A roundtable with Ling Zhang (Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, University of Cambridge); John Sabapathy (History, University College London); and Amanda Power (History, University of Oxford)

Zhang: ‘Writing environmental history is like peeling scar tissues over long-term wounds and staring at the deep roots of traumatic injuries inflicted to the bodies of both humans and nonhumans’.

Sabapathy: ‘Many framings of the Anthropocene stress its modernity, but just as important are understanding how both present and past societies have thought about their relations with non-human forces and conceived of emergencies. Acknowledging this also means that the pre-modern becomes highly instructive to think with’.

Power: ‘Sacrifice zones are areas made unliveable by intensive extraction and pollution. Their destruction is justified by the claim that it enables good life elsewhere. Only by identifying the ideological foundations and governing purposes of our alienation have we any chance of dismantling it’.