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A new book asks a giant question.

How did we end up in a climate crisis?

The idea that we are outside nature.

The idea that technology can solve any problem, the idea that technology can solve any

problem, the idea that we can insulate ourselves, that idea is always a fiction. It's Monday,

December 16th, and you're listening to Science Friday. I'm Sifari producer Rasha Eredi. Looking back at over 800 years, a new book called The Burning Earth A History

connects the dots on how the pursuit of empire, environmental destruction, and human migration

led us to this point in the climate crisis. Sci-fri producer Kathleen Davis spoke with the book's author, Dr. Sunil Amrith, a historian at Yale

University.

Welcome to Science Friday.

Thank you for being here.

Thanks for having me, Kathleen.

Sunil, how did the idea for this massive book come about?

So some of the themes in the Burning Earth I've been writing about

teaching for two decades, though that was primarily focused on one part of the world, and that's

India and Southeast Asia, which is where I do most of my primary research. So some of these

questions, some of these themes have really been with me for a long time. But the question of what

made me want to take on the story at the truly epic scale as I do in the Burning Earth was a coming

together of various things. One was my own children who are 10 and under starting to ask me

questions about how we've ended up in a place

where the environment around us is in such peril. And I found that I didn't really have a

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