Mongabay Newscast18 Mar 2025

What environmental history says about our current 'planetary risk'

Recent and major shifts in international environmental policies and programs have historical precedent, but the context of global environmental degradation and climate change presents a planetary risk that's new, say Sunil Amrith. A professor of history at Yale University, he joins this week's Mongabay Newscast to discuss the current political moment and what history can teach us about it.

" 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, what lessons can be learned, and what periods of history resulted in the most peace and prosperity.

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Image credit: Deforestation in the Peruvian Amazon. Photo by Rhett Butler/Mongabay.

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Timecodes

(00:00) Historical parallels to the current moment

(09:43) The context of 'planetary risk'

(20:36) Lessons from history

(26:10) Credits

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