Interviewers Note: Sunil Amrith’s The Burning Earth is a sweeping work of environmental history that traces how empire, capitalism, war, and technological ambition have shaped humanity’s fraught relationship with the planet. Rather than treating climate change as an isolated contemporary crisis, Amrith situates it within centuries of extraction, inequality, and ecological transformation.
The book moves through stories and vast geographies, assembling a mosaic that asks the question: how did we get here? When we sat down to discuss what often feels like an unfolding climate catastrophe, it was striking that our conversation repeatedly returned to hope. Not a naïve or sentimental hope, but one grounded in collective agency, regional efforts and everyday forms of community-building.
Sunil Amrith resists both apocalyptic fatalism and false reassurance. Instead, he suggests that transformation may emerge not from a single global breakthrough but from dispersed, pragmatic, and relational forms of action. That an interview about planetary crisis became, in the end, a meditation on hope reveals something essential about his work: even in diagnosing the deep roots of environmental breakdown, he insists on the possibility of imagining and building different futures.
Q: In The Burning Earth you write about how your children think and worry about climate change. What kinds of questions do they ask you, and how do you respond, both as a parent and as an environmental historian?
Sunil Amrith: The book came out in September 2024, but I finished writing it about a year earlier. In some ways, it already feels like I wrote it in a different world. Much has changed, and not for the better.
My children are older now, and their questions have become more existential. Even at a very young age, there’s a sense that perhaps it’s too late, that events have accelerated beyond our control.
In responding to them, I try to be honest. False hope isn’t helpful. But despair isn’t helpful either. When the book first came out, some readers described it as bleak; others didn’t. That reaction was revealing. It showed how differently people understand hope.
I still believe change is possible. But perhaps we’re looking for it in the wrong place. I’m less optimistic about sweeping global agreements. Given geopolitical fragmentation, that seems unlikely. But at other scales — local, regional — important work is happening. In Southeast Asia, for example, there are regional efforts toward sustainability that persist despite global instability. That’s where I locate hope: in dispersed, incremental change rather than one grand solution.
Q: Something that I constantly ask myself is how does one engage with questions of climate collapse without falling into feelings of despair. Where do you think the balance lies between criticism and hope?
Sunil Amrith: That dilemma is present in every class I teach. We shouldn’t stop asking that question. Purely doomsday narratives don’t inspire action. They can even become a kind of luxury.
One thing I’ve noticed is that the language and tone common in Western climate discourse is much less prevalent in parts of Asia. In Indonesia or India there’s more pragmatism, more day to day problem solving rather than an abstract feeling of crisis. Despite bearing severe impacts, people aren’t talking about climate change the way that we are in the “West”. The promises of modernity still matters deeply in places where they’ve never been fully realized.
One could interpret that pragmatism as denial. But it might also be more effective than paralysis. Throwing up one’s hands doesn’t mobilize anyone.
Q: Many young people feel their individual agency is negligible in the face of planetary crisis. How do we rethink agency under those conditions?
Sunil Amrith: We need to move beyond highly individualized notions of agency — particularly Anglo-American ideas that equate freedom with personal autonomy. Agency is relational. It exists in community.
And we might push further: agency isn’t exclusively human. Scholars in animal studies and science and technology studies remind us that we share this world with other beings and systems. We are always in relation.
There are even alternative traditions within Europe. Lyndal Roper’s work on the German Peasants’ Revolt shows that for sixteenth-century peasants, freedom didn’t mean individual autonomy. It meant living within nature’s affordances.
If there’s a central argument in The Burning Earth, it’s that the metaphor of warfare — the idea that we are battling nature — lies at the root of how we got here. We framed our relationship with the planet as conquest.
Q: Your book brings together empire, war, capitalism, and environmental history in a way that feels distinct. Did you begin as an environmental historian?
Sunil Amrith: No. I began with questions of empire, decolonization, and inequality in South and Southeast Asia. Over time, I realized that environmental dimensions were embedded in those questions.
So I didn’t start with environmental history and expand outward. It was the reverse. I was interested in political and economic history, and I found that environmental history illuminated them in powerful ways. The boundaries between these fields are artificial.
Q: The book reads narratively but provides in depth analysis and your own personal thoughts. What was your writing process like?
Sunil Amrith: In one sense, it took six years to write. In another, it took twenty. Everything I’ve worked on as a historian is in it.
I couldn’t have written it earlier in my career. It required that accumulation.
I care deeply about storytelling. I can write in a technical register, but I wanted this book to center narrative. Rather than an encyclopedia of global environmental history, I wanted a mosaic — many small stories assembled to answer one enormous question: how did we get here?
Editorial decisions were difficult. I wrote at least twice as much material as appears in the final version. Selection was about narrative arc as much as scholarly synthesis.
Q: You talk about cultivating an environmental consciousness from a city, which are often viewed as separate from the natural environment. How do we cultivate environmental consciousness while living in dense urban areas that seem removed from “nature”?
Sunil Amrith: For a long time, environmental history focused on wilderness and forests. Cities were marginal to the field. That has changed.
Cities are environments too — hybrid spaces of engineering and ecology.
I grew up in Singapore, one of the most engineered cities in the world. If any city appears to have “won” the battle against nature, it might be Singapore — though that success has hidden costs. Growing up there helped me understand the attraction of technocratic solutions: the belief that we can engineer our way out of crisis.
I’m critical of that belief now, but I understand its appeal. Many societies aspire to that model.
Air conditioning is a perfect example of our ethical dilemmas. By the late 1970s, roughly 80 percent of American households already had it. The habitability of hot cities depends on it.
It’s troubling, then, to criticize middle classes in India, China, or Pakistan for wanting the same. There are deep questions of equity and justice here. Some scholars now argue that in certain climates, air conditioning may constitute a basic need.
We’re profoundly entangled in these contradictions. There isn’t a single clean solution. Movement forward will likely be incremental and uneven.
Q: You’ve mentioned scales several times — local, regional, urban. Do you think we need to rethink the scale at which we imagine political action?
Sunil Amrith: Yes. Climate policy is still framed primarily at the level of the nation-state. But that scale often feels paralyzed.
Cities, for example, have formed transnational networks of mayors who share targets and best practices. In some cases, they’ve made more tangible progress than national governments.
Similarly, cities tend to incorporate migrants more pragmatically than nation-states. They deal with realities on the ground.
It may be fruitful to imagine coalitions at subnational or transnational levels — distributed, decentralized forms of action rather than waiting for a universal treaty.
Q: Given everything we’ve discussed, how do we think about hope without slipping into naïveté?
Sunil Amrith: I once attended a conference titled Environmental Joy. I loved that phrase.
We must confront injustice directly — whether in Gaza or through the unequal burdens of climate change. But alongside that reckoning, there are sources of hope.
I’m cautious about the word “resilience,” because it can excuse power: it implies the vulnerable will simply endure. But community-building, defiance, insistence on the public good — those are active forms of hope.
In academic spaces, in the arts, in literature, there’s enormous imaginative energy. There is no shortage of ideas about how to live differently, how to live with limits, how to rethink what it means to be human in relation to the rest of the planet.
Where we’ve stumbled is at the level of institutions and political leadership. But imagination and collective action exist at smaller scales. And perhaps that’s where transformation begins.
Sunil Amrith will be appearing as part of Pittsburgh Arts & Lecture’s “Ten Evenings” series on Monday March 2 at 7P.M.
