Something new under the sun : an environmental history of the twentieth century

At some level, most educated people today probably have a sense, a general impression, of what this book tells us: that humankind is transforming the planet faster and faster, with a depth and scope and variety of impacts that are unprecedented in history and truly alarming in their implications for the future. We know this already, at an intuitive level (those of us, at least, who are not blinded by political ideology or by tenderheartedness for our portfolio of Exxon stock). What makes this book both important and extraordinary is that it succeeds in turning a vague impression, a nagging accumulation of specialized studies and anecdotal news items, into a cogent synthetic vision. McNeill’s study is global in scale and genuinely multidisciplinary in approach: he weaves together, in a highly readable narrative, the whole tapestry of changes that have marked the human transformation of nature in the twentieth century. Lithosphere, atmosphere, hydrosphere, biosphere “every aspect of the planet comes under scrutiny, linked again and again to the pullullating agency of humans and the awesome shifts that agency has wrought.” This is not the first time, of course, that such works of scholarly synthesis have been attempted. George Perkins Marsh produced his landmark work, Man and Nature: Or, Physical Geography as Modified by Human Action, in 1864 “but in 1864 the transformative genie of industrial modernity had barely begun (relatively speaking) to poke its nose out of the bottle.” Another synthesis came in 1955: William Thomas’s Man’s Role in Changing the Face of the Earth; followed in 1990 by yet another immense tome, B.L. Turnerís The Earth as Transformed by Human Action: Global and Regional Changes in the Biosphere over the Past 300 Years. But both these more recent books “while immensely useful in themselves” were edited volumes, offering the reader a compendium of specialized essays by a small army of scientists and other researchers, each reporting the bad news from his or her own corner of the planetís mind-boggling complexity. McNeill’s main achievement lies precisely in this: he succeeds in rendering that complexity comprehensible to a non-specialist reader, soaring over the continents with analytical clarity and narrative vigor, placing within our grasp the full sweep of global changes. The result is that we come away from reading this book with an extraordinarily clear sense of how our species has affected the planet over the past 100 years, and an equally clear sense of where we stand today. We may, at the outset of our reading, have possessed a vague, somewhat scrambled intuition of all this: McNeill puts it right there, in front of your nose. We humans have now become one of the most salient factors in the equation of planetary change. Another great strength of McNeillís approach lies in the fact that he does not regard “interdisciplinarity” in the way some authors unfortunately tend to do: as the mere juxtaposition of analytically distinct narratives: geology, biology, demography, politics, sociology, economics, cultural shifts. Instead, he starts from the premise that socioeconomic and biospheric changes are deeply and inextricably bound up with each other, in complex causal loops that require integral and bi-directional examination. The growth of cities, for example, is presented by McNeill as often having its genesis in certain geographical “givens,” such as the location of a river, or of mineral deposits; but then the dynamic of social and economic forces comes increasingly into play, shaping the city over time, and shaping in turn the surrounding land; this reshaping of the land, in return, reverberates back on the city itself, modifying its culture and economy in important ways. Again and again, McNeill returns to these kinds of complex feedback loops, showing how human history and natural history, in the uniquely dynamic context of the twentieth century, are truly interwoven, and cannot be adequately understood in separation from each other. “History and