An Environmental History of theTwentieth-century world-

With his work, J.R Mc Neill, made a really surprising job. Indeed, we are not used to study the history of the twentieth century through its environmental history, we most often tell the history of the twentieth century through its wars, its economic and political changes, and trying to explain this history with such a different point of view, could be a very challenging and interesting task. Through his book, the author tells us lots of anecdotes, explanations, show us different kind of documents. This book is really based on an exhaustive research, and it seems to be really difficult to sum up all these things in a paper.

In first the author argues that to a degree unprecedented in the human history, in the twentieth century, we have been moving Earth: polluting the atmosphere, the water….Indeed, under the pressure of human activit

The interesting thing we can notice in this book, is that Mc Neill places his ‘environmental history’ in a social, economic and political context, which strengthen his analysis.

Faced which all these attacks, experts try to find- through economic processes- the answers to the market’s failures (As we have previously seen it in class, we have to internalize the externalities and so we can talk about taxes, rights to pollute and pollution permits…). This kind of answer seems to be very attractive to some people, because it could be expressed thank to mathematical expressions, but unfortunately, most of the time it does not reflect Reality. Indeed, Reality forms a system; that is to say lots of elements that are connected and in interaction, and Economics constitute an under-system. The sphere of the economic activities is included in the sphere of human activities which is included itself in the Biosphere…

He also tells us about the story of Thomas Midgely who discovered that adding lead to gasoline made it burn better and in this way, who indirectly did more damage to the Atmosphere than any other human being, and how did Japan transform itself from a polluter’s paradise to a country of clean air without sacrificing economic performance. There are other numerous historical « little stories » and facts in the book. We learn for example that mining efforts in France uprooted people, shifted land and poured smoke and noxious gases into the Atmosphere, that the growth of US railroad (made of wood) threatened to chew up American’s forests at the turn of the twentieth century.

The economic rationality that makes all the decisions implying man and Nature, has now to integrate the ecological knowledge and the ethic preoccupation.

Earth is conventionally divided into a series of spheres : The Lithosphere which is the superficial part of the

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