SOMETHING NEW UNDER THE SUN: An Environmental History of the Twentieth-Century World.

By J. R. McNeill. Norton. 421 pp. $29.95

In my youth in the 1950s, the Chesapeake Bay teemed with life. In summer we swam and fished in its clear, brackish waters. In winter we watched in awe as migrating ducks filled the evening sky and poured into the bay. Today, though, the ducks are nearly gone, and the brown waters are hostile to eelgrass, blue crabs, oysters, fish, and humans. Yet even in the 1950s, people reminisced about an earlier golden age when there had been far more ducks.

Do such anecdotes represent yearning for an idealized past or genuine and lasting environmental decline? McNeill, a professor of history at Georgetown University and the author of The Mountains of the Mediterranean World: An Environmental History (1992), would choose the latter. In this ambitious and exhaustively researched book (the bibliography lists close to a thousand sources), he argues that the 20th century spawned environmental changes that, though unintended, were extraordinary in scope and intensity.

Erosion, smog, extinctions, shrinking tropical forests, ozone holes, birds suffocating in midair over Mexico City—McNeill has plenty to work with. Individual culprits stalk his landscape, including the inventor of the harpoon cannon and the Shakespeare fanatic who released 160 starlings in New York City. But the real villains, as he discusses in the last quarter of the book, are more complex: urbanization, migration, population growth, globalization, and shifts in preferred fuels and technologies, among others.

His account is not unremittingly gloomy. He notes positive developments, such as smog abatement, forest regeneration, and the return of the sensitive salmon to formerly polluted waters. He acknowledges the upside of many environmental changes—eliminating coastal mangroves, for instance, benefits rice farming—and he generally refrains from characterizing a change as bad unless it amounts to a disaster for all life forms. But his neutrality sometimes lapses, as when he relegates rival explanations to footnotes or uses toxic eight times in two pages. He may have found it impossible to do otherwise after concluding that the growth imperative responsible for so much environmental degradation is, like the European rabbit and the water hyacinth, all-consuming and alldestructive.

—Shepard Krech III