Something New Under the Sun

Book review: Financial Times, 2000-12-13

Something New Under the Sun - An Environmental History of the Twentieth Century, by John McNeill. Allen Lane The Penguin Press

In the last thirty years we have become used to a variety of environmental alarms which fluctuate in interest and popularity. Sometimes the threat seems to come from human population pressure, sometimes from soil erosion and deforestation, sometimes from climate change and rising sea levels. But it is never easy to see them together with their interconnections, and still less to judge them at their worth. We need a catastrophe or two to jerk us into realising what is happening.

The central thesis of John McNeill's book is given in its title. For once there is something new under the sun. Up to now there has been a precedent for most things: population explosions of particular plants or animals; periodical extinctions; changes in soil fertility; rapid global cooling and rapid global warming; even impacts of objects from outer space. But in the history of life, ever since the cyanobacteria caused the switch to an oxygenated atmosphere some two billion years ago, there has been nothing like the impact of one animal species - our own - on the condition of the earth, and most of it within a single century.

McNeill takes us through it inch by painful inch, with copious statistics to support his case. The dizzy multiplication of human numbers (now amounting to around five per cent of total animal biomass), our ever increasing skills and technology in exploiting natural resources, the vast changes in the earth's covering of land and water, the concentration of humans (around half of us) in cities, and the accelerating extinctions of other organisms, have come together to make a different world. There is a particularly interesting table which roughly shows the measure of the twentieth century in terms of factors of increase: thus the human population by four, industrial output by forty, energy use by sixteen, air pollution by around five, carbon dioxide emissions by seventeen, sulphur emissions by thirteen, water use by nine, and marine fish catch by thirty-five.

Most of the implications remain unrecognized. We still think almost unconsciously that more use of resources is always better, that living standards may rise for ever, and that technology will be able to solve whatever problems may arise. Nowhere is this clearer than in the field of economics. Economic growth is regarded by governments the world over as an overriding necessity, and "development" with industrialization has even been described as a human right. Most discounting of the future is on a very short term horizon, and the operation of market forces is seen as the key to all and every economic problem. We need reminding from time to time that, as has been well said, the economy is a wholly owned subsidiary of the environment, and that markets may be good at setting prices but are incapable of recognizing costs.

This book well shows what these costs are. They are examined in systematic fashion, including their social, political, and even security aspects. A good example is the analysis of the green revolution, usually seen as a model of beneficent application of scientific ideas. Its various unexpected short comings are now becoming apparent, and each attempt to remedy them, as with genetically modified organisms, can create new problems of its own. The increasing polarization of rich and poor, the relative decline of the nation state with globalization, the movements of power which complicate governance of even well organized societies, together have effects on the environment which remain hard to measure. They may not all be bad, with the recovery of a sense of local community and common interest, but we enter increasingly unknown country in which responsibility has become blurred and elusive.

Few would now go along with Zazurbin who addressed the Soviet Writers Congress in 1926 in extravagant rhetoric about the need to replace the pine forests of Siberia with cities, factory chimneys, railways, cement and iron in the interests of the brotherhood of mankind. Nor would many agree with Robert Solow's statement in 1974 that "the world can in effect get along without natural resources". Nor with the cheery forecast of an American economist in 1984 of seven billion years of economic growth whose horizon could only be clouded by the extinction of the sun.

Change of mind is never easy, and the need for one emerges clearly from this book. But McNeill is disappointingly modest about what direction it should take, and what we should now do. He suggests a new and cleaner energy regime, steps to hasten lower mortality and fertility, and market interventions in the energy field, together with such "desirable initiatives" as improvement of education (particularly of girls and women), conversion of "the masses to some creed of ecological restraint" or "coaxing rulers into considering time horizons longer than the next election or coup."

So far so good. But this is scarcely a revolution, or even a shift of paradigm. It is not so much the masses - whoever they are - as our leaders in government, industry, business and elsewhere who need to exercise ecological restraint. The arguments and statistics packed into the rest of the book make this ending curiously limp. Moreover although McNeill ventures briefly from time to time into the wider biological implications of human impacts, his focus is narrowly human. His case would have been enhanced by a broader treatment of the effects on ecosystems and living organisms among whom we are no more than a small however bumptious part.

McNeill in not the first to try and measure human impacts. WWF publishes an index of planetary health, the Worldwatch Institute publishes annual reports on the subject, and the GEO 2000 Millennium report by the UN Environment Programme has recently brought us up to date. But Something New From Under the Sun is a source which should be studied for its own sake. Readers should be beware. It is certainly a mine of information, but it is also a minefield for innocent believers in the conventional wisdom.