Lessons from the Zebra Mussel
J.R. McNeil's Something New Under the Sun
Felicia Wu Song
January 1, 2002
Something New under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth-Century World, by J. R. McNeill (Norton, 2001), 416 pp.
I've always been skeptical of environmental niche marketing: the life of Birkenstocks, hemp, and earth-friendly cleaning agents. But in J. R. McNeill I've found an environmental chronicler who eschews both charged rhetoric and ideological jargon, replacing them with a fascinating, readable, and unsettling history of ecological change in the twentieth century.
McNeill is a professor of history at Georgetown University who is willing to make big claims. "The human race, without intending anything of the sort, has undertaken a gigantic uncontrolled experiment on the earth. In time, I think, this will appear as the most important aspect of twentieth-century history, more so than World War II, the Communist enterprise, the rise of mass literacy, the spread of democracy or the growing emancipation of women." This unwitting experiment, he argues, has led us to the cusp of exhausting the ecological buffers of land, water, and sky that have kept our species safe from extinction. And while there have always been environmental costs to economic development, they are heightened now by their global scope.
These bold claims are backed up by McNeill's methodical but remarkable synthesis of the massive literature on the world's environment. We learn, for example, that in the twentieth century, humankind used 10 times as much energy as was used in the previous 1,000 years. The average American in the 1990s used 50 to 100 times more energy than the average Bangladeshi. Air pollution in the twentieth century took the lives of 25 to 40 million people-roughly the same number as the combined death toll of both world wars. ...
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