Jason P. Dinh

This book is predicated on the idea that, for centuries, humans have been seeking freedom from nature. Can you explain what you mean by that?

Sunil Amrith

One of the key stories that the book tries to tell is, when did freedom from nature even become a possibility? For most of human history, the idea of freedom from nature would literally have made no sense—it was an impossibility.

Over the last 400 or 500 years, but really more intensively starting in the 19th century, the most wealthy and powerful human beings began to see that liberation from nature was an essential part of human freedom. By liberation from nature, I mean liberation from the kinds of constraints that nature used to put on the human lifespan, on the ability to produce enough food to sustain large populations. It started with these very existential things, but then by the 20th century, humans developed technology like air conditioning—that’s freedom from the weather, for example. 

I think that freedom is a widely shared aspiration, which may have begun with a relatively small group of European men in the 19th century, but which has broadened its reach. In the Global South today, for example, if you ask people what they aspire to, they wouldn’t necessarily articulate it as, “I aspire to be free from nature,” but nevertheless there is a sense that a more comfortable and a more fulfilling life comes from freeing oneself from material constraints of that fundamental kind.

Jason

I was surprised that you opened the story starting around 1200. Why so early?

Sunil

I think the roots of some of the transformations that we’re talking about actually lie earlier. If I were to pinpoint a single starting point for my story, it’s the massive expansion of rice cultivation in China about a thousand years ago. The reason I see that as transformative in global environmental history is because it really shifts a sense of what is possible. This is a relatively rapid doubling of the amount of land cultivated for rice—thanks largely to this 11th century miracle strain of rice that was cultivated first in Vietnam and in Champa and which made its way to China. It was hardier, faster ripening, and more drought resistant. This transforms the conditions of possibility. It is essential to what then becomes a massive period of economic flourishing in China. That, in turn, if you were to really compress the story, is what attracts the Europeans to Asia in the first place. It’s that prosperity, that wealth. I wanted to start at this earlier moment, even if it is just a prelude to what is a far more detailed look at the last two or three centuries.

Jason

You frame modern history as being defined by the pursuit of freedoms, such as that of race, sexuality, gender, and oppressive governments. You then invoke another historian in saying that these freedoms are built on fossil fuel use, which means that, in a way, they’re built on the freedom of nature. Could you elaborate on how these other freedoms are connected to freedom from nature? 

Sunil

I was quoting Dipesh Chakrabarty, from an essay published about 15 years ago. The way Chakrabarty put it is that “the mansion of modern freedoms stands on an ever-expanding base of fossil-fuel use.” 

If you think about so many of the liberatory movements of the 20th century, most of them have, as at least one of their basic conditions, freedom from privation, from hunger, from deprivation. This is true of the feminist movement—the economic status of women has been so central to that movement from the very beginning. It’s true of anticolonial movements, which have struggled to liberate their countries from a subordinate position within the global economy.

So many of these freedoms, whether it was directly realized at the time or not, were built upon a fossil fuel economy and, indeed, ever cheaper fossil energy over the course of the 20th century—upon the kind of work and cities made possible by coal and oil. Fossil fuels are the hidden subtext in so many movements for freedom.

Jason

This book is a lot more than a global environmental history. It’s also a history of conflict, of inequality, and of social justice. As you write in the book, that’s because freedom from nature, like all other freedoms, isn’t equally granted. Countless people have been persecuted, even executed, in pursuit of it. Your book synopsis frames it quite nicely in saying that the book “twins the stories of environment and Empire, of genocide and ecocide.” How far back does that twinning go? And could you pick out a couple examples that illustrate that point?

Sunil

I suspect one could trace that story back to the ancient world—without that terminology, perhaps, but certainly the idea that the most intensive exploitation of some human beings by others very often accompanies massive environmental destruction and transformation.

I most clearly locate that story where I think many people would, which is starting with the colonization of the Americas by the Iberians. There was just such a stark twinning of human violence and utter environmental devastation. You see this on the plantations, of course, throughout the Caribbean and elsewhere, but then I think you see it repeated at various other moments in the book. 

For example, I spent quite a lot of time in the book writing about the two World Wars and how they had this environmental dimension, which maybe we haven’t paid enough attention to. The worst possible kinds of intrahuman violence were twinned with the acceleration and intensification of violence against nature. You also see it in the history of racism and mining labor in South Africa in the 19th century, where the exploitation of African migrant workers from across Southern Africa coincided with the capacity to drill deeper and deeper underground to construct these colossal mine complexes. You can tell versions of that story from the Indian Ocean and Southeast Asia, too.

Jason

Throughout the book, I kept wondering if you wrote this book two decades from now, how the past year would feature in it. We’ve seen ecocide and genocide crop up again, most notably in Palestine, where we’re witnessing the devastation of a land and a mass murder of a people. Have you thought about how the genocide in Gaza fits into the thousand-year narrative about freedom, nature, and equality? 

Sunil

There is a striking and sinking sense of, “We’ve been here before,” when you look at the twinning of genocide and ecocide in Gaza. 

From what information the outside world is able to get, 70% of the buildings in north Gaza were destroyed in the first several months of the war. The debris that has been produced, the poisoning of the soil, the destruction of farmland—this is going to cause generational harm. And of course that is twinned with colossal human suffering and destruction. If you think about the ecological consequences of the war in Ukraine too, these are likely to last for decades from now. 

I can’t help but get a bit of a sense that we’d almost forgotten the damage that is being done. If you take the long view, warfare has probably, certainly in my book, contributed more than anything else to planetary destruction. That’s why I focused so much on the two World Wars. I mentioned the conflict in Vietnam and various other wars because that sort of intensification of violence almost inevitably spills over into an intensification of violence on nature which often outlast the wars themselves. 

Jason

It was a little surprising to me that you didn’t get to climate change until the very end of the book. That’s because the book doesn’t really view climate change as a standalone crisis but as a culmination of our centuries-long quest to be free from nature. The way that you frame it is almost like a tragic irony: fossil energy lifted a constraint from humanity by freeing us from the limits of nature, but it’s now placing a new constraint on us through climate change. 

For starters, the idea that fossil fuels were, to some extent, a liberatory force might be challenging for environmentally-minded folks today to grapple with. Could you explain how the advent of fossil energy could, to some extent, be seen as a boon for human wellbeing?

Sunil

It was always a complicated boon. If we think about the first widespread use of fossil energy, which was in the industrial cities of Britain, their use in factories accompanied horrendous laboring conditions for the working class and a massive diminution in the bargaining power of workers. 

But, if you take a broader view, there’s no question that these fossil technologies lift all kinds of constraints, which you can trace through the history of life expectancy of the first countries in the world to industrialize. Very few countries in the world had life expectancies greater than 40 years at the beginning of the 19th century. By the end of the 19th century, the first countries to industrialize, including Japan along with a lot of Western European countries and the United States, had dramatically raised their life expectancy. For most of the Global South, that didn’t come until the middle to late 20th century.

There are all sorts of ways in which coal and then oil made life longer and easier—the basic heating of one’s home, for example—but always with a cost. And historians of labor have always shown us that cost was never borne equally, it was always borne first and foremost by working people. It was never an unmixed blessing, but nevertheless, it was a liberatory technology. The way I understand that most clearly is thinking about the history of the Global South. If you think about countries that had undergone decades or centuries of colonization, when they became independent, most of them, whatever the political complexion of their leadership, whether they were left-leaning or right-leaning, were absolutely committed to exploiting fossil fuel resources to the greatest extent possible, as fast as possible. There is a sense that colonialism had deprived people of basic material conditions of a comfortable life, and these needed to be secured as quickly as possible. 

Think about state-owned oil corporations like Petrobras in Brazil. They were formed in the 1950s with a promise of liberation from crushing poverty. Whether they lived up to those promises, of course, is a different question. Very often they didn’t. But nonetheless, there is a widely shared promise that energy is freedom. I wouldn’t discount that. 

I think it is hard for us to remember that moment. We’re quite understandably now used to seeing fossil fuels as a fundamental problem for all life on Earth, for our futures, but maybe it’s only by understanding how liberatory they once were that we can understand how difficult it has been to bring about large-scale change.

Jason

You write that we lose something in our ability to address climate change if we think of it as a standalone issue rather than the culmination of a pursuit to control and be free from nature. What exactly do you think we lose? 

Sunil

We lose sight of how tangled climate change is with so much else that we value. If climate change were a standalone crisis, then we could simply say that decarbonization alone will solve it. But if we take the broader view, then we remember that the rare earths for renewable technologies are coming from somewhere. That large solar farms in India are resulting in massive land grabs which seem quite similar to what the big dams did in the 1950s and 1960s. That solving some parts of the climate crisis might not do anything for biodiversity, which is, I think, just as important for our flourishing on this planet. That’s why I wanted to take a bigger view. Not to minimize the magnitude of climate change, but to show it as, as you put it, a culmination of a much longer history. One that makes us realize how difficult it is to undo the knot—because all of these things are bound together.

Jason

What is the big takeaway from this 1,000-year chronicle? How can we apply this new, expansive perspective to inform our climate action?

Sunil

I think two things. One is, I think, the most optimistic thing about the book. It’s realizing how quickly change can happen at a systemic level. The environmental movement, for example, is relatively young, and yet, it has become one of the most multifaceted, widely embraced, and supported movements that we’ve ever seen in human political history. 

Two, which is a corollary to that, is that we can have all the technical discussions we like, but in the end, this comes down to human values. This comes down to the fact that not all societies in the world have experienced the last 100 or 200 years the same way. We need to understand, for example, why climate justice looks very different in the Global South than in the Global North. We have to understand how historical inequalities deeply condition the resources that different societies have now to cope with a warming world, but also condition what they really value, what really matters. It’s that level of discussion that I hope my book can help us go back to. Not, will this intervention work? But, perhaps more searchingly, what are we trying to do? And what sort of world do we want to live in?