the name of exploration, expansion, development, and progress. His thorough and accessible survey traces civilizations as far back as the 13th-century Mongol empire. “To have any hope of undoing the densely woven braid between inequality, violence, and environmental harm, we need to understand its origins,” he writes.
In Amrith’s view, all history is environmental history. And that includes both environmental effects on societies and those societies’ impacts on the environment. He cites evidence, for example, suggesting that a “medieval warm period” spanned most of Europe and parts of North America and western Asia through the 13th century. The period’s benign climate and rainfall, he argues, allowed societies to clear land, expand cultivation, build cities, and grow their populations. He also assesses the rise and fall of the Mongols, who swept across Asia quickly before being thwarted by limited grasses for their horses, intense snowstorms and earthquakes, and deadly plagues that the Mongolian expansion helped spread.
In his analysis, the colonial expansions of the 15th through the early 20th centuries transformed the global distribution of power and wealth while devastating both Indigenous populations and the natural world through deforestation and other ecological harms. He highlights in particular the pivotal role of the early 15th-century Portuguese settlers on the island of Madeira. The settlers razed forests for single-crop sugar plantations, exhausted the land, and then moved on. “Madeira’s ruin marked a new phase in the history of human exploitation: a tightening of the knot that ties human suffering to the destruction of other forms of life,” he writes.
Around the same time, the European colonial powers initiated the slave trade, which deprived the enslaved of their freedom as well as their vital links to their land and food sources. He details how Christopher Columbus and other Iberian conquistadors brought with them both war and deadly diseases that wiped out most of the Aztecs and Incas. And he cites the paleoclimatologist William Ruddiman, who speculated that the era’s large-scale depopulation and the reforesting of denuded landscapes may have played a role in the minor planetary cooling event in the 16th century called the Little Ice Age. Thanks to European settlers, many habitats vanished and species declined across the world, including whales, land mammals like sables, and numerous birds.
At first, it’s hard to detect the broader significance of this grim history of destructive colonialism. But as Amrith zooms in on the 1800s and 1900s, interesting insights begin to emerge. One notable example is the growing production of nitrogen, first for agriculture and then for weaponry. The German chemist Fritz Haber invented a way to create artificial nitrogen in the early 1900s, and partnered with the conglomerate BASF, whose engineer Carl Bosch was able to scale up the process to produce it commercially. That industrialized process would become the world’s main nitrogen source, eclipsing imports from Chile, which had been exporting nitrates extracted from the Atacama Desert.
Haber and BASF subsequently worked to aid Germany during World War I, making nitric acid for explosives, and Haber advised the German military as it made chlorine gas and other chemical weapons for use in trench warfare.
At the same time, nitrogen was increasingly used in agricultural fertilizer during a time of rapid urbanization, which proved to have a profound environmental impact when it was later discovered in the 1990s that fertilizer runoff creates toxic conditions for aquatic ecosystems and contributes to harmful algae blooms. Unfortunately, Amrith doesn’t deeply explore this part of nitrogen’s history.
But he identifies other historical links to the environmental challenges of today. These include, of course, the invention of the steam engine and the burning of fossil fuels, which began during the Industrial Revolution. The invention of cars proved especially transformative — there were already more than 27 million in the United States by 1929, or one for every household.
The book also includes an excellent account of the horrific environmental impacts of the two world wars, culminating in the firebombing of Dresden and Tokyo, and the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, which killed an estimated 110,000 to 210,000 people and released harmful radiation into the air, land, and water. The wartime fires from all those bombs resulted in emissions of possibly more than a billion pounds of soot in the atmosphere, which, like massive volcanoes, may have temporarily affected the Earth’s climate. “That such colossal impact is even plausible marks the dawn of a planetary power beyond comprehension,” Amrith writes.
Within a few decades, humanity began wrestling with not just nuclear arsenals but also with climate change, and now the potential of solar engineering, which “epitomizes the furthest extension of the hubris that human beings can conquer nature,” as Amrith puts it.
Along the way, he also highlights the role of key figures in the environmental movement, such as Hannah Arendt, Rachel Carson, and Indira Gandhi, who all delivered messages about the destructiveness and arrogance of attempting to control nature. The stronger final sections detail the beneficial efforts of modern rubber tappers, rainforest protectors, and Indigenous activists, pointing to new visions of societies flourishing with nature. And he documents efforts toward environmental justice, a concept popularized by the biologist Barry Commoner and the policy researcher Robert Bullard in the 1970s.
But he doesn’t fully extend this analysis into the current era, when U.S. and European leaders and foreign policy officials have continued an extractive approach to natural resources in the Global South.
Even so, “The Burning Earth” is a welcome complement to important historical critiques of social injustice and inequality by authors like Howard Zinn and Eduardo Galeano. His deeply researched account “builds from a patchwork of attachments to many different places, distant from one another, most of them cities far from any wilderness,” he writes. “It is history for an urban, globalized, and divided planet, written from a position of empathy for the all-too-human dreams of fossil-fueled escape that now lie in ruins.”
“.. the relationships societies and empires have had with the environment, especially exploitative ones, go back a millennium…”
I think it’s a wee bit longer than that, regardless, Mother Earth has had enough of our shit, and we’re heading for a divorce.
You may wish to hide any sharp objects before reading this, an excellent… hmmm… no, thorough, overview of nature’s reaction to the parasitical infection known as the human species– and it’s depressing as F.
The 2024 state of the climate report: Perilous times on planet Earth
We are on the brink of an irreversible climate disaster. This is a global emergency beyond any doubt. Much of the very fabric of life on Earth is imperiled. We are stepping into a critical and unpredictable new phase of the climate crisis…
https://academic.oup.com/bioscience/advance-article/doi/10.1093/biosci/biae087/7808595
I agree, it is depressing, but I do no think of humans as a parasitical infection. I think only our minds are infected, infected with the viral pathogen known as capitalism which rewards greed over compassion, profit over people.
Time to stop looking at climate science and look more into our hearts.
How Christ (not Christianity) and St Francis lived I think provide good examples of how we can change peoples hearts by own own example.
This is what the young people call cope.
I’ve been thinking the same lately. Sacralizing nature is needed, with or without belief in god, but also how the early church (especially Franciscan) embrace of monastic communities might be super helpful right about now if we wanted to escape capitalist/industrial society, create an alternative. The Catholic church has the means, the structures, the models, the know-how, the charities and the properties/land, to overnight create the examples others can follow and start shifting that mindset en masse. And this current Pope, in particular, I think recognizes the problem.
It is not capitalism per see, but the “sacrosanct” idea of private property and what it entails when push to the limit…
Yes, this book seems to be part of the usual surge of writing on history by people who think history began with European colonialism.
Mass environmental destruction, intentional or otherwise, goes back a very long way. Heavy metal pollution from Roman iron and copper production can be detected in arctic ice. Early copper manufacture from the 3rd millennium BC left mining scars still visible today, and still toxic. Neolithic farmers indulged in massive deforestation, often destroying soil that never recovered (Western European blanket bogs). Paleolithic and Mesolithic hunters devastated post ice age large mammal populations and most probably drove many into extinction, some possibly deliberately. Humans wiping out entire species when they encounter them on islands goes back to the the earliest period (the Mediterranean islands had very riche ecologies before humans came on the scene). The more we find out about pre-literate societies, the more we can see where the seeds of human destructiveness comes from.
You have reminded me of what I’ve heard called the “pointed stick hypothesis”. That is, if technologically less developed cultures, such as those that appear to live in admirable harmony with their environment had D8 tractors instead of pointed sticks, their environmental impact would not differ from those of more technologically developed societies. Human appetite would appear to be a bottomless pit, and particularly so when it’s economic viability is largely based upon mass consumption of a seemingly endless supply of non-essential crap.
I remember once seeing a photograph of a pre-columbian wheeled children’s toy from central Mexico. Proof that at least someone there and then knew all about the principle of the wheel and axle and refused to apply it to the realm of “economic activity”.
Here is a bunch of aggregated images. Some of them show pictures of Native Indiandigenous wheeled toys, showing the principle was known to quite a few, and that the refusal to apply wheels to economic activity was also general. Some nationloads of people, at least, had internal cultural checks upon the excercise of endless greed and groaf.
Here is the link.
https://images.search.yahoo.com/search/images;_ylt=Awrir2isZxVnLYgHoxNXNyoA;_ylu=Y29sbwNiZjEEcG9zAzEEdnRpZAMEc2VjA3Nj?p=pre-columbian+wheeled+toy+image&fr=sfp
Pretty sure we’re past the brink and at the beginning of the end. If everyone woke up and changed their ways tomorrow we might slow the decline but there’s no way we’re reversing it.
A view consistent with an article in yesterday’s Links: It’s Time To Give Up Hope For A Better Climate & Get Heroic The best we can do is lengthen the time between now and ultimate defeat. This in turn reminds me of the psychological orientation put forth in Stevenson’s fable: Faith, Half Faith and No Faith At All.
Yes I commented on that too. I am not advocating carrying on as usual, I think we should all be trying to find our connection to the earth and to each other and trying to be better creatures. But mostly to ease the pain of our loss because it really is too late to fix things. I am not familiar with Stevenson’s fable, I’ll check it out, thanks for the link.
“the destructiveness and arrogance of attempting to control nature”
Of course we are nature too if one accepts Darwin as most modern people do. Which means that we are part of this environment and to some degree must control nature in order to survive.
But saying nature also controls us is important if a bit self evident. From a history standpoint one could talk about the reasons for all that black enslavement including the search for a work force resistant to mosquito born diseases. And while the European colonists infected the natives many of them died as well–here and in India–from the new environment in which they found themselves.
Humankind faces multiple possibly existential crises. The growing climate chaos is but of those crises. I suppose there is some satisfaction to be derived from self-flagellation although I have never found it appealing. After reading this post and the comments above, I fail to grasp what lesson to learn from “The Burning Earth” past a simple judgment of Humankind “bad”. What purpose does that judgment serve as we enter the crucible?
A PMC acquaintance of mine has some thoughts:
The book highlights the interconnectedness of global systems and the profound impact of human actions on the planet. This suggests that a more holistic and interdependent worldview is necessary to address the climate crisis.
Here are some specific implications:
Global Cooperation: The book emphasizes the international nature of climate change, implying that global cooperation is essential to finding and implementing solutions.
Intergenerational Responsibility: By tracing the historical roots of climate change, the book suggests that we have a moral obligation to future generations to mitigate the effects of our actions.
Shift in Values: The book implies a need for a shift in values away from consumerism and short-term gains towards sustainability and long-term well-being.
Systems Thinking: The book encourages a systems-thinking approach to understanding and addressing climate change, recognizing the interconnectedness of various factors.
In essence, “The Burning Earth” suggests that a more sustainable, equitable, and interconnected world is necessary to address the climate crisis and ensure a prosperous future for humanity.
Thank you! You offer a good answer to my comment. However, I am troubled that Global Cooperation, a broad sense of Intergenerational Responsibility and a Shift in Values, combined with some common sense Systems Thinking is necessary to address the climate crisis and ensure a prosperous future for humanity. The Elites running this world lack those qualities and add considerable faults to the mix of forces crafting the future of Humankind. While the yoke of our Elites rides heavy and heavier on our necks — of what value is knowing how things should be. I feel as a mouse yearning to bell the cat but reasonably afraid to make the attempt.
“He details how Christopher Columbus and other Iberian conquistadors brought with them both war and deadly diseases that wiped out most of the Aztecs and Incas”
For those who haven’t read Charles C Mann’s “1493”, this quote above is explained thoroughly. Mann is a pleasure to read.
The Burning Earth is another current expose’ of the dire straights we’re in.
War and disease did have their effect in the conquest of Mexico, but my memories from a reading of “Discovery and Conquest of Mexico” by Bernal Diaz del Castillo leave me wondering how much the inner conflicts and weaknesses of the Aztec Empire played in Cortes’s conquest of millions of Aztecs with an army of perhaps five hundred conquistadors.
Let me get back to playing my broken record: 8 Billion human lives in simultaneous being is unprecedented in human history. The world population has quadrupled since I was born in the mid-1950’s. We pesky homo sapiens have been a pestilence on the planet since before the wooly mammoth was hunted to extinction.
Colonialism and/or Capitalism are easy straw-men to knock down. The real issue is that industrial agriculture and modern medical science — whether practiced under capitalism, socialism, Hinduvta, Shari’a, or what-have-you — have allowed an enormous decline in infant mortality accompanied by a huge extension of life-expectancy, so that multiple generations are living together simultaneously.
Quite certainly, there is no way that 8 Billion human lives in simultaneous being can be sustained without raping the planet to destruction. Professor Amrith is correct that we are an “urban, globalized, and divided planet” with “…all-too-human dreams of fossil-fueled escape that now lie in ruins.” How do we face the inevitable collapse?
Does the reviewer suggest that we all line-up at the Kool-Aid pot? March ourselves en-masse out of our extraction-dependent cities into the Killing Fields? Thanks, but no thanks.