All Roads Lead to Ruin

Review of The Burning Earth: A History by Sunil Amrith (W. W. Norton and Co., 2024)

“For the first time in the history of the world, every human being is now subjected to dangerous chemicals, from the moment of conception until death.” Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) balanced its chilling revelations about the use of pesticides with a call to action, phrased for the age of the internal combustion engine. We were speeding down a “smooth highway” to “disaster.” Carson urged humanity to take “our last, our only chance” — the biological, rather than chemical, control of insects.

Historian Sunil Amrith points out that this clarion call was far less persuasive globally than domestically. For Carson, the immense surpluses generated by America’s agriculture made the resort to chemicals as needless as it was deadly. Yet the export of those surpluses to its allies sustained the lives of millions of people. Even public health officials sympathetic to Carson’s warnings against DDT in the United States pointed out that it remained essential in the global struggle to eradicate malaria.

Ecological disaster has become an attractive topic for historians, because of its scope for retrospective wisdom. The Burning Earth: A History reads like the gloomier and slimmer cousin to Peter Frankopan’s sprightly epic of anthropogenic climate change, The Earth Transformed: An Untold History. Amrith, a distinguished historian of Asia, wants to show how the “roads to ruin” “twisted together” in the centuries from the Mongols to the present day, forming the cloverleaf ramp to Carson’s deadly highway.

His perspective combines anger with fatalism. He tells a history of “folly” in which…