Out of the Frying Pan, Into the Fire
Environmental History Reading Group Session Two: The Age of Fossil Fuels
We continue our environmental history reading group in February with parts two and three of Sunil Amrith’s The Burning Earth. We will follow the same format as last month for our meeting (details on location here)—a potluck dinner at the start followed by discussion. If you missed last month’s discussion, no worries! We will be covering the bulk of the book this month, and deciding on the future direction of our readings together.
There are many ways we could approach discussing this huge and important period of human history, only a handful of which we can tackle in a couple of others unfortunately. There’s a lot going on—this is a global history, so it’s easy to get lost in the details and the many places and particular histories. The main thing is to pick up on the big themes, the through-lines that can be seen in India and Indonesia, the American frontier and the Siberian one, and so on. If you don’t get the exact context of every thing Amrith covers, that’s ok (and feel free to bring up stuff you didn’t understand or about which you’d like to know more, odds are going someone in our group can point you in the right direction!).
Before we get to fossil fuels—which are arguably the dominant factor in modern history, of even more importance than the rise of capitalism, the emergence of the modern state, and so forth—we should first think about the immediate pre-history of the fossil fueled modern world. In the first part of The Burning Earth we saw some of these factors: the European conquest of the Americas and their integration into the emerging global economy, the various political, economic, biological, and other transformations that make up what we call “early modernity” and which took place across the planet. While the discovery and utilization of fossil fuels would power—literally and metaphorically—the world from the mid-19th century or so forward, all of these factors helped determine the shape that things would take. Industrial capitalism (which is itself an imperfect descriptive phrase—as Amrith shows many of the same broad factors at work in explicitly capitalist countries of the twentieth century were also at work in the communist, ostensibly non-capitalist, bloc) developed out of a mass of global factors and patterns, made possible by the unlocking of unimaginably vast reservoirs of physical power in the form of coal, oil, and gas.
The vast and relatively rapid movement of people over the face of the earth was one such factor, one that coincided not coincidentally with the emergence of the modern state, even as nineteenth century states struggled to control and direct these great flows of human beings. Ecologically, the movement of humans is a major story in the remaking of the earth’s surface; it has also been accompanied (though Amrith doesn’t really talk about it as much) by the movement of many other living things, from pathogens to entire complexes of species (if you step outside and examine the “weeds” growing nearby odds are very good they are all or mostly of Eurasian, not North American, origin). These movements and ecologically rearrangements were already under way before the industrial revolution began to spread globally, but they have continued apace to the present.
But of course fossil fuels are the big story here, and it would be hard to over-stress how vital they really are to understanding the modern world. From where I sit at the moment typing—a coffee shop in Rossville—almost everything within sight has been made possible by fossil fuels, from the asphalt of the road to the plastics of the table to the plants (nursery grown non-natives) in the road margins to the whole electronic infrastructure visible and invisible around me to the coffee I’m drinking and of course the computer upon which I’m typing. In the distance Lookout Mountain is a reminder of the initial energy source of the great industrial transformation, the Carboniferous age coals that cropped out close enough to the surface for easy exploration (if not easy exploitation—witness the “dog hole” mines that still dot the Cumberland Plateau, ceilings so low you practically have to crawl through them). For our discussion it might be helpful just to go through all of the ways we can think of in which fossil fuel energy has reshaped the earth and its living systems—Amrith covers some but not all (otherwise this would be a multi-volume work!). For instance, the development of electronic lighting and its pervasive use has fundamentally reshaped the ecology of the night, the human experience thereof and the non-human. But there are many, many others—keep track of ones mentioned in the book, as well as others you might think of as you read, and we can bring them all up on Thursday and try to make sense of the whole.
Therein lies perhaps the biggest question we will want to address: beyond the simple reality of fossil fuels and their incredible energy potential, what are the main dynamics that have shaped all of these things? What are the choices people have made, at various levels of power? Have the transformations of modernity been deliberate in any sense, or are we as humans simply being carried along on a wave of inevitability? To go back to last month’s discussion, who, or what, in this story has fundamental agency? Does it even matter if we recognize what is going on? Do political ideas or philosophical commitments matter? Can the direction of history be changed in some meaningful way by deliberate human action? In light of the genuinely mind-boggling climatic transformations that fossil fuels have unleashed this question gains especial force, and Amrith certainly attempts to end things on a positive note. We can discuss the extent to which this positivity is warranted or not, and in general talk about how we should think about our own role in this still burning earth and to what extent we as human actors in this drama can individually and collectively shape how future history will turn out. Weighty stuff, but hopefully the burden can be lightened a bit by undertaking it together.