Something New Under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Modern World
We know that the world is changing quickly, and as geologists we know that the Earth System and its processes are changing too. Climate is now warming beyond the bounds of the Holocene, while the biosphere is undergoing transformation, and numerous new materials like pesticides and plastics are adding their signatures to the strata now forming. The Anthropocene is upon us, in reality if not yet formally.
The human drivers of this ongoing planetary change are almost infinitely complex: an interwoven and ever-shifting tapestry of social, economic and (increasingly) technological forces. A marvellous guide to those forces is the updated edition of historian John McNeill’s Something New Under the Sun.
The first edition of this book was published in 2000, written before Paul Crutzen’s improvisation of the Anthropocene term and concept at an International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme (IGBP) meeting that year. The data McNeill painstakingly assembled fed into the ferment of new thinking around this idea, showing convincingly that the 20th century, especially its second part, had no parallel in humankind’s long history. McNeill, Crutzen and IGBP Chair Will Steffen went on to develop the idea of a mid-20th century Great Acceleration of human population, industrialisation and globalisation, driven by steep increases in fossil fuel burning.
Now, McNeill has published a revised version of Something New Under the Sun, written with the Anthropocene and its associated concepts as central context, plus all the data that have accumulated in the past quarter-century, to show how this de facto new epoch has grown. It is a tour de force, linking the currents of human history with their environmental consequences: physical, chemical and biological. The book’s structure shows the planetary focus, with chapters on lithosphere/pedosphere, atmosphere, hydrosphere and biosphere and how these have transformed, before moving on to the “engines of change”: cities; fuels, tools and economics; ideas and politics. It is a potent mix.
Packed with data and detail, and yet highly readable, this is the book to read if you want to understand the fundamental background to our current times, as human history and Earth history combine to create something that is quite new. McNeill wrote the book for the course he taught at Georgetown University, USA, and it is hugely rewarding that he now shares its insights with the wider world.
Review by Jan Zalasiewicz and Colin Summerhayes
DETAILS
BY: John McNeill (2026) WW Norton & Co, 480 pp.
ISBN: 9781324079347
PRICE: £16.99, available from Geoscientist’s bookshop
