Document – J. R. McNeill, excerpt from Something New Under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth Century (2000)

Document

The disadvantage of men not knowing the past is that they do not know the present.

—G. K. Chesterton (1933)

Environmental change on earth is as old as the planet itself, about 4 billion years. Our genus, Homo, has altered earthly environments throughout our career, about 4 million years. But there has never been anything like the twentieth century.

Asteroids and volcanoes, among other astronomical and geological forces, have probably produced more radical environmental changes than we have yet witnessed in our time. But humanity has not. This is the first time in human history that we have altered ecosystems with such intensity, on such scale and with such speed. It is one of the few times in the earth’s history to see changes of this scope and pace. Albert Einstein famously refused to “believe that God plays dice with the world.” But in the twentieth century, humankind has begun to play dice with the planet, without knowing all the rules of the game.

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 the 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. To see just how prodigal and peculiar this century was, it helps to adopt long perspectives of the deeper past.

In environmental history, the twentieth century qualifies as a peculiar century because of the screeching acceleration of so many processes that bring ecological change. Most of these processes are not new: we have cut timber, mined ores, generated wastes, grown crops, and hunted animals for a long time. In modern times we have generally done more of these things than ever before, and since 1945, in most cases, far more. Although there are a few kinds of environmental change that are genuinely new in the twentieth century, such as human-induced thinning of the ozone layer, for the most part the ecological peculiarity of the twentieth century is a matter of scale and intensity.

Sometimes differences in quantity can become differences in quality. So it was with twentieth-century environmental change. The scale and intensity of changes were so great that matters that for millennia were local concerns became global. One example is air pollution. Since people first harnessed fire half a million years ago, they have polluted air locally. Mediterranean lead smelting in Roman times even polluted air in the Arctic. But lately, air pollution has grown so comprehensive and large scale that it affects the fundamentals of global atmospheric chemistry. So changes in scale can lead to changes in condition.

Beyond that, in natural systems as in human affairs, there are thresholds and so called nonlinear effects. In the 1930s, Adolf Hitler’s Germany acquired Austria, the Sudetenland, and the rest of Czechoslovakia without provoking much practical response. When in September 1939 Hitler tried to add Poland, he got a six-year war that ruined him, his movement, and (temporarily) Germany. Unknowingly—although he was aware of the risk—he crossed a threshold and provoked a nonlinear effect. Similarly, water temperature in the tropical Atlantic can grow warmer and warmer without generating any hurricanes. But once that water passes 26 degrees Celsius, it begins to promote hurricanes: a threshold passed, a switch thrown, simply by an incremental increase. The environmental history of the twentieth century is different from that of time past not merely because ecological changes were greater and faster, but also because increased intensities threw some switches. For example, incremental increases in fishing effort brought total collapse in some oceanic fisheries. The accumulation of many increased intensities may throw some grand switches, producing very basic changes on the earth. No one knows, and no one will know until it starts to happen—if then. . . .

The human species has shattered the constraints and rough stability of the old economic, demographic, and energy regimes. This is what makes our times so peculiar. In the nineteenth century the world began a long economic boom, which climaxed in the twentieth century, when the world economy grew 14-fold. . . . Energy use embarked on a boom which began with a fivefold growth in the nineteenth century. That boom climaxed (to date) in the twentieth century with a further 16-fold expansion.

Why has all this happened now? The main answer is human ingenuity. Part of the answer is luck. First the luck: in the eighteenth century a large part of the disease load that checked our numbers, and our productivity too, was lifted. Initially this had little to do with medicine or public health measures, but reflected a gradual adjustment between human hosts and some of our pathogens and parasites. We domesticated or marginalized some of our killer diseases, quite unintentionally. This was luck. So was the ending of the Little Ice Age (c. 1550–1850), which may also have had a minor role in permitting the great modern expansions.

Most of the explosive growth of modern times derives from human ingenuity. From the 1760s forward we have continually devised clusters of new technologies, giving access to new forms of energy and enhancing labor productivity. At the same time we have designed new forms of social and business organization that have helped ratchet up the pace of economic activity. Both machines and organization— hardware and software—lie behind the breakthrough of modern times. The great modern expansion, while liberating in a fundamental sense, brought disruption with it. The surges in population, production, and energy use affected different regions, nations, classes, and social groups quite unevenly, favoring some and hurting others. Many inequalities widened, and perhaps more wrenching, fortune and misfortune often were reshuffled. Intellectually, politically, and in every other way, adjusting to a world of rapid growth and shifting status was hard to do. Turmoil of every sort abounded. The preferred policy solution after 1950 was yet faster economic growth and rising living standards: if we can all consume more than we used to, and expect to consume still more in the years to come, it is far easier to accept the anxieties of constant change and the inequalities of the moment. Indeed, we erected new politics, new ideologies, and new institutions predicated on continuous growth. Should this age of exuberance end, or even taper off, we will face another set of wrenching adjustments. . . .

Review

1. 1. What factors does McNeil suggest were primarily responsible for environmental change in the past century? Are these ideas consistent with the data provided?

2. 2. McNeill claims that natural systems have crucial “thresholds” that affect their proper functioning. What does he mean by “thresholds”? Give some examples and explain why they are important.

3. 3. McNeill summarizes capitalist values as “. . . we can all consume more than we used to, and expect to consume still more in the years to come. . . . [We expect] continuous growth. . . .” Given your understanding of capitalism, do you think this is an accurate representation? Why or why not? In your assessment, is capitalism consistent with environmental health?