I

don't want to get too fatalistic with this next question, but if we look at history, there's a number of examples where there have been civilizations that have sort of like kind of fallen off a cliff, as it were, in terms of like their resource use and their prosperity due to poor decisions from their leadership or their governments. A very cautious note for my listeners here. I would strongly dissuade you from using the term civilizations, as I did here naively. While Sunil didn't say this to me in my research upon editing this episode, I found that historians generally see the term as problematic as it has been used to define certain groups either as civilized or uncivilized in history. It's incumbent on me to make this clarification to you. Societies or another term would have been better to use here. Is there such a cliff here, do you think? What are some examples from history where, perhaps like famous examples, where civilizations fell off that environmental cliff and couldn't retreat from? Are we in a similar position of risk here?

I think we are. And I think what makes this different is that it's planetary risk. I mean, when we look at examples from the past, those civilizational collapses, if you want to use that term, 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, in terms of where we are in terms of planetary boundaries, I think the scale of any risk, the scale of any potential crossing over into sort of irreversible threshold is going to have impact on a scale that I'm not sure that historical precedents would give us much insight into. I mean, there are plenty of historical precedents. One which ended just appallingly badly, of course, is Imperial Japan. If you think about the driving force for Japan's imperial expansion into Southeast Asia, the attack on Hawaii and Pearl Harbor, so much of that was actually motivated by a sense of resource scarcity. It was Southeast Asia's mineral resources that really attracted the attentions of Japanese military planners. And in my book, The Burning Earth, I talk about a map that's produced just a year before the Second World War in the Pacific, in which Japanese military planners are literally mapped out Southeast Asia in terms of its mineral resources. even in the way in which Greenland is being talked about, even in the way in which colonial conquest is in a sense back on the agenda in a more explicit way than it's been since the 1940s. And of course, that project in Imperial Japan collapsed in disaster and Japanese people essentially paid the ultimate price for that disaster. One could look at post-war Japan as a much more hopeful example of a society that's rebuilt itself with much more attentiveness to limits, to sustainability, and to international humility.

So obviously the administration is looking at placing these heavy tariffs on some of its closest trading partners and seemingly trying to onshore more production of things like construction for housing or oil drilling for that matter. What are the impacts in global disruption this could have on resource use? I

think, again, thinking about historical precedents, it does start to feel more like the 1920s and 30s where the quest for self-sufficiency is really what results from countries around the world of opting out of a more coordinated international trading system. So each country starts to look to its own hinterland, often perhaps with more and more of a sense of needing to dominate that hinterland in order to secure the resources that can no longer be secured by global trade. Now, we're on a podcast that's talking primarily about environmental perspectives. It's complicated when it comes to the environmental perspective on all of this, because as we know, sort of unrestricted global trade is itself one of the things that has propelled the climate crisis since the 1980s and 1990s. I'm not sure that this particular approach is going to lessen resource use and make things any better, but there is an argument that people across the political spectrum have had about how much the current trading system incorporates emissions, for example, or thinks about externalities, as the economists call it, when it comes to the environmental consequences of some of the ways in which our economic arrangements play out.

I'm curious to know if you have any thoughts on Greenland, because this is not the first administration that has expressed interest in the world's largest island. I believe two previous US secretaries of state have both expressed interest in it, specifically in the 1800s and in the mid 20th century. So why would a foreign nation have interest in Greenland? What would be the purpose behind that, would you speculate?

Very interesting piece just last week in Foreign Affairs magazine by the political scientist Michael Albertus, who's the author of a really fascinating new book called Land Power. And Albertus argues that actually climate change has something to do with it, that Greenland is likely to be one of the places in the world where climate change actually makes things more habitable rather than less, as will be the case in many other parts of the world, makes it more hospitable to agriculture. There is lots of speculation about the extent of mineral resources to be had. There's the possibility of climate change also opening up a kind of northerly shipping route. So then the sort of geopolitical strategic role of Greenland looms larger than it did. But in some ways, there's always been a geopolitical mindset, which as you say, you can see in the middle of the 20th century, you can see in the 19th century, that simply sees territory as a zero-sum game that if we don't control it, somebody else will. And so I think there's also that much older mentality is still very much at play. And in some ways, I think it's sort of resurgent now.

Yeah. I mean, the obvious factor here is that the territory is already occupied and in control of Greenlanders. So, I mean, they've stated unequivocally that Greenland is not for sale. I suppose we probably couldn't speculate on how that would play out, but it seems like to me that there isn't any legitimate or legal way to occupy that land because it is already the occupation of Greenlanders.

And there, I think we have a very, very long set of historical precedents we can look to. So many of the parts of the world that were occupied in the 19th century were already occupied. That is, that were occupied by Europeans and settlers in the 19th century were already occupied. And that's where you have these elaborate legal doctrines of terra nullius and the idea that indigenous people are not using land productively and therefore they can be dispossessed. I mean, these are ideas that go back to the 17th century in North American history. And again, they haven't really gone away.

quite, I mean, quite terrifying. So, I mean, it's really scary to think about what would occur. It seems like, Sunil, that there's a lot of lessons from history that we could be learning or should be learning. What would some of those lessons be, would you say? What are some of the most important lessons do you think that we should be learning right now that perhaps maybe we aren't? I

think the simplest lesson is that whether we're interested in the state of the world's environment or whether we're interested in social progress and human well-being, that has tended to be in periods of peace and international cooperation that the greatest gains have been made. And I think that would be a lesson deeply worth heeding in our current moment of division and polarization and increasing conflict. What were some of those periods? I think the period 1940s to the 1970s, where two major things happened. One is the post-Second World War settlement, the UN and its agencies. A flawed but genuine attempt at global cooperation that came from that, accompanied by the process of decolonization and political freedom coming to most parts of the world, allowing them for the first time to chart their own futures. I think the coming together of those two things in that middle or the sort of third quarter of the 20th century. If you look at Thomas Piketty's book on inequality, it is interesting that that is the moment of least inequality over more than a century of data that we have both within and across nations. I think a certain commitment to redistribution was more or less a subject of consensus. And it is really striking, particularly in relation to the US polarization of US politics today, that this was a moment where the Nixon administration is passing environmental legislation. And this is a moment in Britain when Margaret Thatcher's government, which while privatizing everything, is very early to take climate change seriously.