09.23.2024 WORDS BY JASON P. DINH In The Burning Earth , a sweeping global environmental history, Sunil Amrith frames climate change as a symptom of humanity’s inequitable quest to be free from nature. The year 1200 is an unusual place to start a book that is ostensibly about climate change. It’s half a millennium before the heyday of fossil fuels and about 750 years before scientists began taking regular CO2 measurements in the atmosphere. But for Sunil Amrith , Yale University historian and author of the forthcoming book, The Burning Earth , climate change is not some disembodied, standalone crisis; it’s the culmination of our species’ centuries-old pursuit to be free from nature. Without understanding those roots, Amrith writes, it’s impossible to understand—or solve —our planet’s most pressing crisis. As Amrith recounts nearly a thousand years of human history, he shows that until very recently, our species was bound by nature. Everything we grew and made depended on the sun’s energy—on plant photosynthesis. Our food and housing were at the mercy of the weather’s mercurial whims and Earth’s unshakeable geography. A couple hundred years ago, however, fossil fuels changed the narrative. With instant access to ancient fossil energy, humans were, to some extent, liberated. Fossil fuels were unleashed in farming , medicine , and manufacturing. The technologies they allowed dramatically lengthened life expectancies in industrialized nations. They empowered people to dominate the planet through the likes of dams, excavators, and mines. “Fossil energy represented a ‘breaking free from the dependence on photosynthesis. It was a kind of freedom that would previously have been beyond the reach of human imagination: a freedom that people could hardly have known how to want.” Amrith writes. “It was suddenly possible to imagine the unimaginable: freedom from wind, water, and earth.” Freedom from nature, […]