“The land, like our skin, is bound to conserve the traces of past wounds!” ❤️

The Burning Earth | Sunil Amrith

An Insightful Overview

#lovelyReads #justReleased

ONCE UPON A TIME ALL HISTORY WAS Environmental history. Life was governed by the seasons. When the weather gods were fickle, misery followed.

Human societies used their ingenuity to wield fire, dam rivers, cut down forests: all to mitigate the risks of living.

They harnessed the power of the animals they shared shelter with.

Every culture had its gods of beneficence; every culture had dreams of plenty. A thousand years ago, those dreams grew more insistent. The scale of human impact on Earth expanded with the growth in human numbers.

And then things changed.

The most privileged people in the world began to think that the human battle against nature could be won. They believed that natural limits no longer hindered their quest for wealth and power.

They believed that instant access to the prehistoric solar energy embedded in fossil fuels made them invulnerable. Their steam engines and lethal weapons conquered the world. In pursuit of freedom, they poisoned rivers, razed hills, made forests disappear, terrorized surviving animals and drove them to the brink of extinction.

In pursuit of freedom, they took away the freedom of others. The most powerful people in the world believed, and some still believe, that human beings and other forms of life on Earth are but resources to be exploited, to be moved around at will.

How have we reached this point of planetary crisis? It is the outcome of our creaturely quest for survival - the long and continuing struggle for food and shelter that still drives a large part of the human impact on the rest of nature.

It is, conversely, the outcome of the elite pursuit of luxuries - animal, vegetal, and mineral - that has spanned ever more of the world, ever more relentlessly, over the last five hundred years.

It is the outcome of energy-hungry economic systems, capitalist and socialist alike, that turned living nature into lifeless commodities, sometimes with the liberatory intention of expanding human freedoms.

It is the outcome of our inability to imagine kinship with other humans, let alone with other species.

It is the outcome of the mutating hydra of militarism, armed with the power to destroy every form of life on Earth.

goes The Burning Earth: A History by Sunil Amrith.

A timely book, that is in tune with the urgency of our times by Sunil Amrith.

Sunil Amrith is Professor of History with Yale University, a prestigious Ivy League University.

About his childhood, Sunil says -

I HAD THE MOST THOROUGHLY URBAN OF CHILDHOODS in an Asian metropolis that grew vertically. My memories are of harbor lights and darkened movie theaters and air-conditioned shopping malls.

I paid little attention to the natural world, though nature seeped into my life unnoticed. To this day the rain I love is the rain that thrilled me then: rain that arrives abruptly and falls in sheets from stacks of inky afternoon clouds.

I grew up in Singapore, an island-city that imported almost all its food and even its water, a city as committed as anywhere on the planet to remaking nature for human ends.

From the 1960s to the present day, Singapore’s land area has grown by 25 percent.

The country’s engineers have conjured land from water - land made from sand dredged from river beds, held up with pillars drilled into the sea floor, and then sculpted into highways and parks and public housing and the world’s best airport. Even the climate was molded to the nation’s needs.

As a young person I was conscious of the idea of “sustainability,” which entered common use in the 1980s.

But I was drawn to study history by what seemed to be the more urgent struggles for political and social freedom that I saw unfolding all around me in the last two decades of the twentieth century.

When nature first touched my writing, it entered unbidden through the archives.

Amid the bloody accounting of Malaysia’s coroner’s court records, I stumbled on detailed descriptions of the neat rows of trees that provided cover for the buried bodies of Indian migrant workers on the rubber plantations in the late nineteenth century.

As I traveled through rural Malaysia to interview retired rubber tappers, I was surprised by how many of the stories they told me were about trees.

A line from the French historian of the Mediterranean Fernand Braudel came to my mind - “the land, like our skin, is bound to conserve the traces of past wounds.”

A few years later, in 2012, I spent time in Yangon, Bangkok, and Mumbai within the space of a few months.

Within recent memory all three cities had faced extreme floods. A monsoon deluge in July 2005 submerged a substantial part of Mumbai. Cyclone Nargis leveled Yangon in 2008, with a toll beyond counting in lives and homes lost.

The Bangkok floods of late 2011 broke the fortress of levees that surrounded Thailand’s capital, which was no longer able to contain a Chao Phraya River swollen by a summer of unusually heavy rains. In all three cities, extreme weather cascaded into political disaster because of misrule.

In Mumbai, decades of unregulated construction had paved over the city’s natural drainage. In Yangon, a military government clung to power at any cost, denying the scale of the tragedy and shutting out international assistance. 

In Bangkok, rapid growth had wrecked the mangroves that once held back the waters. In all three cities the poorest people suffered most, those who lived in makeshift housing in precarious and low-lying settlements.

The most compelling writing on nature often comes from deep feeling for the texture of a particular landscape and a sense of kinship with the other species that share it,

says Sunil, in this insightful book, that traces those threads so beautifully from the 13th Century onwards, down until the present, showing alternatively, the interweaving of progress and disaster, that also includes a brilliant history of the spread of rice around the world.

And for once, we get to hear things from a person closer home, from the East on familiar historical events across a huge swathe of time.

The read is quite gripping, as it is interspersed with a lot of engaging anecdotes, and eyewitness testimonies, weaving together the economic, social and environmental history across the continents into its fabric.

A must-read book that’s akin to Amitav Ghosh’s The Great Derangement or Roy Scranton’s Learning to Die in the Anthropocene.

You may want to read a review of Amitav Ghosh’s The Great Derangement in our past post HERE, where I was lucky and privileged to be part of the interactions we had with Amitav Ghosh on climate change at the Times Literary Festival, at Mehboob Studios, Mumbai.