'The Burning Earth': Empire of extraction

This critically acclaimed work tracks how human ambition has reshaped the planet and asks if our appetite for progress can co-exist with nature, writes Sudhirendar Sharma

By the turn of the current century, a three-degree rise in the combined effects of temperature and humidity could make life unbearable for at least 3.25 billion people.

By then, the monsoon cycle may grow deeply erratic, and glaciers might exist largely as digital archives. Much will have changed, and doomsday models already sketch dreadful scenarios. Nothing of the kind may happen, climate change sceptics argue. To prevent such outcomes, the world’s governments agreed to limit global warming to no more than an additional 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.

Far from mitigating the temperature rise, however, the planet has already warmed by around 1.2 to 1.4 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial times, bringing the 1.5-degree threshold perilously close. Recent unprecedented floods across South and Southeast Asia have been linked by scientists to rising global temperatures and intensifying climate variability. Worse may lie ahead: recent years, including 2023 and 2024, have ranked among the hottest ever recorded. Yet the urgency of this emerging reality, steadily inching closer, has not fully compelled collective global action.

Abrupt climatic changes are acting upon a world long moulded to serve human needs and desires. Yale University historian Sunil Amrith argues that the human transformation of nature began long before the Industrial Revolution and accelerated thereafter. The seeds of this transformation, he suggests, were sown as early as the medieval period.

The Charter of the Forest, issued by England’s King Henry III in 1217, formally acknowledged certain rights for common people to use forests for grazing, fuel, and cultivation. While intended as a check on royal power, such measures also reflected a broader shift in how nature came to be viewed as a resource for human use. Until the advent of the Industrial Revolution, relatively stable climate patterns enabled imperial and colonial powers to clear land, expand cultivation, and build cities at an unprecedented scale.

The Industrial Revolution, in turn, fuelled energy-hungry economic systems that transformed nature into commodities. The harnessing of fossil fuels fostered a worldview in which human freedom appeared to defy natural limits, expanding the horizons of what could be made, extracted, and consumed.

The Burning Earth is an environmental history, and, in the author’s formulation, all history is environmental history. It examines both the environment’s influence on human societies and the profound impact of those societies on the natural world. Taking a long historical view, the book suggests that the continuous struggle to fulfil human wants and desires has driven much of humanity’s transformative impact on nature.

Amrith identifies three distinct “time zones” in global environmental history. He traces major ecological turning points to events such as large-scale deforestation following medieval land policies, the Mongol expansions across Central Asia and western Eurasia, and the spread of crops such as rice across regions, which reshaped landscapes and agrarian systems.

Around the same time, European colonial expansion initiated the transatlantic slave trade, severing enslaved people from their relationships with land and food systems. Christopher Columbus and other Iberian conquistadors brought war, conquest, and diseases that devastated Indigenous populations in the Americas, including the Aztecs and Incas. These processes led to the disappearance of habitats and the decline of species across continents. All these developments reveal a persistent interplay of need and greed: the extraction of gold for global trade, the emergence of powerful financial centres, and centuries of dependence on fossil fuels. Today, the contest for resources increasingly includes access to water, intensifying existing inequalities. Addressing the planetary crisis is further complicated by the limited moral authority of wealthy nations, which have historically contributed most to environmental degradation, even as they urge poorer nations to curb their aspirations for growth and prosperity.

The Burning Earth offers a far-reaching survey of the central role played by human wants and desires in shaping — and often destroying — the planet. As things stand, the human impulse to script and harness nature is likely to grow even more elaborate in the centuries to come. In this expansive narrative, Amrith shows how humans not only transformed the material world through technology but were themselves transformed in the process. The book is an epic exploration of human ambition, yet it leaves the reader with unresolved questions about why such patterns persist and how meaningful change might emerge. Written with intellectual passion, the narrative is both insightful and provocative. As societies are gradually drawn deeper into a technologically mediated world, the book raises a pressing question: Will there remain sufficient space for freedom and democracy in a future shaped by ecological limits and technological control?

Amrith’s work has received significant critical recognition for its ambitious scope and scholarly depth. The book’s reception reflects its relevance to contemporary debates on climate, empire, and global inequality.