Recent and major shifts in international environmental policies and programs have precedent in history, but the scale and urgency of their potential impacts present a planetary risk that’s new, podcast guest Sunil Amrith says. A professor of history at Yale University, he joins the show to discuss the current political moment and draw comparisons across time. “ When we look at examples from the past, [societies’ ecological impacts] have tended to be confined to a particular region, to those states, and perhaps to their neighbors. Because of where we are in terms of anthropogenic warming [and] planetary boundaries, I think the scale of any risk, the scale of any potential crossing over into irreversible thresholds, is going to have impact on a scale that I’m not sure historical precedents would give us much insight into,” he says. Amrith is the author of The Burning Earth: A History, which examines the past 500 years of human history, colonization and empire, and the impact of these on ecological systems. In this conversation, he details some historical parallels that can be ascribed to the current global political moment — like the U.S. withdrawal from international agreements such as the Paris climate accord — and what history can teach us about these actions. When asked what periods of history resulted in the greatest cooperation and peace, Amrith pointed to the post-World War II era, when “the U.N. and its agencies — a flawed but genuine attempt at global cooperation that came from that accompanied [by…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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