‘Climate change is driven by human need and human greed’: Yale historian Sunil Amrith on his book and all things climate change

While writing, I often thought of Mahatma Gandhi’s statement: “the world has enough for everyone’s need but not enough for everyone’s greed”. We need to look at both the story of human need and human greed to understand how we arrived at this point of the planetary crisis.

One thread running throughout The Burning Earth is that the quest to feed ourselves has always been the most fundamental way in which human activity has transformed the planet. Maldistribution is a challenge: the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from food waste alone are estimated to amount to more than the emissions of any single country, with the exception of the US and China.

The second thread in 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 environmental harm.

Were there possibilities during early industrialisation, or in the run-up to it, of ushering an industrial age that was not as antagonistic to the environment?

The sense of missed opportunities is what draws me to write history in the first place.

The technologies of industrialisation did contribute to a vast expansion of human possibilities. 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. It strikes me that many commentators today are describing artificial intelligence in the same way.

But there were also paths for the deployment of those technologies to be developed and deployed in ways that were more socially beneficial and less ecologically costly — this might have involved deploying them on a smaller scale, with more local control, less concentration of power.

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?

In your earlier work, Unruly Waters, you refer to papers by the 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. 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 ambitious and more technically ambitious. 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 US and the Soviet Union, for post-colonial leaders, was that they were witnessing change on a scale that made European colonial governments in Asia and Africa appear pathetic.

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

Undoubtedly they did. Ramachandra Guha’s book, Speaking with Nature begins with an astonishingly prescient speech of Rabindranath Tagore, 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 Earth. 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.

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

One idea 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 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 work of Nandini Sundar and Alpa Shah, the Indian state’s capacity to inflict social and ecological violence has been immense.

In the more recent past, the Chinese state’s commitment to decarbonisation, and to addressing pollution, has gone much further than India’s, but we could ask who has paid the price for that success. We could also compare the responses of Indian and Chinese societies to environmental challenges. People’s 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 the scale, diversity, and impact of India’s environmental movement has been greater. But in both China and India today, I worry about restrictions on dissent and the 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 is also a growing recognition that it can be understood by bringing together a multiplicity of perspectives — atmospheric chemistry, economics of carbon markets, anthropological work on how communities respond to environmental stress, the work of literary scholars on understanding alternative ways of imagining 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.

But the political context, especially in the US, has never been more hostile to climate action.

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

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 Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. He said it was important to find new ways to tell stories about climate change and bring visibility to a variety of slow-onset environmental risks. Data alone will not make the emotional connection necessary to shift people’s perceptions. The creative arts have an enormous role to play in making the links between climate change and questions of identity.

But the opposite tendency can also be a problem — to attribute everything to climate change. The anthropologist Camelia Dewan has written an important book, 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.

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

Both propositions are true. 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 marginalised in the countries where they live?

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

My new book, Crossings — co-authored with my wife, Ruth Coffey — is about migration written for teenagers. 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. Climate pressures are indeed adding to the strain that many rural families feel. But except in cases of sudden disasters — where movements to safety tend to be short-term — environmental pressures combine with 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.

Climate-induced migration is compatible with a world of hardening borders, which I agree is what we are witnessing. But contrary to the oversimplified views of “climate migration” that one reads in media reports in the Global North — 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, even longer. In that sense, climate change is irreversible. But there is a 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 shows how quickly things can escalate if we don’t act to slow the pace of environmental destruction. But the report also shows that there are also positive “tipping points,” including in the affordability and accessibility of clean energy. 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 weaponised to create new inequalities?

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.

Bill Gates has said that we shouldn’t worry too much about exceeding the 1.5 degrees Celsius threshold of the Paris Pact and technology will sooner or later resolve climate change. Meanwhile, the focus should be on human welfare. Your views.

I agree that the focus should be on human welfare — but one of the key points I make in The Burning Earth is that we need to stop thinking of human welfare in isolation from the wellbeing of the ecosystems that sustain our lives. Even if we were to accept that climate change will be “resolved” by technology, that is only one dimension of a planetary crisis that also includes mass extinction and accumulating waste.

I have no doubt that technological change will resolve some parts of the problem—the rapid expansion of clean energy is likely to reduce both emissions and pollution over time, perhaps even in the near future. But given the complexity of interrelated changes to the Earth system, any technical “fix” on a grand scale risks a cascade of unwanted consequences. My other reason for skepticism is the sheer concentration of power in the tech industry, which raises questions about how democratic, how accessible, and how just any technological “solutions” will be.

We should also think about what we mean by “sooner or later,” given the real and escalating impact of climate change on human lives right now.

Sunil Amrith is the Renu and Anand Dhawan Professor of History at Yale University