Once upon a time all history was environmental history. Life was governed by the seasons. When the weather gods were fickle, misery followed. Human societies used their ingenuity to wield fire, dam rivers, cut down forests: all to mitigate the risks of living. They harnessed the power of the animals they shared shelter with. Every culture had its gods of beneficence; every culture had dreams of plenty. A thousand years ago, those dreams grew more insistent. The scale of human impact on Earth expanded with the growth in human numbers. The range of possible futures inched wider. But the twinned foes of famine and epidemic never receded for long.
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And then things changed. The most privileged people in the world began to think that the human battle against nature could be won. They believed that natural limits no longer hindered their quest for wealth and power. They believed that instant access to the prehistoric solar energy embedded in fossil fuels made them invulnerable. Their steam engines and lethal weapons conquered the world. In pursuit of freedom, they poisoned rivers, razed hills, made forests disappear, terrorized surviving animals and drove them to the brink of extinction. In pursuit of freedom, they took away the freedom of others. The most powerful people in the world believed, and some still believe, that human beings and other forms of life on Earth are but resources to be exploited, to be moved around at will.
People knew from hard experience that the health and survival of their small communities was consonant with the health of the forest.
Almost eight hundred years separate the Charter of the Forest—issued by England’s King Henry III in 1217—and the Earth Charter, published in fifty languages in the year 2001 by an international group of political leaders, scientists, and activists chaired by Mikhail Gorbachev, the final leader of the Soviet Union. The two charters are waypoints in a history of human freedom in relation to nature.
The medieval Charter of the Forest was a companion piece to the more famous 1215 charter of liberties (Magna Carta) decreed at Runnymede by King John of England to placate rebel barons resentful of overweening royal power. The forest charter “disafforested,” or removed from the realm of Royal Forest, all the ecologically varied lands that the previous king, Henry II, had added to it. It affirmed the customary rights of commoners—rights to collect bracken and wood, turf for fuel, bark for tanning; rights to collect herbs and berries; the right to allow pigs to roam.
As it gave, so it took: the charter recognized the property rights (the assarts) of lords whose domains encroached on the Royal Forest, easing fines for erecting structures or creating arable land. As forests became lucrative sources of timber, lords restricted public access to their woods—that is, they enclosed them as private property. Landscapes on the margins of settled cultivation, woods and uplands and wetlands, were at the leading edge of this enclosure movement. Soon, manor courts charged the provision of firewood or game from the enclosed lands as theft. Local people fought back, invoking royal promises of equal justice. To address these social conflicts, traveling forest courts, Eyres, became a feature of English law.
In the year 1227 a group of peasants from Bilston, a manor south of Wolverhampton in the English Midlands, brought a case to the royal courts at Lichfield. They charged that Juliana, widow of Roger de Bentley, had put up unauthorized buildings and cut down trees in the Royal Forest, where the plaintiffs claimed rights of common. The men of Bilston alleged Juliana and her son were blocking entry to the woods that remained. The court’s verdict in this case is unknown, but there were many other judgments like it.
People took action.
They uprooted or burned fence posts. They filled ditches. They occupied land. Sometimes the courts brokered compromise by specifying limits to common rights: only alder and willow, thorn and holly could be used for fuel and fencing, for these were trees that lent themselves to coppicing—cutting low on the trunk so that the trees can grow back. The forests were not inexhaustible; demand for them was. People knew from hard experience that the health and survival of their small communities was consonant with the health of the forest.
The Charter of the Forest arose from social conflicts that drove rapid changes in how human societies inhabited the planet around a thousand years ago—conflicts between rulers and ruled, elites and commoners, settled agriculture and nomadic life. Twinned with the charter of liberties, the Charter of the Forest acknowledged that human freedom and flourishing lay in the richness of human and more-than-human life that the soils and forests and waters sustained. The capture of those resources by people with power narrowed and impoverished the ways others could live, eroding what an archaeologist and an anthropologist together have called the “basic forms of social liberty”: the “freedom to move away,” the freedom to “ignore or disobey commands,” and the freedom “to shape entirely new social realities.”
What relation does this capacious notion of human freedom—freedom within the affordances of nature—have to the narrower history of freedom as the foundational political concept that defines modernity? Modern ideas of freedom arose together with a step change in the scale and scope of the human imprint on the rest of the living planet, and together with the growing power of western European societies over the lives of others far away. Thomas Hobbes put it this way in his 1651 political treatise, Leviathan: “The NUTRITION of a Common-wealth consisteth, in the Plenty, and Distribution of Materials conducing to Life.” Over the centuries to come, the pursuit of “materials conducing to Life” would transform the planet; their “distribution” would create vast inequalities in different peoples’ access to that plenty.
Into the pursuit of freedom there crept, over time, a notion previously unthinkable: that true human autonomy entailed a liberation from the binding constraints of nature. The unshackling of fossil energy bolstered a way of seeing the world in which freedom defied any limits on what it was possible for human beings to do and to make—and for owners of capital to accumulate. “Freedom has been the most important motif of written accounts of human history of these [last] two hundred and fifty years,” Dipesh Chakrabarty observes.
The liberal freedom from arbitrary government, the capitalist freedom of markets, workers’ freedom, anticolonial freedom, freedom from patriarchy, freedom from caste oppression, sexual freedom—hidden within these histories, until a belated twenty-first century reckoning, was their basic material underpinning: “the mansion of modern freedoms stands on an ever-expanding base of fossil-fuel use.” That condition of possibility now exerts a new limit on the choices of future generations.
In the human struggle to expand the possibilities of life on Earth, there is a surprising twist in the tale. From long before the Charter of the Forest, a fundamental human aspiration has been the dream of continuance: the dream that one’s kin, one’s name, one’s works, one’s community would outlast the vicissitudes of drought and flood, plague and famine, accident and disorder. In the second half of the twentieth century, that dream met with astonishing, unforeseen success, as early death and debilitating illness lost some of their power over a significant part of humanity. Economist Angus Deaton calls this the “great escape” of modern history. It is a signal and surprising achievement in a century otherwise characterized by its terrible innovations in mass killing.
To have any hope of undoing the densely woven braid between inequality, violence, and environmental harm, we need to understand its origins.
A child born in India in the 1940s could expect to live on average thirty-five years; had they been born in Indonesia or Nigeria, the prospects would have been just as bleak, and if in Brazil only modestly brighter. Life expectancy at birth in each of those countries, and for most of the Global South, has doubled in less than a century. The survival gap between the wealthiest countries and the rest of the world has narrowed. Infant mortality has fallen rapidly, though unevenly along the gradient of wealth and social status. Nowhere in the world today are rates of infant mortality as high as they were in Britain in 1900, at the time when it was the wealthiest and most powerful country in the world.
This vast expansion in human possibility could be credited to an increase in environmental control. Sanitary engineers disrupted the conditions in which water-borne and vector-borne diseases thrived. Oil refineries churned out the fractionated petroleum products that made fertilizers to boost crop yields and antibiotics to fight bacterial infections. Coal-fired power plants or diesel-powered generators kept the lights on in rural obstetrics wards that made childbirth safer, at least some of the time.
And then, in the year 2001, a further threshold was crossed in the human ability to understand, and potentially to manipulate, every form of life on Earth. That was the year when an international team of scientists announced that they had completed the initial sequencing of the human genome—the complete genetic information in an organism contained in sequences of DNA, consisting of twenty-three pairs of chromosomes in the cell’s nucleus, and a small chromosome in the mitochondria.
It came as a “capstone for efforts of the past century” to understand the building blocks of life. At the time, scientists had already deciphered the genome sequences of 599 viruses and viroids, 31 eubacteria, a fungus, and 2 animals. This was different. The team’s first claim for the significance of the human genome was its complexity—it was twenty-five times as large as any genome previously sequenced. Only then did they add: “And, uniquely, it is the genome of our own species.”
There was no triumphalism in the genome team’s announcement, which conveyed a sense of wonder that “the more we learn about the human genome, the more there is to explore.” They acknowledged obstacles in the way of their scientific advances being deployed “broadly and equitably.” But still there was an exhilarating sense of a barrier broken. Working together across borders, scientists had finally found the key to “long-sought secrets” of life, with “profound long-term consequences for medicine.”
The initial sequencing of the human genome was published the same year as the Earth Charter. In 2001, at a “critical moment in Earth’s history”—amid “environmental devastation, the depletion of resources, and a massive extinction of species”—the Earth Charter insisted that human well-being, and ultimately human freedom, depended on “preserving a healthy biosphere with all of its ecological systems, a rich variety of plants and animals, fertile soils, pure waters, and clean air.”
The relationship between human liberty and ecological vitality had become toxic. But unlike the medieval Charter of the Forest, the 2001 declaration contained no enforceable provisions. There would be no world court for the Earth, no global Eyre. The statement articulated principles that could only be enacted, if at all, by an interlocking architecture of administrative states, national courts, international organizations, and multilateral agreements.
Scientists’ breakthrough in assembling the genome coincided with awareness that all forms of life, including human life, were threatened by the destabilization of the core conditions that had made Earth a hospitable home. An expanding horizon of possibility collided with a closing-in of constraints. The publication of the charter marks a moment when people around the world began to ask: At what cost has this basic freedom, the freedom to live, been won? In the “great escape,” were there also seeds of future imprisonment?
The dream of human freedom from nature’s constraints is under assault by viruses, burned by wildfires, drowned by floods, scorched by extremes of heat. Many still cling to it, but an awakening has come to people around the world: “we cannot and will not escape the constraints that constitute the parameters of our mortal existence,” writes essayist and critic Maggie Nelson in On Freedom—“nor do I see why we would want to.”
In the wealthy part of the world, and in the context of the past seventy years, the last part of Nelson’s statement is bracing and radical. In the broader sweep of human history, it was the norm. Egyptologist J.G. Manning puts it this way: “We have, some say, achieved an existence outside of nature,…and in control of our own destiny. But that of course, is an illusion, and one limited to those living in a handful of lucky nations.” The real question, then, is how it ever became possible for a small minority, a minority-within-a-minority, to believe in the illusion of mastery.
How have we reached this point of planetary crisis? It is the outcome of our creaturely quest for survival—the long and continuing struggle for food and shelter that still drives a large part of the human impact on the rest of nature. It is, conversely, the outcome of the elite pursuit of luxuries—animal, vegetal, and mineral—that has spanned ever more of the world, ever more relentlessly, over the last five hundred years. It is the outcome of energy-hungry economic systems, capitalist and socialist alike, that turned living nature into lifeless commodities, sometimes with the liberatory intention of expanding human freedoms.
It is the outcome of our inability to imagine kinship with other humans, let alone with other species. It is the outcome of the mutating hydra of militarism, armed with the power to destroy every form of life on Earth. Over time, those roads to ruin have twisted together: “The planet is shaped by the sheer amazing force of human want, which has changed everything,” observes novelist Samantha Harvey. To have any hope of undoing the densely woven braid between inequality, violence, and environmental harm, we need to understand its origins.
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From The Burning Earth: A History by Sunil Amrith. Copyright © 2024. Available from W.W. Norton & Company.
