History :The west and the World
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GlobalEnvironment_Secondary1.docxHI 103 West and the World
The Global Environment – Secondary Sources
J. R. McNeill – Something New Under the Sun
In the Prologue to his book McNeill attempts to identify the major causes of environmental change in the 20th century. He identifies three major drivers of environmental change – what are they are in what specific ways have they impacted environmental history?
Prologue: Peculiarities of a Prodigal Century
[p.3] Environmental change on earth is as old as the planet itself, about 4 billion years. Our genus, Homo, has altered earthly environments throughout our career, about 4 million years. But there has never been anything like the twentieth century….
This is the first time in human history that we have altered ecosystems with such intensity, on such scale and with such speed. It is one of the few times in the earth's history to see changes of this scope and pace….
[p.4] 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 twentieth-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. To see just how prodigal and peculiar this century was, it helps to adopt long perspectives of the deeper past.
In environmental history, the twentieth century qualifies as a peculiar century because of the screeching acceleration of so many processes that bring ecological change. Most of these processes are not new: we have cut timber, mined ores, generated wastes, grown crops, and hunted animals for a long time. In modern times we have generally done more of these things than ever before, and since 1945, in most cases, far more. Although there are a few kinds of environmental change that are genuinely new in the twentieth century, such as human-induced thinning of the ozone layer, for the most part the ecological peculiarity of the twentieth century is a matter of scale and intensity.
Sometimes differences in quantity can become differences in quality. So it was with twentieth-century environmental change. The scale and intensity of changes were so great that matters that for millennia were local concerns became global. One example is air pollution. Since people first harnessed fire half a million years ago, they have polluted air locally. Mediterranean lead smelting in Roman times even polluted air in the Arctic. But lately, air pollution has grown so comprehensive and large-scale that it affects the fundamentals of global atmospheric chemistry. So changes in scale can lead to changes in condition.
Beyond that, in natural systems as in human affairs, there are thresholds and so-called nonlinear effects…. Water temperature in the tropical Atlantic can grow warmer and warmer without generating any hurricanes. But once that water passes 26° Celsius, it begins to promote hurricanes: a threshold passed, a switch thrown, simply by an incremental increase. The environmental history of the twentieth century is different from that of time past not merely because ecological changes were greater and faster, but also because increased intensities threw some switches. For example, in
[p.5] cremental increases in fishing effort brought total collapse in some oceanic fisheries. The accumulation of many increased intensities may throw some grand switches, producing very basic changes on the earth. No one knows, and no one will know until it starts to happen—if then.
This chapter examines the long-term histories of some of the human actions that change environments….
Economic Growth since 1500
Most of the things people do that change environments count as economic activity. Economists habitually measure the size of economies by summing the total value of goods and services brought to market or otherwise officially noted. The addition yields a single figure, the gross domestic product, or GDP….
Five hundred years ago the world's annual GDP (converted into 1990 dollars) amounted to about $240 billion, slightly more than Poland's or Pakistan's today, slightly smaller than Taiwan's or Turkey’s. Up to 1500 the world economy had grown extremely slowly over the millennia, mainly because (as we shall see) population had grown only slowly and improvements in productive technologies came very slowly by recent standards. After 1500, leading technologies were applied to the Americas and other regions, shipping became truly oceanic, and international trade grew. By 1820, the world's GDP had reached $695 billion (more than Canada's or Spain's, less than Brazil's in 1990s terms). The Industrial Rev-
[p.6] olution, further improvements in transport, and further development of frontier lands increased the rate of growth after 1820 so that in 1900, world GDP reached $1.98 trillion (less than 1990s Japan's). Indeed the period 1870 to 1913 remains one of spectacular growth spurts in the history of the world economy; faster than any that went before, and faster than much of what followed. After three decades of repressed growth (1914-1945) the world economy surged again, so that in 1950, world GDP attained $5.37 trillion (as large as the United States's economy in 1991). A long boom followed, based on more-open international trade, fast development of technology, and rapid population growth. By 1992, world GDP was about $28 trillion. This miraculous period of economic history with all its upheaval, invention, organization, and suppression, is reduced to index numbers and growth rates in Table 1.1.
TABLE 1.1 EVOLUTION OF WORLD GDP, 1500-1992.
Date World GDP
1500 100
1820 290
1870 470
1900 823
1913 1,136
1929 1,540
1950 2,238
1973 6,693
1992 11,664
The world's economy in the late twentieth century was about 120 times larger than that of 1500. Most of this growth took place after 1820. The fastest growth came in 1950 to 1973, but the whole period since the World War II saw economic growth at rates entirely unprecedented in human experience.
[p.7] Most of this economic expansion was driven by world population growth. The rest is owing to more productive technologies and organization (and perhaps harder work). Per capita figures (Table 1.2) show that while the world economy has grown 120-fold since 1500, average income for individuals has grown only 9-fold. This of course is a global average, and disguises huge variations among regions, countries, and persons.
TABLE 1.2 PER CAPITA WORLD GDP SINCE 1500
Year Per Capita World GDP Index Numbers
(1990 dollars) (AD. 1500 = 100)
1500 565 100
1820 651 117
1900 1,263 224
1950 2,138 378
1992 5,145 942
On average, we have nine times more income per capita than our ancestors had in 1500, and four times as much as our forebears had in 1900. Despite gross inequities in the distribution of this income growth—the average Mozambican today has an income well under half the global average of 1500—it must count as a great achievement of the human race over the past 500 years, and especially over the past century. The achievement has come at a price, of course. The social price, in the form of people enslaved, exploited, or killed so that "creative destruction” could make way for economic growth, is enormous. So is the environmental price. Historians in the past thirty years have appropriately paid great attention to the social price of economic growth and modernization; the environmental price deserves their attention too….
Population Growth since 10,000 B.C.
[p.8] When humans first invented agriculture (around, say, 8000 B.C.), global population was probably between 2 and 20 million. We were outnumbered by some other primates, such as baboons. But with agriculture came the first great surge in human numbers. Population grew much faster, probably between 10 and 1,000 times as fast as before, but nonetheless very slowly, by tiny fractions of a percent per year. By A.D. 1, the globe supported around 200 or 300 million people (roughly equivalent to today's Indonesia or United States). By 1500, world population had reached 400 or 500 million. It had taken about a millennium and a half to double, and grew at a rate well under 0.1 percent per year. After 1500, world population continued to grow quite slowly, reaching 700 million around 1730. At this point it began to rise more quickly, beginning the long boom still in progress today. By 1820, human population reached a billion or so. Our spectacular biological success since then is sketched by the figures in Table 1.3.
TABLE 1 3 WORLD POPULATION SINCE 1820
Year Population (billion) Annual Growth Rate (%)
1820 1 -
1850 1.2 0.5 (1820-1849)
1900 1.6 0.6 (1850-1899)
1950 2.5 0.8 (1900-1949)
1990 5.3 1.8 (1950-1989)
2000 6.0 1.5 (1990-1999)
[p.9] Since the eighteenth century our numbers have grown extremely quickly by previous standards. And in the period since 1950, population has increased at roughly 10,000 times the pace that prevailed before the first invention of agriculture, and 50 to 100 times the pace that followed….
Like the long-term course of economic growth, our population history also represents a triumph of the human species. It too, of course, has come at a price. In any case, it is an amazing development, an extreme departure from the patterns of the past….
The long-term trajectories of economic growth and population growth followed one another closely for millennia. Only around 1820 did they
[p.10] begin to diverge sharply, with economic growth outstripping population growth—hence the rising per capita incomes. What made this possible were new technologies and systems of economic organization that allowed people to make far greater use of energy.
Energy History since 10,000 B.C.
Before the Industrial Revolution began, we had at our disposal the muscle power of our bodies and of some domesticated animals; the power (very inefficiently harnessed) of wind and water; and (for heat but not for power) the chemical energy stored in wood and other biomass. The Industrial Revolution changed everything because it brought engines that could convert into mechanical power the biomass energy stocks accumulated in the earth's crust over hundreds of millions of years: fossil fuels….
[p.11] The first human societies used only their own muscle power, derived from chemical energy stored in plants and animal flesh. Eventually, with a few tools, the deployment of this muscle power grew more efficient. The use of fire helped a great deal in heating, of course, and, when cooking was invented, rendered some otherwise inedible energy sources edible. But until roughly 10,000 years ago, for mechanical energy our ancestors depended on their own bodies in what one might call the "somatic energy regime…."
The limits of the somatic energy regime were stringent. In a burst of effort, the human body can muster 100 watts of power. The most any society could devote to a given task, say ditch digging, darn building, or fighting, was—with people and animals as the main sources of mechanical power—a few hundred thousand watts. The Ming emperors and Egyptian pharaohs had no more power available to them than does a single modem bulldozer operator or tank captain….
The Industrial Revolution first augmented and then quickly outstripped human muscle power. Wherever it spread, it ended the somatic energy regime, replacing it with a much more complex set of arrangements that one might call the "exosomatic energy regime," but might better be called the fossil fuel age: to date the lion's share of energy deployed since 1800 has come from fossil fuels….
In the eighteenth century, steam engines tapped hundreds of millions of years' worth of photosynthesis, burning coal to convert chemical into mechanical energy. Coal of course had found uses for centuries, mainly as a fuel for heating. But the steam engine's capacity to convert that heat into mechanical energy capable of doing work opened up new possibilities….
World coal production, about 10 million tons in 1800, shot up 100-fold by 1900.
By 1900 another major departure was underway: internal combustion engines using refined oil. A Scot, James Young, figured out how to refine crude oil in the 1850s, and an American, Edwin Drake, proved in 1859 that oil could be drilled through deep rock. The oil age had begun, albeit in a small way. Internal combustion engines, developed mainly in Germany after 1880, furthered the transition. They weighed less than coal-fired steam engines, they were much more efficient, especially at small
[p.14] scales. On larger scales they could deliver much more power than steam engines. The provision of electricity needed power on such a scale; and automobiles required lightweight and efficient engines.
So from 1900 forward, biomass, coal, and oil provided large quantities of energy. In terms of usable energy, fossil fuels overshadowed biomass from the 1890s forward, even though the great majority of the world's population used no fossil fuels directly. Production and use of all three fuels grew throughout the twentieth century…. Not only did fossil fuels largely replaced biomass in the global energy mix in the twentieth century, but the total energy harvest skyrocketed. The electrification of the globe, begun around 1890 and still in train, boosted demand and use of energy….
[p.15] No other century—no millennium—in human history can compare with the twentieth for its growth in energy use. We have probably deployed more energy since 1900 than in all of human history before 1900. My very rough calculation suggests that the world in the twentieth century used 10 times as much energy as in the thousand years before 1900 A.D….
This astounding profligacy, too, counts as something of a triumph for the human species, a liberation from the drudgery of endless muscular toil and the opening up of new possibilities well beyond the range of muscles. Even on a per capita basis energy use grew spectacularly, four-or fivefold in the twentieth century. In the 1990s the average global citizen (an abstraction of limited utility) deployed about 20 "energy slaves," meaning 20 human equivalents working 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. The economic growth of the last two centuries, and the population growth too, would have been quite impossible within the confines of the somatic energy regime.
This energy intensification came at a cost. Here I mention two aspects of that cost. First, fossil fuel combustion generates pollution…. Secondly, fossil fuel use has sharply increased the inequalities in wealth and power
[p.16] among different parts of the world. The requisite technologies and corresponding social and political structures developed first and most thoroughly in Europe and North America. Other parts of the world generally remained dependent on biomass for heat and muscles for mechanical energy until 1950 or so. Indeed, the poorest countries remain so still. The average American in the 1990s used 50 to 100 times as much energy as the average Bangladeshi and directed upwards of 75 energy slaves while the Bangladeshi had less than one. Harnessing fossil fuels played a central (though not exclusive) role in widening the international wealth and power differential so conspicuous in modern history. This is a good thing if one prefers to see some people comfortable instead of almost all locked in poverty, but it is a bad thing if one prefers equality. In any case, inequality in energy use peaked in the 1960s. Thereafter the transition to intensive energy use spread around the world….
Conclusion
The human species has shattered the constraints and rough stability of the old economic, demographic, and energy regimes. This is what makes our times so peculiar. In the nineteenth century the world began a long economic boom, which climaxed in the twentieth century, when the world economy grew 14-fold. It expanded less than about fourfold in per capita terms, because world population multiplied fourfold in this century. Energy use embarked on a boom which began with a fivefold growth in the nineteenth century. That boom climaxed (to date) in the twentieth century with a further 16-fold expansion….
The great modern expansion, while liberating in a fundamental sense, brought disruption with it. The surges in population, production, and energy use affected different regions, nations, classes, and social groups quite unevenly, favoring some and hurting others. Many inequalities widened, and perhaps more wrenching, fortune and misfortune often were reshuffled. Intellectually, politically, and in every other way, adjusting to a world of rapid growth and shifting status was hard to do. Turmoil of every sort abounded. The preferred policy solution after 1950 was yet faster economic growth and rising living standards: if we can all consume more than we used to, and expect to consume still more in the years to come, it is far easier to accept the anxieties of constant change and the inequalities of the moment. Indeed, we erected new politics, new ideologies, and new institutions predicated on continuous growth. Should this age of exuberance end, or even taper off, we will face another set of wrenching adjustments.
McNeill, J. R. Something New Under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth-Century World. Norton, 2001.
HI 103 West and the World Global Environment – Secondary Sources 6
