Lambert says: The term “original accumulation” sounds very neutral.
by Ramin Skibaan astrophysicist turned science writer and freelance journalist based in the Bay Area. Originally published in Undark
In a world plagued by climate change storms, wildfires, air pollution, and dwindling natural resources, humanity’s dependence on and impact on nature has never been more evident than today. But the relationships between societies and empires and the environment, particularly exploitative ones, go back a thousand years, and their turbulent history has shaped the rapidly warming planet we live on today.
Sunil Amrith, a professor of history and the environment at Yale University, documents these global changes in an extensive new account.Burning Earth: A History.” This is his second book since winning the prestigious award. MacArthur Fellowship In 2017, it was much broader in scope and ambition than its South Asia-focused predecessor.Unruly Waters.“
Here, Amrith follows the disparate and often disastrous efforts to conquer and control nature in the name of exploration, expansion, exploitation, and progress. His thorough and easy-to-understand research traces civilization back to the Mongol Empire in the 13th century. “If we are to have any hope of unraveling the tightly woven braid between inequality, violence, and environmental destruction, we need to understand its origins,” he writes.
In Amrith’s opinion, all History is the history of the environment. And it includes both the impact of the environment on societies and the impact of those societies on the environment. He cites, for example, evidence to suggest that a “medieval warm period” extended through much of Europe, North America, and parts of western Asia until the 13th century. He argues that the period’s mild climate and rainfall allowed societies to clear land, expand cultivation, build cities, and increase population. He also talks about the rise and fall of the Mongols, who quickly swept across Asia before being hampered by a lack of pasture for horses, severe blizzards and earthquakes, and a deadly plague that helped spread the Mongols’ expansion. I am evaluating it.
His analysis shows that colonial expansion from the 15th century to the early 20th century destroyed both indigenous peoples and the natural world through deforestation and other ecological damage, while at the same time changing the global distribution of power and wealth. It completely changed. He particularly emphasizes the important role of Portuguese settlers on Madeira in the early 15th century. Settlers destroyed forests for single-crop sugar plantations, used up the land, and then moved on. “The destruction of Madeira marked a new stage in the history of human exploitation, an intensification of the link between human suffering and the destruction of other forms of life,” he writes.
Around the same time, European colonial powers began the slave trade, depriving slaves of not only their freedom but also their vital connections to land and food sources. He details how Christopher Columbus and other Iberian conquistadors brought with them both wars and deadly diseases that wiped out most of the Aztecs and Incas. And he quotes paleoclimatologists. William RuddimanThey speculated that the large-scale population decline and reforestation of bare land at the time may have had an impact. role A small-scale planetary cooling phenomenon that occurred in the 16th century. little ice age. Thanks to European settlers, many habitats and species declined around the world, including whales, land mammals like sables, and numerous bird species.
At first, it is difficult to appreciate the broader implications of this tragic history of destructive colonialism. But when Amrith focuses on the 1800s and 1900s, interesting insights begin to emerge. One notable example is the increasing production of nitrogen, first for agriculture and then for weapons. German chemist Fritz Haber invented a way to create artificial nitrogen in the early 1900s and partnered with the conglomerate BASF. BASF engineer Carl Bosch was able to scale up the process to commercial production. This industrialization process would become the world’s major source of nitrogen, exceeding imports from Chile, which had been exporting nitrates extracted from the Atacama Desert.
Haber and BASF later worked to support Germany during World War I, producing nitric acid for explosives, and Haber advised the German military on making chlorine gas and other chemical weapons for use in trench warfare. Ta.
At the same time, nitrogen was increasingly used in agricultural fertilizers during a period of rapid urbanization, which was found to have significant environmental impacts, as it was discovered in the 1990s that: fertilizer runoff It creates toxic conditions in aquatic ecosystems and contributes to harmful algae blooms. Unfortunately, Amrith does not explore this part of nitrogen’s history in depth.
But he identifies other historical connections to today’s environmental issues. Of course, these include the invention of the steam engine and the burning of fossil fuels, which began during the Industrial Revolution. The invention of the automobile was particularly transformative. By 1929, there were already more than 27 million automobiles in the United States, or at least one for every household.
The book also includes an excellent account of the horrific environmental effects of the two world wars, which culminated in the incendiary bombing of Dresden and Tokyo, and the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. It is estimated that many people died. 110,000 to 210,000 people and released harmful radiation into the air, land, and water. During the war, all these bombs caused fires and probably released more material. billion pounds of soot They exist in the atmosphere and, like giant volcanoes, may have temporarily influenced Earth’s climate. “The reality of such a huge impact marks the dawn of a planetary power beyond comprehension,” Amrith writes.
Within a few decades, humanity began to fight not only nuclear weapons but also climate change, and the possibility of solar engineering, which, as Amrith says, “represents the furthest extension of man’s arrogance that he can conquer nature.” I began to struggle with sexuality.
Along the way, it also highlights the role of key figures in the environmental movement, such as Hannah Arendt, Rachel Carson, and Indira Gandhi, who conveyed a message about the destructiveness and arrogance of attempts to control nature. . A richer final section details the useful work of modern rubber tappers, rainforest protectors, and indigenous activists, pointing to new visions of societies that thrive with nature. And he’s documenting his environmental efforts justicea concept popularized by biologist Barry Commoner and policy researcher Robert Bullard in the 1970s.
However, he does not fully extend this analysis to the current era, where U.S. and European leaders and foreign policy officials continue to take an extractive approach to the natural resources of the Global South.
Still, Burning Earth welcomes important historical critiques of social injustice and inequality by writers like Howard Zinn and Eduardo Galeano. His deeply researched account, he writes, is “built from a patchwork of attachments to many different places far removed from each other, most of them cities far removed from the wilderness.” “This is the history of an urbanized, globalized, and divided planet, written from a position of sympathy for the all-too-human dream of a now-defunct fossil fuel-fueled escape. ”
