Something New Under the Sun

In Something New Under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth-Century World (2000), John Robert McNeill covers the changes we have wrought upon our environment. Acclaimed a pioneering and revolutionary book, it won both the 2000 Charles A. Weyerhaeuser Book Award and the 2001 WHA Bentley Book Prize. McNeill is a professor at Georgetown University and an environmental historian. Something New Under the Sun is his third work of nonfiction. Between 2011 and 2013, he served as the president of the American Society for Environmental History.

McNeill’s central thesis is that more damage occurred to the environment during the twentieth century than during any other period in history. Particularly, McNeill emphasizes how casually we have destroyed the environment and created irreversible changes to Earth’s core spheres. McNeill suggests that, although we reduced pollution levels in the twentieth century compared to, for example, the Industrial Revolution, the scope and scale of our economic growth, industry, and militarism erased these benefits.

Something Under the Sun proposes that the most understudied aspect of the twentieth century is its environmental history. Although global catastrophes such as World War II had a profound effect on humanity, environmental changes will have the greatest long-term impact. While we speak of wars, the rise of communism, women’s rights, and activism when we think of the twentieth century, we forget the environment and the ways we have altered it.



McNeill acknowledges that Something Under the Sun is too broad in scope to cover any one facet of the environment in detail. However, he expects the book to appeal to any reader with a general interest in environmental studies, and science or history students who are keen to explore their chosen subject of study from a new angle. Crucially, it’s one of the few books that focuses on the environment from a historical point of view, offering insight into wide-scale environmental and historical trends.

The book is divided into two parts. The first part, “The Music of the Spheres,” covers the Earth’s different spheres, from the hydrosphere to the biosphere, and the changes over the last one hundred years. In the second part of the book, “Engines of Change,” McNeill considers the reasons for these changes and what the future may hold for our planet. McNeill doesn’t promise any solutions. Instead, he asks us to consider what changes we might make to improve our planet’s prospects.

In “The Music of the Spheres,” McNeill examines the foundations of our world, such as land, and water, and its biological resources. He considers why, on the one hand, the way in which we have exploited the environment has improved our lives, and on the other, how these changes have broken the environment beyond repair. Importantly, we rely on technological systems that are fragile and complex, and if these systems fail us, we can’t survive.



McNeill proposes that humans now play a role in environmental evolution that we do not understand. For example, in chapter three, “The Atmosphere: Urban History,” McNeill explains how we have unintentionally replaced microbes, bacteria, and other life-forms as the engineers of our atmosphere. The difference between these microbes and us, McNeill argues, is that we don’t know what we’re doing, and we aren’t prepared for this responsibility.

In chapter two, “The Lithosphere and Pedosphere: The Crust of the Earth,” McNeill accuses us of altering the Earth’s soil chemistry irreversibly. Through our aggressive farming techniques, we have depleted Earth of its soil nutrients and we haven’t replaced them. Instead, we waste the nutrients we don’t use by dumping them. We have altered the Earth’s natural cycles, and it is impossible to say what the long-term consequences of our actions will be.

In “Engines of Change,” McNeill analyses the social trends responsible for driving these environmental changes. For example, in chapter nine, “More People, Bigger Cities,” McNeill criticizes population growth and how mass population movement has unintentionally contributed to environmental damage. Rapid population growth, conflict, and fossil fuel production are just some of the factors McNeill holds responsible for environmental destruction.



In chapter eleven, “Ideas and Politics,” McNeill argues that, while ideologies and politics evolved significantly over the course of the twentieth century, our attitude to the environment did not. Politicians and their prevailing goals influenced what we think of the environment, but these goals are, of course, shaped by personal agendas. For example, leaders may tell people that fossil fuels are harmless because they need these fuels to power the industry they’re determined to grow. We have allowed the Earth to be shaped by political motives and power games.

McNeill concludes that environmental change is unavoidable. For millions of years, the Earth has undergone changes. However, the twentieth century altered the Earth in unprecedented ways. We have influenced the planet without understanding the rules of the game we are playing, and we won’t understand the gravity of the damage for many years yet.