Something New under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth-Century World

Abstract

There is good reason to be skeptical about a book that undertakes to chronicle the environmental history of the twentieth-century world. This is a gargantuan subject: there are hundreds of stories to tell, complex patterns to decipher, and an enormous body of secondary literature to digest and synthesize. Yet J. R. McNeill has pulled it off. In this single volume he lays out in readable fashion the most significant development in human history since the invention of agriculture: how the “rogue pri-mate[s],” once subject and vulnerable to the natural world, have emerged in the past century to become “lords of the biosphere.” McNeill has also performed a worthy service to environmental historians by synthesizing the work of a generation. His book should command a broad, general audience and holds great promise for college classroom use. The book's title suggests its central argument. Contrary to Ecclesiastes' claim that there is “nothing new under the sun,” McNeill asserts that “there has never been anything like the twentieth century” with regard to the scale and intensity of human influence on earthly environments. Some may quibble with the accuracy of the thesis. After all, the roots of this impact lie earlier, mainly in the industrial revolution, and future trends (human impact on climate change, for example) will very likely distort McNeill's periodization further. Still, the author is well aware of these things and is careful to trace back processes of environmental change wherever they may lead. His evidence, divided in terms of earth's soils, atmosphere, water, and nonhuman life forms, makes clear how and why the human impact of the recent century dwarfs previous ones.