From the review, it sounds like the author lets the military's role in
environmental destruction off the hook way too much.     Still, it looks
to be an interesting read.
......................................Tony Abdo

NY Times, June 25, 2000
Review : "Something New Under the Sun: An Environmental History of the
Twentieth-Century World", by J. R. McNEILL"

By DICK TERESI

On an April day in 1970 I was riding an elevator to my job at Fawcett
Publications (our motto: ''Something for every page!'') when the
executive vice president, a man not usually taken to speaking to science
editors, cornered me and poked an executive finger into my sternum.
''Y'ever heard of this ecology thing?'' he demanded. He pronounced it
with a long, hard ''E.'' The previous day, after drinks at the Park
Lane, he had wandered into Central Park, no doubt in search of bad
novels to sign up, where he had run smack into the first Earth Day
celebration.
He had learned a new word. ''Keep your eye on this EEE-cology thing,''
he barked at me. ''It's going to be big!''
Not big enough, apparently, is the message of J. R. McNeill's
''Something New Under the Sun: An Environmental History of the
Twentieth-Century World.''

McNeill, a professor of history at Georgetown University, tells us how
humans have altered the earth from the 1890's to the 1990's. We've done
a lot. O.K., asteroid crashes and volcanic explosions, McNeill concedes,
can do more in one fell swoop than we can. The five previous great
extinctions, like the one that erased 90 percent of marine species, make
our clubbing of harp seals and building of strip malls seem pathetic by
comparison. When the biography of the earth is written, our effect on
the planet will be a footnote at best -- until 1890. In the past
century, McNeill says, that started to change. We are beginning, as high
school valedictorians always promise, to make a difference.

The author has compiled a volcanic eruption of statistics to prove this.
Usually such numbers, in the hands of environmentalists, are nothing
more than ''cocktail statistics,'' meaningless tidbits to share with
Tipper and Al or Annette and Warren over tofu canapés and mineral
water. My favorite: we lose a football field's worth of rain forest each
second.

About which I always wonder, American rules or Canadian? Or, 75 percent
of the water we use in our homes is used in the bathroom, to which P. J.
O'Rourke says: ''Thank goodness. Think of the mess it would make in the
den.''

McNeill spares us such trivia, serving up his numbers rare, such as 13x,
16x, 40x (the increases, respectively, in the world's urban population,
energy use and industrial output during the past century). He doesn't
examine man's assault on the earth as an environmentalist, but as a
historian: ''The human race, without intending anything of the sort, has
undertaken a gigantic uncontrolled experiment on the earth. In time, I
think, this will appear as the most important aspect of 20th-century
history, more so than World War II, the Communist enterprise, the rise
of mass literacy, the spread of democracy or the growing emancipation of
women.''

McNeill's tone will not please liberals, because of his lack of moral
outrage. He writes about deforestation with the same dispassion that one
might use to describe the 17th-century defenestrations in Prague. And
conservatives will not like the content he thus delivers: world economic
growth, up 120 times since 1500, has exacted an enormous toll on the
earth's crust, atmosphere, water supply, plants, animals and finally on
its rogue species, us.

We used 10 times as much energy in the 20th century as in the 1,000
previous years. Before 1900, humans had little impact on earth and rock,
compared with oceanic volcanoes, tectonic movements (mountain building)
and glaciers. By the 1990's, we had surpassed all of them, moving 42
billion tons of rock and soil per year against 30 billion tons by
volcanoes, 14 billion tons by tectonics and only 4.3 billion tons by
glaciers. And why not? A single bulldozer operator today has as much
power at his control as an Egyptian Pharaoh with all his slaves.

We have lost in one century an amount of topsoil it took 1,000 years to
form, and we're running out of clean water. Take the Ogallala Aquifer,
an underground river stretching from South Dakota to Texas. In the 30's,
when we began using the aquifer for irrigation, it was equal in volume
to Lake Huron. Nature took 25,000 years to make the Ogallala. We will
sprinkle the remainder away within 20 to 30 years.

Joining the assault on the earth is the chain saw, which allows us to
cut trees 100 to 1,000 times faster than with axes; without it the
clearance of tropical forests might not have happened. (The need for a
new football field every second is not a driving factor.)

The author thinks we suffer from ''ideological lock-in.'' Prevailing
ideas and politics, from an ecological perspective, have changed little.
After 1880 economists took nature out of economics. Robert Solow, the
1987 Nobel Prize winner in economics, claimed ''the world can, in
effect, get along without natural resources.'' There is plenty of blame
to go around. ''While economists ignored nature,'' McNeill says,
''ecologists pretended humankind did not exist.''

''Something New Under the Sun'' is full of big numbers. I sought help
from Michael Sutherland, the director of the Statistical Consulting
Center at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Sutherland is an
expert at detecting fake or misleading statistics, but found no such
problem with McNeill's, pointing out that he always identifies his
sources and is willing to cite numbers that point in different
directions, as often happens in real life. McNeill doesn't attempt to
make his statistics dovetail to further a point. Sutherland also
applauded McNeill's penchant for not always interpreting the numbers,
leaving that responsibility to the reader. He was amazed, however, at
the dearth of data on the environment. ''We know more about commercial
shipping than about the condition of the earth,'' Sutherland says, ''and
we have few statistics beyond the U.S.''

McNeill tempers his numbers. He points out that while soil erosion
appears catastrophic, ''more food per capita was available by the end of
the 20th century than at any time in human history,'' thanks to better
agricultural technology. And while air pollution killed as many people
in the century as the two world wars, he points out that air pollution
kills the sick, elderly and very young, while wars kill people in the
prime of life -- quite a different matter from social and economic
points of view.

This is a book about the collective work of lots of people (the 80
billion people born in the past four million years), but there are
entertaining stories, too. There's Thomas Midgley, a chemical engineer
who in 1921 figured out that adding lead to gasoline would allow it to
burn better.

By the 70's most Americans had elevated lead levels in their blood. In
1930-31, Midgley went on to invent Freon, which eats ozone molecules. He
eventually contracted polio, and built a system of ropes and pulleys to
help him in and out of bed. Midgley, perhaps the most politically
incorrect man of the century, strangled himself in the contraption and
died suspended in midair.

Princess Diana and President George Bush notwithstanding, land mines and
Saddam Hussein have proved beneficial to the environment. ''Iraqi land
mines in the Kuwaiti desert kept people out and allowed a resurgence of
animal and plant life in the 1990's,'' McNeill writes. Heinrich
Himmler's SS was ecologically correct, too, with plans to establish an
enormous wildlife preserve in Europe. The Poles, however, opposed the
SS's choice of a site: Poland. An early conservationist, Peter the
Great, introduced laws on wildlife conservation, forest preservation,
overfishing, soil conservation and water pollution between 1689 and
1725.

Catherine the Great, despite her fondness for horses, later rescinded
most of these laws. Admirers of Eastern religions will learn that in the
1980's the Ganges was choked by several million tons of ashes per month
-- cremated remains of the 30 million Hindus per year who sought
post-mortem salvation in the sacred river.

German U-boats helped restore marine life in the North Atlantic during
World War II by scaring fishermen back into port. McNeill says that
humans have done a good job of preserving several species -- those we
find delicious.

''Something New Under the Sun'' is an original work of history,
exhaustively researched and carefully written. The message, however, is
not particularly pleasant. McNeill writes that the future is
''inherently uncertain'' and that ''sharp adjustments will be
required.'' The most hopeful statement here comes from James Watt,
President Ronald Reagan's secretary of the interior. Nominated by a man
who blamed trees for air pollution, Watt said environmentalists were not
real Americans and suggested they should be shot. At his Senate
confirmation hearings, he said there was no need to worry about the
environment. An apocalypse, being prepared by God, Watt told the
senators, was imminent.

(Dick Teresi is writing a book about the non-European roots of Western
science.)