The Burning Earth: An Environmental History of the Last 500 Years (Winner of the 2025 Dayton Literary Peace Prize for Nonfiction)

本書由歷史學者 Sunil Amrith 撰寫，作者以宏觀而細緻的視角，將帝國擴張與環境變遷並置書寫，從祕魯的白銀礦、南非的黃金礦，到中亞的石油開採，描繪逐利行動如何深刻改寫地貌與人類命運。書中也重新理解兩次世界大戰，不僅是人力的動員，更是對自然資源的全面調度，形塑出難以逆轉的行星尺度後果。文字沉穩而開闊，本書將環境破壞、戰爭與遷徙連結起來，讓讀者看見自由、能源與破壞之間的複雜糾葛，並提出一個關於集體責任與未來抉擇的深層提問。

Winner of the 2025 Dayton Literary Peace Prize for Nonfiction
Longlisted for the 2025 PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award

One of The New Yorker's "Essential Reads" of 2024 - One of NPR's "Books We Love" for 2024

In this magisterial book, historian Sunil Amrith twins the stories of environment and Empire, of genocide and eco-cide, of an extraordinary expansion of human freedom and its planetary costs. Drawing on an extraordinarily rich diversity of primary sources, he reckons with the ruins of Portuguese silver mining in Peru, British gold mining in South Africa, and oil extraction in Central Asia. He explores the railroads and highways that brought humans to new terrains of battle against each other and against stubborn nature. Amrith's account of the ways in which the First and Second World Wars involved the massive mobilization not only of men, but of other natural resources from around the globe, provides an essential new way of understanding war as an irreversible reshaping of the planet. So too does this book reveal the reality of migration as consequence of environmental harm.

The imperial, globe-spanning pursuit of profit, joined with new forms of energy and new possibilities of freedom from hunger and discomfort, freedom to move and explore, has brought change to every inch of the Earth. Amrith relates in gorgeous prose, and on the largest canvas, a mind-altering epic--vibrant with stories, characters, and vivid images--in which humanity might find the collective wisdom to save itself.