J. R. McNeill

The mission of father and son was to write a history within 200 pages, so people who do not have the time to read several shelves of books are able to learn about ”how the world got to be the way it is”. What a megalomaniacal task, and what a result. The task is done by reducing the manifold of facts by using the accumulation of human connections as an optic lens.

This works. McNeill sr. and jr., are able to include technological, communicative, environmental, biological, religious, show more economical and political developments that lead to our current day.

This macro view of course has its downsides. In the history millions of people are overrun by more developed and/or more aggressive people and the illnesses they brought with them. (You need a strong stomach to deal with the abundance of suffering in world history). How did people include these great dyings in their cultural narratives? This was a question i found myself asking again and again. These topics are not explored.

Probably it is good that the writers don’t lose focus. The book is condensed but not oversimplified. I learned a lot about the role of China in world history, about Polynesian communities. All histories is did not encounter in Highschool. Go read this book!

From here?
The book ends with the urbanisation which gives “the acute challenges of our time, it seems sure, is the process of social, political, psychological, moral, and ecological adjustment to life in the big city.” Both writers have something to say about this adjustment in the afterword.

“We will have biological evolution, as well as cultural evolution, in our own hands. A great deal will depend on just whose hands” (Junior).

“I conclude that we live on the crest of a breaking wave. Luck, intelligence, and awkward tolerance may keep the web from breaking. Let’s hope so” (Senior).

Both conclusions do not sound very optimistic to me and after reading the book and seeing the news every day, I do not have the feeling their is a lot of direction in ‘my’ or ‘our’ hands. I hope to feel less hopeless about the adjustments we can make and need to put more effort into investigating this. Any suggestions are welcome. :) show less

This is a first attempt at an inventory of what the 20th century exactly meant in terms of the impact of man on the environment. John R. McNeill (°1954) in detail goes through what human development in the past 100 years has meant for the different biospheres of our planet: starting from the earth's crust, via the atmosphere, the rivers and oceans, to the living beings with whom we share our planet, he paints a particularly negative picture of human intervention and the resulting pollution show more and biological extinction. For each aspect he explores a few striking examples. This does not provide a very pretty picture, and McNeill clearly warns of the potentially dramatic consequences in the long term.
He also analyses what the driving force behind so much human intervention is. For him, this comes down to the growth imperative fetish: Western modernity is obsessed with 'always more', in all domains. This also is the greatest obstacle to taking the environmental crisis seriously. And so his message is that we must eventually get rid of that.
If you read this book carefully, you will notice that McNeill actually still is rather cautious. And that has everything to do with the publication date: 1999. It is clear that a quarter century later we can no longer afford to be so optimistic. More about that in my History account on Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1986543394. show less

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 show more 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. show less

Very broad history of the world, emphasizing human connectedness across cultures. Well done although in a book like this there almost always seems like too much detail - even though you know every tidbit of detail could be (and probably is) a book of its own.