The Burning Earth

The LA Review of Books asked me to review Sunil Amrith’s The Burning Earth: A History. This is a history of the last several hundred years through the lens of climate change. It’s brilliant, but also flawed, as Amrith completely biffs the end, where he can’t make any useful suggestions on what to do with this information because he has internalized the intellectual world of James Scott, where the state can’t the solution. I find this absolutely disastrous and plan to write more on this last point. Anyway, an excerpt:

Within this narrative, Amrith tells powerful stories. He frames his urban chapter using Albert Kahn, the European banker and mining investor. Amrith’s story depicts Kahn bringing the vast resources of the world to Paris, before the narrative moves to the South African gold mines that made both Kahn and Europe rich, created an overnight city in Johannesburg, and brought Chinese and African migrants to the mines. Miners fought for labor rights and basic living conditions, including the right to breathe. Denying that created more profit, so it didn’t happen. Then Amrith stops in Baku, Azerbaijan, where similar conditions defined the rise of the oil industry. Here the Nobel brothers enter the story, not only the dynamite-and-peace-prize-creating Alfred but also his father, the ammunition capitalist Immanuel, and brother, the oil investor Robert, who brought the Baku oil to the global market. That created another round of migration and exploitative labor conditions, as profit rolled into the West. Kahn responded by sending photographers abroad to document a globe on the verge of change due to his own investments. The establishment of the Archives de la Planète remains today one of the great documentary projects of the early 20th century. Capital, migration, exploitation, and beauty all help define what the unlocking of mineral and fossil wealth unleashed.

Or take Amrith’s chapter on three 20th-century women: the philosopher Hannah Arendt, the scientist and writer Rachel Carson, and the president of India, Indira Gandhi. He weaves their contradictions and insights into a brilliant chapter titled “The Human Condition” after Arendt’s 1958 book of the same name, written after the splitting of the atom and at the very start of the space race. She noted that humans had cut all ties with nature so completely that we might remove ourselves from our planet. Carson, previously known for her beautiful writing on shorelines, synthesized the latest scientific research on the consequences of humans’ unmooring from nature into 1962’s Silent Spring, which demonstrated the terrible impact of DDT and other pesticides. Both women were prophets, but neither had to apply these insights to governing, especially in the Global South. Amrith thus makes Gandhi the true centerpiece of the chapter: she sums up the paradox of freedom and environment in the 20th century. Gandhi was a great environmentalist in a way that appeals to many of us today, taking on the racist anti-population rhetoric of Paul Ehrlich and urging a redistributive global economy. But she also faced extreme drought and then the fear of ecological and political crisis that led to her Emergency. That massive violation of human rights, effectively a war on the poor and minority groups, sterilized eight million Indians in the mid-1970s. Arendt had warned that control over natural resources in a complex world could create irreversible consequences, and while Carson’s advocacy created space for legislative environmentalism around the world, Gandhi demonstrated how a leader could support antipollution legislation and still respond to internal and external pressures by using environmental crises for terrible political projects.

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o how to have our oil painting and a functional planet too? Amrith sees human failure as threefold. First, he correctly blames the wealthy for their ever-increasing greed that uses up the planet’s resources. Second, he notes how the modern state turned nature into commodities, as true of socialism as of capitalism. Third, he blames our species’ failure to imagine “kinship” with each other or other species.

I agree with all these points. But this leads me back to my original point—what are we supposed to do with this history? If labor historians can point to stronger labor law, and queer historians to enshrining gay rights in the law, how do we as environmental historians use our powers to provide lessons to those wanting something to do with this today?

This is where Amrith falls short. After writing a sweeping synthesis of human history up to the moment of publication, he tries to put together a conclusion that provides a bit of hope. This is the list of what he sees as reasons for hope: the films of Hayao Miyazaki; the anti-war writings of Rabindranath Tagore; the protest of an Indonesian mine by 150 women; the 2008 Constitution of Ecuador, which wrote ecological rights into the law; video games with ecological messages; and an Instagram video from a K-pop band in support of fighting the climate crisis.

This is all … nice? None of it even begins to address the issues seriously, except perhaps the Ecuadoran Constitution, and even here, the nearly 20 years since its ratification have seen that nation deal with other pressing crises such as gang warfare and political assassination over prosecuting violations of these provisions. Amrith admits that the mining company in Indonesia just found somewhere else to mine. His inability to articulate meaningful paths forward to our burning earth is hardly unique in the field. Environmental historians, and sometimes environmentalists themselves, have often struggled in discussing responses.

This isn’t good enough. It is also far too common. So many solutions articulated today revolve around the small. I’m sorry—your community garden is going to do nothing useful except provide you with tasty vegetables and some satisfaction at growing your own food. And we hear many calls these days about Indigenous knowledge and thinking through preindustrial ways of interactions with nature; that’s fine, as far as it goes, but there are eight billion people on this planet who all need food and water, and who are unlikely to reject consumer goods. Calls to “degrow” the economy that come out of this rhetoric have no answer to what that would mean materially for people.

The only solution is the state. Yes, the same state that brought us colonialism and imperialism, DDT and thalidomide, the atomic bomb and the Emergency in India. For these reasons, scholars and activists have largely devalued the state as a site of solutions in recent years. With scholarship, much of this goes back to the deep influence of James C. Scott and his suspicion of the governmental apparatus, especially in his brilliant 1998 book Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. That book, in its critique of high modernism, certainly diagnosed the worst the state can offer, but Scott also chose the most extreme examples to make his points. We see the lack of trust in state solutions throughout our politics and our society. Small-A anarchism has more punch today than state socialism. Environmental activists have often turned from big political fights to backyard gardens, a theme reflected in a lot of scholarship as well across the social sciences, where articles and books on this subject flower like my father’s astounding roses in July. Compare the response to vaccinations between Jonas Salk’s polio vaccine in 1955 and the COVID-19 vaccines that developed by late 2020. The latter was one of the great successes of the modern state, but unlike in the 1950s, enormous swaths of the country and then the world avoided vaccination as conspiracy theories filled the void.

It’s really a great book, like legit great. Except for that one thing. And that one thing is a real problem. Still, this is the perfect kind of book to review–the fantastic book with the fatal flaw. Still, you should probably buy the book.