Is it up to pop stars to save the planet now?

‘Walking by the banks of the Chao Praya on a breezy evening after a day of intense heat,’ writes Sunil Amrith at the start of his melancholic new book, ‘I struggled to connect the scene before me.’ While the river that flows through Bangkok looked idyllic, ‘crowded with noisy pleasure boats festooned with lights’, Amrith was struck by the realisation that half of the city ‘could be underwater by the end of this century’. This thought was the latest stage in a process that he says has taken him time to work out: ‘I can no longer separate the crisis of life on Earth from our concerns with justice and human freedom that inspired me to become a historian in the first place.’

The result is The Burning Earth, a volume that bristles with indignation. All history used to be environmental, notes the author – for ‘life was governed by seasons. When the weather gods were fickle, misery followed’. That required humans to be ingenious, learning how to wield fire, dam rivers, cut down forests and mitigate risks. According to Amrith, those were golden days, when humans shared shelter with animals, devised gods of beneficence and ‘every culture had dreams of plenty’. Opportunities seemed endless. ‘Then things changed.’

Amrith is a professor of history at Yale with an outstanding academic record, as well as being the author of several highly regarded books, mainly about South Asia. He is  a scholar who writes with conviction. In this book, he is clear about who’s to blame for how ‘things changed’, even if he’s reticent about how or why. ‘The most privileged people in the world began to think that the human battle against nature could be won.’