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

Most science writing nowadays must be interdisciplinary; able to use empirical evidence and relevant concepts, theories, and conclusions from vastly different fields of enquiry. Would you expect the same of a history book? Although this book's publishing category is science/environment it really should be history. The author says as much. This is "a history of - and for - environmentally tumultuous times". And that history is broad. From the ancient days when the book of Ecclesiastes was written to our modern era of Nobel Prize winning physicists, there has been a remarkable common conception of our planet as immutable and infinite. In contrast to the biblical gentleman who said there was nothing new under the sun, or physicist Robert Millikan who saw Earth's vastness as effectively shielding it from real harm from humanity, J R McNeill sees SOMETHING NEW UNDER THE SUN and it's simply that "the place of humankind within the natural world is not what it was."
Can we link man's history with that of the natural or biological world? Many have tried from both sides of the equation. Great historians and thinkers like Kant, Marx and Pierre Tielhard de Chardin have seen a direction and inevitability about history while Berlin and Popper spoke eloquently against historicism. This book doesn't go there nor does it tackle the attempt by some evolutionary biologists to explain all we see in life as determined at the genetic level. Great scientists from Einstein forward have sought some unifying or final theory and it's still going on. Today sociobiologists, quantum physicists and game theorists say they have the answers.
What McNeill contributes to this is his view that "in recent millennia, cultural evolution has shaped human affairs more than biological evolution has. Societies...unconsciously pursue survival strategies of adaptability or of supreme adaptation." The entire book is a brilliant exposition on this point. How mankind, like the rat, was a creature that used adaptability to select for fitness for exploitation of new niches created when short term environmental shocks killed off competition. I say "was" because McNeill convincingly argues that in the 20th century we have tended more towards the strategy of supreme adaptation. Best typified by the shark this is fine-tuned specialization that "is rewarded by continuous success only so long as governing conditions stay the same." The stability required for continued success in this system is based on "stable climate, cheap energy and water, and rapid population and economic growth". Through chapters such as "The Atmosphere: Urban History", "The Hydrosphere: Depletions, Dams and Diversions", "More People, Bigger Cities" and "Fuels, Tools and Economics" he uses tables and data and balanced and thoughtful reasoning to show that these conditions are neither static nor stable, and he effectively makes his pont. His point is not that of a Cassandra warning of an impending environmental apocalypse but something more measured. "We might then consciously choose a world that would require only irksome adaptations on our part and avoid traumatic ones." Couched in these terms his message is much more likely to be read, thought about, and most importantly acted upon. If nothing else McNeill would encourage us to act as the very process itself will "distinguish us from rats and sharks."

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