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Something New Under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth-Century World (The Global Century Series) Reprint Edition

by J. R. McNeill (Author)
4.1 4.1 out of 5 stars 117 ratings
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"One of those rare books that’s both sweeping and specific, scholarly and readable…What makes the book stand out is its wealth of historical detail." ―Elizabeth Kolbert, The New Yorker

The history of the twentieth century is most often told through its world wars, the rise and fall of communism, or its economic upheavals. In his startling book, J. R. McNeill gives us our first general account of what may prove to be the most significant dimension of the twentieth century: its environmental history. To a degree unprecedented in human history, we have refashioned the earth's air, water, and soil, and the biosphere of which we are a part. Based on exhaustive research, McNeill's story―a compelling blend of anecdotes, data, and shrewd analysis―never preaches: it is our definitive account.

This is a volume in The Global Century Series (general editor, Paul Kennedy).

40 b/w photographs, 15 maps
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  1. ISBN-10
    0393321835
  2. ISBN-13
    978-0393321838
  3. Edition
    Reprint
  4. Publisher
    W. W. Norton & Company
  5. Publication date
    April 17, 2001
  6. Part of series
    Allen Lane History
  7. Language
    English
  8. Dimensions
    6.2 x 1.3 x 9.3 inches
  9. Print length
    448 pages
  10. See all details
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Editorial Reviews

Review

"Refreshingly unpolemical and at times even witty, McNeill's book brims with carefully sifted statistics and brilliant details."
― Washington Post

"A monumental, important, and timely work of interdisciplinary scholarship, written to be accessible to anyone interested in the relationship between our species and the planet that supports us."
― Chris Lavers, The Guardian

"This scientifically informed survey makes a useful resource for environmentalists, scholars, globalists, biologists, policy makers and concerned readers."
― Publishers Weekly

About the Author

J. R. McNeill is a professor of history at Georgetown University. He is the author of award-winning works in world and environmental history. These include The Human Web: A Bird’s-Eye View of World History (co-authored with his father and world history pioneer, William H. McNeill), and Something New Under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth-Century World, both published by Norton. McNeill is a recent past president of the American Historical Association.

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ W. W. Norton & Company; Reprint edition (April 17, 2001)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 448 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0393321835
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0393321838
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 2.31 pounds
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.2 x 1.3 x 9.3 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.1 4.1 out of 5 stars 117 ratings

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John Robert McNeill

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4.1 out of 5 stars
4.1 out of 5
117 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

Arvella B. Oliver
5.0 out of 5 stars Easy to read and full of history everyone should know
Reviewed in the United States on December 12, 2006
Verified Purchase
This book may be the best historical survey I've ever read. (And with an M.A. in history, I've read a few!) I got this book to complement my hard science slogging on global warming, and found so much more than I hoped for or ever imagined! McNeil's book provides the historical background and the human context for all the graphs and numbers in the science texts. If you're looking for one book to give you a focused overview of just how much human civilization has accomplished, good and bad, in the last 100 years, this is it.

The organization of the book is excellent. McNeil sources everything, ends each chapter with an excellent summary, and wraps it all up with his own thoughtful commentary on climate change. He uses an inspired mix of the small detail (birds dying mid-flight) and the enormous concept (the Aswan dam affected the entire Mediterranean ecosystem). He describes chains of cause and effect and makes connections other historians and scientists seem to miss. The chapters dealing with agriculture are, I think, particularly relevant to our everyday lives; but students in nearly every subject will find this book useful. My husband is a family physician, and has read the sections on public health; my neighbor is a biologist with the USGS, and is reading the chapter on dams and irrigation.
7 people found this helpful
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Teresa Eun Young Kwon
4.0 out of 5 stars Something New Under the Sun
Reviewed in the United States on October 10, 2008
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I like the book because of the historical perspective on the detrimental effects of the environment with selected topics, although I am preferring my other book which tells the stories of different places on the what the effects of the environment has had over the years of human civilization. Still, both are quite good...
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Richard Reese (author of Understanding Sustainability)
5.0 out of 5 stars Environmental History Rocks
Reviewed in the United States on June 7, 2014
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A verse* in the Old Testament proclaims, “there is no new thing under the sun.” These words come from a low-tech era when nomadic herders diminished their ecosystem so slowly that little change was noticeable to the passing generations. Something New Under the Sun is the title of J. R. McNeill’s environmental history of the twentieth century. It describes a high-tech era when industrial society got thoroughly sloshed on cheap energy, and went on a berserk rampage, smashing everything.

With the emergence of agriculture, the relationship between humankind and the ecosystem took a sharp turn onto a bumpy bloody unsustainable road. There are a few places where agriculture wrecks the land at a slower pace. A region spanning from Poland to Ireland typically receives adequate rain in gentle showers, the lay of the land is not steep, and the heavy soils are not easily eroded. When the farming methods from this region were exported to North America, where heavy rains are common, it resulted in severe erosion.

Many agricultural systems flamed out and vanished long ago. China has beat the odds, and remained in the farm business for over 3,000 years. This is often cited as proof that sustainable agriculture is possible. But McNeill points out that their longevity is the result of sequentially replacing one unsustainable mode with a different unsustainable mode. They will eventually run out of tricks and flame out. A process that regularly pulverizes soils and depletes nutrients cannot have a long-term future, and irrigated systems usually flame out faster.

Food is one thing that humans actually need. McNeill describes how agriculture has become far more destructive in the last hundred years. It produces more food, degrades more land, and spurs population growth, seriously worsening many other problems. Readers learn about erosion, heavy machinery, synthetic fertilizers, salinization, pesticides, herbicides, water mining, and so on. Our ability to continue feeding a massive herd will face huge challenges in the coming years.

In addition to troublesome agriculture, we stirred fossil energy and industrialization into the pot, and it exploded. The twentieth century was like an asteroid strike — a tumultuous pandemonium never seen before, that can never be repeated. Tragically, this era of roaring helter-skelter is what most people today perceive to be “normal.” Life has always been like this, we think, because this is how it’s been since grandma was born. History Deficiency Syndrome leads to a life of vivid hallucinations. There is a highly effective antidote: learning.

The “normal” mindset is trained to focus on the benefits, and ignore the costs. With a bright torch, McNeill leads his readers down into a sacred cave, where the walls are covered with images of our culture’s darkest secrets. In this vast grotto, we record the many, many things that are never mentioned in the daylight world above, because they clash with our myths of progress and human superiority — similar to the way that dinosaur bones make creationists twitch and squirm. The bones contradict the myths, an embarrassing dilemma.

So, with the swish of a magic wand, we’ve made the bones invisible in our schools, workplaces, newsrooms, churches, and homes. We keep them in the cave. In the normal daylight world, we are constantly blasted by a fire hose of frivolous information, ridiculous balderdash, and titillating rubbish. The myths are safe. The world was made for humans. We are the greatest.

McNeill points out that a major cause of twentieth century mass hysteria was that millions of people were enslaved by “big ideas.” Some ideas are absorbed by cultures and never excreted, even stupid ideas, like the obsession with perpetual economic growth, our insatiable hunger for stuff and status, our stunning disregard for the generations yet-to-be-born.

“The overarching priority of economic growth was easily the most important idea of the twentieth century.” We created a monster that we could not control — it controlled us. Economists became the nutjob gurus of the wacky cult of growth, and society guzzled their toxic Kool-Aid. Crazy economists, who preached that society could get along without natural resources, won Nobel Prizes. They became respected advisors to world leaders. In every newscast, you repeatedly hear the words “growth” and “recovery.” These are the yowls and howls of an insane asylum.

Environmentalists often sneer at the multitudes who fail to be enraged by the catastrophe of the week. They assume that the herd understands the issues. But the daily info-streams that deluge the mainstream world have almost nothing in common with McNeill’s model of reality. Few people in our society have a well-rounded understanding of our eco-predicaments, including most environmentalists. This world would be a much different place if McNeill’s perception of history became the mainstream, and folks could readily comprehend the harms caused by our lifestyles. Ignorance is enormously costly.

One wee bright spot in the twentieth century was the emergence of Deep Ecology, a small group of renegade thinkers that enthusiastically denounced the dead end path of anthropocentricism. For the first time in 300 years, Western people were spray-painting naughty insults on the cathedrals of Cartesian thinking — “We do not live in a machine world of soulless dead matter!” Deep Ecology succeeded in channeling bits of wisdom from the spirits of our wild ancestors.

On the final pages, McNeill does not offer an intoxicating punch bowl of magical thinking. Our future is highly volatile, even the near future is uncertain. History has little to say about sudden mass enlightenment and miraculous intelligent change. “The reason I expect formidable ecological and societal problems in the future is because of what I see in the past.”

The book is thoroughly researched, well written, and hard to put down. Readers are taken on a sobering voyage of discovery, where there are thrills and chills around every turn — mercury poisoning, radiation nightmares, soil mining, deforestation, and on and on. It’s fascinating to observe the spectacular ways that brilliant innovations backfire. Human cleverness is amazing, but it is dwarfed by our amazing un-cleverness. We weren’t made to live like this.

At the same time, human genes are about 98 to 99.4 percent the same as the genes of chimps and bonobos, our cousins who have never lost their path. They’ve been healthy, happy, and sustainable for over a million years. Circle the superior species in this picture. We have a sick culture, but our genes are probably OK. Cultures can be changed. We need to become aware of reality. We need to turn off our glowing screens, open the door, and rediscover our home and our identity. Happy trails!

* Ecclesiastes 1:9 “The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.”
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TheHistorian
3.0 out of 5 stars Decent read; old statistics.
Reviewed in the United States on January 7, 2018
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Purchased for a college history course. Contains good history, but the statistics are outdated— the latest date to the early 1990s.
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Stephen Balbach
5.0 out of 5 stars Thomas Midgley's epitaph
Reviewed in the United States on November 11, 2006
Verified Purchase
Sub-titled "An Environmental History of the 20th Century", this is a sober and objective survey of environmental changes over the past 100 years. I was concerned this would be an emotional appeal or judgmental polemic from the left - but not the case, it is academic and professional history from an environmental perspective (the environment, not "environmental movement"). It's encyclopedic in scope and style.

I would not call this an "entertaining" read (although some of the facts really fire the synapses), but it is deeply rewarding as a broad survey of a very large and complex problem. The chapters and sub-sections are arranged in a logical outline making it possible to read the chapters in any order.

The main idea of the title "something new under the sun" is that humans have so fundamentally changed the environment that things really are very different now than they have ever been historically. To regard our current conditions of energy availability, access to water, unending economic growth - as enduring and normal appears to be an interesting gamble given the facts.

Some interesting trivia: humans did not become the dominate primate until about 8,000 BC with the rise of agriculture (baboons outnumbered humans before then). About one-fifth of all humans that ever lived did so in the 20th century. In sheer energy terms, if all modern technology and energy sources were not available, the average American would need about 70 human slaves to maintain the current standard of living (each American "directs" 70 energy-slave equivalents). Each year, humans move more earth and soil than glaciers, wind erosion, mountain building (plate tectonic uplift), and volcanoes combined. Probably the single most damaging biological organism in earths history was the human primate Thomas Midgley Jr from Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania born in 1889. He invented Freon (which destroys the Ozone layer), and also leaded gasoline, which has polluted most of the worlds soil lasting thousands of years (all of us carry elevated lead levels because of it and will continue to do so for centuries to come, leading to birth defects, lowered IQs, etc..). Midgley contracted Polio at age 51 and invented a system or ropes and pulleys to move his crippled body off the bed - he became tangled and was strangled to death in 1944 by his own invention, before learning how damaging his inventions were.
6 people found this helpful
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Top reviews from other countries

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FAIRON Marc
5.0 out of 5 stars Something New Under the Sun
Reviewed in France on May 17, 2015
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Il s'agissait d'un livre imposé pour les études donc ce n'était pas un choix de lecture personnel. Celui-ci a bien répondu aux attentes :).
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Franzi
4.0 out of 5 stars Zufriedenstellend
Reviewed in Germany on May 4, 2015
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Guter Zustand des Buches, schnelle Lieferungauf jeden Fall emphehlenswert wenn man sich nicht ein teures neues Buch kaufen möchte und ein gebrauchtes auch ausreicht.
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anozama
5.0 out of 5 stars Something New called `Human Technology'
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on August 30, 2011
Verified Purchase
'Environmental' information is often somehow wrapped in polemic, so the strength of this book is its calm, knowledgeable, tone.

McNeil works steadily through the catalogue of issues: soil, air and water pollution; over-grazing, over-fishing, over-felling. He reveals the extraordinary environmental impact of human activity in a sober, dispassionate work. Sometimes it feels like an academic documentation of the rise and fall of a now extinct species.

Although it is a thorough, coherent, comprehensive account, he relays the story in a rich, sensitive, sympathetic and conversational style.

No doubt whatsoever is left in the reader's mind. The overall message is that the exponential growth of human population and industrial activity in the 20th century has created a paradigm shift. Homo Sapiens, from 1900 onwards has created `Something New' for the earth, to add to its history of spectacular crises.
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W taylor
5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent exposition of mankinds impact on the environment
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on March 12, 2014
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Well written and lucid. Mr Mcneill leaves no stone unturned when looking at man's impact on his environment. Well presented facts and data, supported by examples and historical analysis.
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