Climate justice lets super-rich in developing world off the hook: Prize-winning historian Sunil Amrith

While climate change’s association with early industrialisation is often cited, the connections between global warming and environmental shifts over the last 500 years are not that well-known. Your work, ‘The Burning Earth’, joins the dots. If one were to ask you for a central theme or message, of what is a many-splendoured study, what would that be?

While writing the book, I often found myself wrestling with Mahatma Gandhi’s famous statement: ‘the world has enough for everyone’s need but not enough for everyone’s greed.’ Has this ever been true? If there is a central message in The Burning Earth, it is that we need to understand both the story of human need and of human greed in understanding how we arrived at this point of planetary crisis.

One thread that runs through The Burning Earth, going back to medieval China where I begin the story, is that the quest to feed ourselves has always been — and remains today — the most fundamental way in which human activity has transformed the planet. This continues to be a struggle for all too many people, including of course in India. Maldistribution remains a fundamental challenge. The greenhouse gas emissions from food waste alone are estimated to amount to more than the emissions of any single country apart from the United States and China.

The second thread through the book looks in the opposite direction — it shows that the pursuit of luxuries by a small elite has had, and still has, a disproportionate role in driving forward environmental harm. I start that narrative with the devastation caused by the Spanish colonisation of the Americas, which set in train a process that twinned human harm and environmental destruction: the story unfolds through sugar and slavery, through gold and silver mining and the enormous harm they caused to the health of workers while leaving behind ruined landscapes.

In The Burning Earth, you talk of the vast expansion of human possibilities as being detrimental to the environment. But were there also possibilities during early industrialisation, or in the run-up to it, when the two could have actually not been antagonistic? Were there missed opportunities?

I think that sense of missed opportunities is what draws me to write history in the first place. Things could have been otherwise — and the hopeful lesson in that is that they still might be.

The technologies of industrialisation did contribute to a vast expansion of human possibilities, and we should never forget that — in The Burning Earth, I quote some early observers of industrial technology who were so amazed at what they made possible that they could only describe them using a religious or mystical language of magic and miracles. It does strike me that many commentators today are describing AI in the same way.

There were paths for the deployment of those technologies that could have been more socially beneficial and less ecologically costly — this might have involved deploying them on a smaller scale, with more local control and less concentration of power. Some classic books in English social history, for example E P Thompson’s Making of the English Working Class, are full of alternative visions and movements that sought to assert democratic control over the new technologies. Thompson wasn’t interested in the environmental impact as such, but going back to his work with ecology in mind also raises new insights.

And, of course, there is a long-running ‘what if?’ in the history of India and most parts of the Global South: what if industrial technologies had been developed autonomously or circulated more freely, without the distorting effects of the colonial structures under which they actually did spread?

Much of the early environmental shifts overlapped with colonialism. In what ways did imperial rule lay the grounds for global warming?

Imperial rule had both direct and indirect effects in laying the grounds for global warming. In a direct sense, imperial rule intensified the commodification of nature; it caused massive deforestation; it was highly extractive; it denigrated and disempowered local ways of life that may have been less environmentally harmful. More abstractly, the vision of unrestrained capitalism that we associate with Victorian political and economic thought gave rise to the ideas of endless growth and accumulation that have only deepened their hold in more recent times.

The indirect effects are also important. In the minds of many postcolonial leaders— in India, we see this especially the wing of the freedom movement represented by Nehru — the problem with colonialism was not that it had been extractive as such: the problem was that it had been extractive in the wrong ways, and for the benefit of a small minority. The push to decolonise, in that sense, was about hastening extraction for the benefit of the people, but with just the same instrumentalist approach to the wider ecology and the environment.

Amitav Ghosh observed the irony of this indirect legacy of colonialism in The Great Derangement. He pointed out that, in a counterintuitive way, colonialism perhaps delayed the climate crisis by holding back the industrialisation of large countries like India and China.

At one place in your earlier work, Unruly Waters: How mountain rivers and monsoons have shaped South Asia’s history, you refer to papers by the great Indian scientist, Meghnad Saha, where he talks of floods in the Damodar Valley and says that science can help restore the balance between humans and nature. At another place in the Burning Earth, you quote Mao Zedong, ‘When we ask the high mountain to bow its head it must do so. When we ask the river to yield, it must yield’. In what ways were attitudes of post-colonial regimes, and their scientists similar and dissimilar to that of their colonial forebears?

Post-colonial regimes and their scientists were far more ambitious than their colonial forebears — they were more morally ambituous as well as more technically ambitious. They thought big. Many of them, and Saha is a good example, were motivated by a genuine sense that technology would bring social liberation. Engineering infrastructure and engineering society were seen as two sides of the same process. The great allure of both the United States and the Soviet Union, for anti-colonial activists and post-colonial leaders, was that they were witnessing change on a scale that made European colonial governments in Asia and Africa appear pathetic.

Post-colonial planners’ zeal, and that commitment to size, were double-edged. When things went wrong, the impact on both people and on the rest of nature was on an unprecedented scale. And the sense of mission tended to ride roughshod over dissenting views.

‘The Burning Earth’ explores how centuries of environmental change have propelled human migration.

Did post-colonial societies miss opportunities to do things differently?

Undoubtedly they did. And on that I can do no better than to recommend Ramachandra Guha’s excellent book, Speaking with Nature. It is a treasure trove of creative visions by Indian thinkers who imagined a different path to development, one that would have been less ecologically reckless.

Guha begins the book with an astonishingly prescient speech of Rabindranath Tagore, given in 1922, that used a parable of a future race of beings laying waste to a distant planet to describe the irreparable harm humans were doing to the Earth. And this was in 1922. From more sensitive urban planning to innovative methods of water conservation, we have a rich archive of ideas about how to do things differently. That archive is still open to us, of course, if we choose to turn to it for seeds of inspiration.

In what respects have post-colonial India and China been similar in ways they have framed the environment? Where have they diverged?

One idea I put forth in The Burning Earth is that a key sensibility that linked India and China — and many other post-colonial societies — was an emphasis on haste. Despite fundamental differences in ideology and the form of government, their leaders shared a sense that, however fast change was happening, it was not happening fast enough. This opened the way to environmental recklessness.

A significant divergence is that at no point did the Indian state have either the ideological drive or the capacity to cause the kind of colossal harm that Mao Zedong’s government did during the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution over a very concentrated period of time. Yet, that is a relative observation. Seen through the brilliant work of Nandini Sundar and Alpa Shah, the Indian state’s capacity to inflict that same combination of social and ecological violence has been immense.

In the more recent past, the Chinese state’s commitment to decarbonisation, and especially to addressing air and water pollution, has gone much further than India’s, but we could legitimately ask who has paid the price for that success.

That is the top-down perspective. We could also think about how Indian and Chinese society have been similar or different in their response to environmental challenges. People’s environmental movements have flourished in China despite political restrictions; indeed, environmental activism emerged in the 1980s and 1990s as a relatively ‘safe’ way to express criticism. But there is no question that the scale, diversity, and impact of India’s environmental movement has been greater: India has been home to one of the most flourishing and multifaceted environmental movements in the world, alongside some counterparts in Latin America. But in both China and India today, I worry deeply about restrictions on dissent and the political targeting of environmental defenders.

What are the shifts you have noticed in attitudes in academia, and among people at large, towards climate change?

Within academia, climate change has become an unavoidable question across almost every discipline, including in the humanities. There has also been growing recognition that climate change can only be understood by bringing together a multiplicity of perspectives — from atmospheric chemistry to the economics of carbon markets, from the work of anthropologists on how communities respond to environmental stress to the work of literary scholars on understanding alternative ways of imagining the human relationship with the rest of nature.

No issue concerns or motivates my students more than the climate crisis. Youth movements all over the world have come together over questions of environmental justice. There is a huge amount of creative thought going into how to address different dimensions of climate change. But the political context, especially in the United States, has never been more hostile to action on climate change. Concurrent with a surge in public awareness of the climate crisis, there has been an enormous backlash.

Despite the enormous seriousness of it, climate change doesn’t get the same traction among people as say economic challenges, or identity politics. Why is that so?

The most common answer to the question, which is not wrong, is that climate change is such an abstract and complex process that it can feel disconnected from lived experience. But we could also flip the question and say that, increasingly, identity politics and economic challenges are themselves bound up with the effects of climate change.

The fundamental challenge is one that the literary scholar, Rob Nixon, identified more than a decade ago in a book called Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Nixon pointed out how important it is to find new ways to tell stories about climate change and bring visibility to a whole variety of slow-onset environmental risks that don’t grab headlines. It is amply clear that data alone will not make the emotional connection necessary to shift people’s perceptions and behaviors. It is an imaginative challenge as much as anything else. I think the creative arts have an enormous role to play in making the links between, in your terms, climate change and questions of identity.

But the opposite tendency can also be a problem, which is to attribute everything to climate change. The anthropologist Camelia Dewan has written an important book called Misreading the Bengal Delta, about how NGOs in Bangladesh have felt pressure to frame all of their work in relation to climate change in order to access international funding — Dewan shows that this can distort priorities and create misunderstandings about the root causes of complex social problems.

Developing countries often argue that the developed world needs to take greater responsibility for mitigating global warming. Does such a framing of climate justice let the rich in the Third World off the hook?

I feel strongly that both propositions hold true, and that we should not feel the need to choose between them. Developing countries are entirely right to insist that the developed world should take greater responsibility for global warming. India’s leaders from across the political spectrum — starting with Indira Gandhi’s famous speech at the 1972 UN environmental conference in Stockholm — have been eloquent in pointing out the sheer hypocrisy of the Global North’s position on environmental responsibility, as seen by the pitiful amounts that have actually been pledged for mitigation and adaptation in relation to the amounts needed.

At the same time, those claims can indeed serve to let the rich in the developing world off the hook. A recent study by Sarah Schongart and colleagues in Nature shows that those in the top 10 per cent of the global wealth distribution were responsible for almost half of all emissions in 2019; while a significant part of that 10 per cent still lives in the Global North, a growing proportion is made up of the richest people in India, China, Indonesia, Brazil, etc. So internal and international inequality are both important factors to consider.

A big question I have been asking in my work is who gets left out if we frame climate justice entirely in nation-state terms? Where does that leave communities who are exceptionally vulnerable precisely because they have been marginalized as second-class citizens, or worse, in the countries where they live?

You have also written about migration. There’s a school of thought which holds that the era of migration is over. There is also another school of thought that warns of waves of climate-change precipitated migration. What are your views?

As it happens, my brand new book, Crossings — co-authored with my wife, Ruth Coffey — is a book about migration written for younger teenagers, published by the wonderful Tara Books later this month. It is a work of fiction, but informed by the research I did many years ago for a book called Crossing the Bay of Bengal.

The relationship between climate change and migration is complex, as many studies from India have shown. There is no doubt that climate pressures are adding to the strain that many rural families feel. But except in cases of sudden disasters — where movements to safety tend to be ad hoc and short-term, and not well captured by the term ‘migration’— environmental pressures always combine with a whole raft of other factors to shape patterns of migration: poverty, debt, access to capital, the presence or absence of social networks, and the cultural imagination of what opportunities lie elsewhere.

Increased migration as a result of climate change is entirely compatible with a world of hardening borders, which I agree is what we are witnessing. Contrary to the oversimplified views of “climate migration” that one reads in media reports in the Global North — where the assumption is that millions of climate migrants will be waiting at the gates of the richest countries — the overwhelming majority of climate-driven migration will be domestic, and countries in the Global South will be most affected.

Do you believe that climate change is irreversible, and we will have to find ways to live with it? Or are you more optimistic? In both cases, do you see a role for technology?

Even if we reached net zero tomorrow, a significant amount of warming would already be locked in for centuries or even longer. In that sense, climate change is irreversible and we will have to find ways to live with it. But there remains a wide range of possible trajectories in relation to how much and how fast: strong mitigation measures still have the potential to keep warming within limits that can be adapted to. The Global Tipping Points report, recently published, shows how quickly things can escalate if we don’t act to slow the pace of environmental destruction, as we are already witnessing with potentially irreversible harm to the world’s coral reefs. But the report also, more hopefully, shows that there are also positive “tipping points,” including in the affordability and accessibility of clean energy, which may not be far away.

That last point tells you that I do believe technology will play a central role in how we adapt to a warming world. The questions we must ask are: who will benefit from these technologies? Will it be more than a small minority? Who will control these technologies? Will they be weaponized to create new inequalities and even new empires? Who will decide which risks are worth taking? If there’s one lesson from the long history I have narrated in The Burning Earth, it is that failing to ask those questions has brought us to this point of planetary crisis.