Required Reading in 2025
The Burning Earth
Sunil Amirth
The Burning Earth got a scorching hot review in The New Yorker, and so I ordered it from my local library, meaning that, as a new best seller, I’d have only two weeks to read it. No problem, since The Burning Earth is as fascinating as it is readable.
Sunil Amirth is a MacArthur “genius,” born in Singapore, currently a professor of history at Yale. These three attributes all contribute to the book’s important differences from many screeds about how we’re despoiling our earth. First, Mr. Amirth’s book reaches beyond Western contributions to climate change. His insights about environmental destruction in Asia, Africa, Indonesia, and other places provide a truly global perspective. Second, his historical perspective is unique in my reading about climate change. Lastly, his academic bent lends the book a scientific legitimacy that transcends mere doomsday.
Yet, The Burning Earth is not a scholarly read. Rather, it’s as if Malcolm Gladwell, that master of digestible vignettes as stand-ins for complex human experience, took up climate change. Rudyard Kipling, Willa Cather, Albert Kahn, Diego Rivera; the book draws an astonishing array of voices. Farming, mining, transit, famine, flood, fire; it recounts story upon story of human disaster, whether medical, social, economic, or physical. Mr. Sumil explains environmental disruption so severe it impacts the behavior of every form of life on earth. Until, one by one, the flora and fauna that define our planet become extinct.
While most analyses pin the origins of climate change on the Industrial Revolution, Mr. Sunil goes further back: all the way to 1200, when the Charter of the Forest, a companion to the Magna Carta, institutionalized cutting down forests to create arable land. Of course, things really started heating up with the steam engine, then railroads, and increased urbanization. Beyond the rise of capitalism and redefinition of human labor, Mr. Sunil presents this as a fundamental shift in our understanding of the relationship between man and our environment.
In 1842, on the cusp of the potato famine, Irish writer William Cooke Taylor wrote how the absence of smoke “…indicates the quenching of the fire on many a domestic hearth, want of employment to many a willing labourer, and want of bread to many an honest family.” Amirth notes, “Witness here the birth of an idea so powerful that it has reverberated around the world for almost two centuries: the idea that the degradation and sacrifice of nature is the necessary price of a human freedom from want.”
He then goes further to demonstrate how the rhetoric of freedom has become bound up with the triumph of the artificial over the natural. “Into the pursuit of freedom there crept, over time, a notion previously unthinkable: that true human autonomy entailed a liberation from the binding constraints of nature.” Which is how we arrive today at Elon Musk, a man of unbridled power whose ambition is to exhaust the resources of this planet in order to inhabit Mars.
The Burning Earth exposes our ceaseless penchant for war with a fresh, diabolical perspective. Ecologist Paul Sears wrote that “Violence toward nature is no less evil than violence against Man.” But Amirth illustrates how man’s violence against man actually produces violence agsint nature. His description of the landscapes destroyed by World War I is gripping, only to be eclipsed by the immense ecological damage of World War II, triumphed by the catastrophic havoc wrought by the atomic age.
Two aspects of The Burning Earth gnaw. First, the graphics are terrible. Beyond meaningless, they’re downright confusing. Since the book is finding a large audience, a second edition with worthy graphics is in order. And while publisher W.W. Norton is at it, they ought to invest in more proof reading. The book is chock full of statistics. Early on, I came upon this trio of numbers related to the horrific conditions and baked-in racism of South African gold mines. “By the end of the nineteenth century, the goldmines employed close to 93,000 workers. Just over 10,000 of them were white…Africans…made up 90 percent of the workforce.” 93,000 minus 10,000 leaves a large majority of ‘other’ but simple math shows it falls short of 90 percent African. This statistical ‘fudge’ cast suspicion over every subsequent stat. The travesty of environmental degradation is so huge, there’s no need to embellish.
Despite these shortcomings, The Burning Earth gets more compelling as we burn, baby burn. Part Three (1945–2025) lays out the complexity of trying to address our climate crisis along with the hypocrisy of our all-too-lame efforts to date. One chapter compares and contrasts three women of the 1960–1970’s era: scientist Rachel Carson, philosopher Hannah Arendt, and Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. At first, it seems their understanding and approaches to the science, morality, and politics of climate change are aligned. But when actual action is required, conflicts flare.
These conflicts only become more intractable as time marches on (and men finally start paying attention). Regarding the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio, the Dalai Llama said, “planetary harm is an outcome of a social order of atomized, desiring, acquiring individuals,” while US President George Bush said, “the American way of life is not up for negotiation.” No wonder there’s no agreement on how to proceed!
I was disappointed, though not surprised, that Mr. Sunil offers no worthwhile insight about how to address this intractable, life-threatening dilemma. Instead, the epilogue to The Burning Earth is laced with optimistic stories of young people’s awareness and commitment to rebalancing human’s place on this planet. As a Baby Boomer who came of age protesting war and chanting peace, forgive me for discounting the commitment of youth. After all our optimism, we baby boomers delivered to the world Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Joe Biden, and Donald Trump. Two generations out from Silent Spring, more than fifty years since the first Earth Day, and over thirty years since Rio: what have we accomplished? We’ve emitted more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere since 1990 then in all prior measured history.
So. If our situation is so dire and the remedies so paltry, why bother reading this book? Because in the path of human development, knowledge, understanding, and perspective always trump ignorance. The better we understand how we got here, the easier it will be to find a way forward.
I am not hopeful for the future of humans on this earth. But I put my faith in two enduring truths. One: that humans are lame in anticipating problems, but pretty creative in addressing catastrophes. Two: that Mother Earth is more resilient than we deserve. It’s been almost forty years since Marc Resiner’s Cadillac Desert made the case that we’re out of water in the American West. Yet, the population sustained by the Colorado River system has almost doubled since then. In this book, Mr. Sunil spends considerable time discussing the population explosion of the 1960’s and 70’s, which many intelligent people viewed as impossible to sustain. Yet, the Green Revolution has created enough food to feed eight billion people. To be sure, we have ongoing problems of equity and distribution, and the environmental consequences of industrial agricultural have created new dilemmas, but at a first level approximation, we’ve figured out how to feed a heck of a lot of people.
Today, the proposed technological fixes to climate change give me the willies, the political will for change is weak, and the economic forces to bullying down our reckless path of destruction are strong. But despair is surrender, and so I force myself to a position of hope. That’s why everyone should read The Burning Earth, and then find a way, however small, to apply the cool hand of reason to the challenges we face.
