The biggest story of our time is not the US presidential election or Elon Musk’s ego. It is our destruction of the natural world, which places into jeopardy our own future. Sadly, this story is depressing and overwhelming, and therefore not generally the stuff of bestsellers.
It is also, as Sunil Amrith reminds us in The Burning Earth, not a new story. His narrative begins in England in 1217. Two years after Magna Carta, the nobility secured a “Charter of the Forest” that would facilitate their exploitation of land, timber and game. For the rich, the freedom to influence laws went hand-in-hand with the freedom to plunder nature. So it has been ever since.
A professor of history at Yale University, Amrith recounts countless episodes of human greed, including the imperialism of Spain, Russia, China, Britain and others; the growth of South Africa’s gold mines, where the suffering of African miners helped to forge London as a financial centre; and the murders of modern-day environmentalists. We have reached planetary crisis because of “our inability to imagine kinship with other humans, let alone other species”. We failed to understand that freedom has “ecological preconditions”.