Industrial smoke rises near New Zealand’s Kaikoura mountains
Colin Monteath/Minden Pictures/Alamy
The Burning Earth
Sunil Amrith (Allen Lane (UK); W. W. Norton (US))
So much has been written about the environmental crisis that it is difficult to say anything new. It is a hard problem, but Sunil Amrith takes a good swing at it.
He is a historian at Yale University, with interests that range from migration to climate history. In The Burning Earth: An environmental history of the last 500 years, Amrith documents the ways our societies have impacted the planet over the past half-millennium, from industrial…
