By John Robert McNeill
The heritage of the 20th century is commonly advised via its international wars, the increase and fall of communism, or its monetary upheavals. In his startling new booklet, J. R. McNeill supplies us our first normal account of what may well turn out to be the main major measurement of the 20th century: its environmental background. to some extent unheard of in human heritage, we now have refashioned the earth's air, water, and soil, and the biosphere of which we're a component. in line with exhaustive study, McNeill's story—a compelling mix of anecdotes, information, and wise analysis—never preaches: it's our definitive account. this can be a quantity within the worldwide Century sequence (general editor, Paul Kennedy).
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Additional info for Something New Under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth-Century World
Sample text
The price was the degradation of the environment, the squandering of resources. Some of the nation’s wildlife was quickly overwhelmed by the technology of an advancing civilization. The passenger pigeon is often cited as a tragic example of humanity’s skill in annihilating life. Elimination of bison from the plains is an even more powerful example of how the technology and economy of the expanding nation reduced the richness of the continent’s wildlife. Pigeons, bison, and other animals—not to mention the Native Americans, who by the end of the nineteenth century had been reduced by disease and destruction of their culture to about a third of their pre-Columbian population—were the first casualties of the new and careless civilization that swept across the continent.
The wilderness, with all its dangers, its mystery, its promise, was largely gone. The few fragments of remaining wild land were no longer places to be feared and civilized but, to a growing number of Americans, reminders of an earlier era that were to be preserved and cherished. In many areas, the great abundance of wood that so impressed the first settlers had given way to scarcity. Soil erosion, loss of watersheds, and disappearance of game had by the latter part of the nineteenth century become national problems as the once seemingly endless forests were methodically leveled.
The Europeans also brought a technology that contributed to the heavy impact they had on the land. Horses and oxen enabled them to open and cultivate much broader acres. Plows could dig deeply into the soil, exposing far more loam than the pointed sticks used by Native American women. With draft animals, the Europeans could harvest heavier loads and transport them to market. Sailing ships could carry those loads along the coasts or across the ocean. Firearms could more efficiently kill wild animals and birds—not to mention the advantage they gave the Europeans in their unequal contest with the natives for control of the land.