Burning Earth: how conquest and massacre devastated landscapes around the world!

An epic study of human history shows how the poor and disenfranchised fought again and again with those who sought to carie on the planet's natural resources.

In the 1620s, King Charles I of England commissioned the Dutch hydraulic engineer Cornelius Wermuiden to drain the flat swamps of East Anglia, which he considered a deserted wasteland. The locals were outraged. These swamps, writes historian Sunil Amrit in "Burning Land", "maintained the wealth of human and more than human life, which was now in danger". According to one pamphletist of that time, many thousands of farmers lived by collecting "reeds, feed, turf, flags, poufs, segs" and "many other swamp goods".

Local residents, nicknamed "Swamp Tigers", destroyed the dams, dams and locks that were installed to divert the rivers. But the political elite of England was determined to see nature "acted". The swamps were eventually drained and the land was repurposed for agriculture, the benefits of which went to wealthy landowners. Now known as the bunary of Britain, these once biologically diverse wetlands are under constant risk of flooding.

This model of conquest and massacre - inciting the rich against the poor, colonizers against indigenous people, control over nature for the prosperity of wildlife - has been tragically repeated countless times throughout history and around the world. Amrit tells this sad (and sometimes inspiring) saga with talent, in his epic study of human innovation and destruction.

He notes that the swamp inhabitants of Eastern England were not the first to lose their livelihoods and wild lands because of the rich, and not the last to resist. People with power and privileges have conquered the world with the help of technology and deadly weapons, but the poor and powerless persist. The indigenous peoples of Brazil, Indonesia and India continue to fight corporations that encroach on their untouched tropical forests, just as swamp tigers fought for their swamps. It is on these overlooked environmental and political conflicts that Amrit focuses his narrative.

Bloody commerce

For 600 years, many of these conflicts have revolved around the pursuit of luxury. When Portuguese ships reached the North Atlantic island of Madeira in 1426, colonists set fire to most of its forests and then enslaved native Guanches from the nearby Canary Islands to clear the land for sugar cultivation. In the 1470s, the Portuguese reached the coast of Ghana. In Elmin, they built a fortress that flourished as a center for the gold, ivory and pepper trade, first, and later for the "bloody Atlantic slave trade".

At every stage, European colonists sowed death and destruction of the environment. In the sixteenth century in Peru, the Spaniards kidnapped the indigenous people and forced them to extract a mineral source of mercury called cinnabar, which was used to extract silver from ore. Toxic vapors from cinnabar processing plants poisoned water, mammals, fish and shackled people working in the "death mine" in Uankavelik. As Amrit quotes one of the reports of that time: "previously there were deer with horns in this mountain, and now you can't even find grass." Today, mercury is still seeping from roads and houses built of contaminated bricks.

Uprising and retribution

But wherever people were enslaved, a significant number rebelled. In Palmares, Brazil, 10,000-20,000 strong quilombos, or a community of once slave fugitives, formed a self-governing society. Most of the inhabitants who survived on natural agriculture and trade had roots in Angola and Congo, but some were indigenous Brazilians, Jews and Muslims.