History :The west and the World

J. R. McNeill – Something New Under the Sun

In the Prologue McNeill argued that there were three main drivers of environmental change in the 20th century – population growth, economic growth, and increased energy usage. In these two chapters he expands on these points by discussing more specific trends that are reflections of these three broad changes. What are those specific trends, and what has been their environmental impact?

Chapter 9 – More People, Bigger Cities

[p.269] Among the greatest distinctions of the twentieth century were its powerful twin surges of population growth and urbanization….

[p.270] The bizarre population history of the twentieth century was the climax (to date) of a long frenzy of reproduction and survival…. The globalization brought about by European mariners at the end of the fifteenth century incubated two biological changes significant for subsequent population history. First, their globe-girdling voyages spread diseases among populations that had previously been long isolated from one another. In the short run, this led to catastrophic losses, notably in the Americas and Oceania. Eventually this swirl of infection produced more seasoned immune systems, closer symbiosis between pathogens and hosts, and still later, public health systems, so that the toll from epidemics subsided. Secondly, maritime voyagers distributed food crops far and wide, eventually allowing (within limits imposed by politics and tradition) every region of the world to concentrate on the crops best suited to its ecological and market conditions. Maize spread from its home in the American tropics to East Asia, southern Africa, and the Mediterranean basin. Tropical Africa acquired manioc (cassava) from Brazil, while the Americas got wheat. In sum, the world's food supply improved. By about 1650 these two factors provoked a long-term rise in world population, still in train.

On top of this surge, itself unprecedented in human history, came a tidal wave of population growth. It drew on further improvements in food supply and disease prevention … and reached a crescendo after 1950. These improvements first caused declines in mortality…. When mortality had declined but fertility had not, population grew very quickly. Demographers call the whole process

[p.271] "the demographic transition." The rate of growth peaked in the late 1960s (at 2.1% per annum)…. Growth slowly slackened after 1970, mainly because women acquired more say in many societies and limited their fertility. By 1996 the total annual increment of population had peaked at about 92 million to 95 million more births than deaths per year….

[p.276] Population growth accounted for a modest share of air pollution-related environmental changes and a larger share of those pertaining to water and the biota, especially those involving food production. Big environmental change resulted more often from combinations of mutually reinforcing factors than from population growth alone….

Migration often mattered even more than growth, although the two are often hard to separate because growth sometimes caused, or at least helped cause, migration. From 1500 to about 1870 most of the world's intercontinental migrants were slaves or "coolies." Then, around 1845 to 1920 the spontaneous migration from Europe to the Americas came to overshadow other currents around the world. After 1925, international migration receded for several decades, and when it gathered pace again by 1960, more diffuse flows prevailed. In all periods, migration often promoted radical changes in land use and sharp ecological shifts.

From the point of view of environmental change, the most important migration involved frontier areas. Mass migrations from humid to dry lands repeatedly provoked desertification. Migrations from flatlands to sloping lands often led to faster soil erosion. Migrations into forest zones brought deforestation.

[p.277] With declining transport costs and tightening integration of markets after 1870, people moved about as never before. They frequently ventured into ecological zones about which they understood little. This, of course, has happened throughout human history. But in the twentieth century more people moved, they had more transformative technologies at hand, and in most cases they had stronger links to markets or national planners, giving them incentives to clear more land, plant more crops, graze more animals, catch more fish, or mine more ore than their own subsistence required.

The scale was enormous. In the period 1830 to 1920, Europe alone sent 55 million to 70 million emigrants to the Americas, Australia, and Siberia. A large minority engaged in pioneer farming, such as Ukrainians on the Canadian prairies or Italians on the coffee frontier of Brazil…. Simultaneously (1834-1937) about 30 million to 45 million Indians moved, mostly as indentured laborers to plantations in Fiji, Malaya, Burma, Mauritius, Natal, Trinidad, and Guyana. While they took no part in land-use decisions, and while most were sojourners not settlers, their labor converted millions of hectares of forest land to sugar, rubber, and other crops. Large numbers of Chinese labor migrants moved to Southeast Asia, the Caribbean, California, and Peru among other destinations….

[p.281] Around the world, spontaneous and officially sponsored migrations moved tens of millions of people into ecologically unfamiliar areas in the twentieth century. A hefty proportion of the world's environmental changes resulted. This was especially true in those categories strongly affected by frontier farming: vegetation cover, biodiversity, soil condition, and, in dry lands, water use.

Twentieth-century urbanization affected almost everything in human affairs and constituted a vast break with past centuries. Nowhere had humankind altered the environment more than in cities, but their im-

[p.282] pact reached far beyond their boundaries. The growth of cities was a crucial source of environmental change.

First, consider the scale and tempo of the process. A millennium ago China and the Islamic Middle East had the world's most urbanized populations, but even in these lands 90 to 95 percent of people lived outside cities…. In 1700, only five cities in the world, all political capitals, had more than half a million people: Istanbul, Tokyo, Beijing, Paris, and London. By 1800 there were still only six. (Canton/Guangdong had joined the list.) The hazards of city life, mainly endemic childhood diseases but also epidemics, killed people faster than others were being born…. But the constraints on urban growth soon relaxed: farms were growing slightly more productive; cities, at least capital cities, were more able to dominate hinterlands; fossil fuel transport extended the reach of cities farther into the countryside; and public health programs began to take effect…. For 8,000 years cities had been demographic black holes. In the span of one human generation they stopped checking population growth and started adding to it: a great turning point in the human condition.

By 1900 there were 43 cities of over half a million, mostly in western Europe, eastern North America, and on the seacoasts of export-oriented economies, often in European colonies. By 1990 about 800 cities, scattered all over the world, surpassed the half million mark. Some 270 had more than a million residents, and 14 topped 10 million. It remains to be seen what constraints on city size now exist….

[p.283] The first country in which half the population lived in cities was industrializing England, in about 1850. The United States reached this level at about 1920, Japan about 1935, the USSR and Mexico about 1960, South Korea about 1975, South Africa about 1985. In 1998 the world as a whole approached it. In very general terms, rapid urbanization happened in Japan, western Europe, and eastern North America in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, in the Soviet Union and Latin America in the mid-twentieth century, and almost everywhere else after 1960. In national terms, by far the fastest urbanizations occurred in the USSR in the 1930s and in China in the 1980s. Each of these reflected burgeoning industrialization, in the Soviet case while building communism (and starling cities from scratch) and in the Chinese case while dismantling it….

[p.287] The environmental meaning of the world's tumultuous urbanization was vast and variable. Urban impacts extended beyond city limits to hinterlands, to downwind and downstream communities, and in some respects to the whole globe. Cities absorbed ever larger quantities of water, energy, and materials from near and far. In exchange they pumped out goods and services—as well as pollutants, garbage, and solid wastes. Broadly speaking, this process of urban metabolism generated two categories of environmental change: pollution effects and land use effects.

GARBAGE AND POLLUTION. Rapid urbanization normally generated severe pollution stress. Infrastructure rarely kept pace with heady urban growth. Many people in 1900 and about 800 million in 1990 lived without piped water, sewage systems, gas, or electricity. Consequently they lived amid their own wastes and pollution…. The environmental conditions created by speedy urbanization were among the bleakest humans experienced. Slimy water and gritty air were the worst but not the end of it.

Consider garbage and solid waste….

By midcentury the scale of garbage and solid-waste problems began to grow, overwhelming the capacity of many cities to cope. Mexico City in 1950 produced about 3,000 tons of garbage per day. By the late 1990s it generated three times as much. At least a quarter of it piled up in streets, ditches, and ravines. Garbage hills and ridges sprouted in almost every fast-growing city, from Manila to Maputo and Quito to Karachi. Streets and alleys acquired a rancid and rotting patina of household and other wastes. In Surat, a city of 2.2 million in India, a fifth of the city's garbage went uncollected in the early 1990s. This created ideal rat habitat, and helped launch an outbreak of bubonic plague in 1994….

[p.289] THE ECOLOGICAL FOOTPRINTS OF CITIES. Cities themselves covered perhaps 0.1 percent of the earth's land surface in 1900 and about 1 percent in 1990. Their spatial growth, however, was only a small fraction

[p.290] of their environmental impact, for they spread their tentacles far and wide, drawing in food, water, and energy sometimes from other continents. The space needed to support a city and to absorb its wastes is, metaphorically speaking, its ecological footprint….

Urban growth … had tumultuous effects on water, land, and life—because cities have metabolisms. They take in water, food, oxygen (and more) and discard sewage, garbage, and carbon dioxide (and more). Fast-growing cities, like teenagers, have higher metabolisms than those that have stopped growing….

[p.293] Growing cities also needed timber, cement, brick, food, and fuel. Prior to the age of rail, all this came by ship or came from nearby. With railroads and trucks it could come from much further afield, dispersing the environmental effects across broader hinterlands, thus enlarging the ecological footprint of cities. Chicago by 1900 exerted a gravitational pull on timber, livestock, grain, and other fruits of the land from a huge region in the heart of North America. When the poet Carl Sandburg christened Chicago "hog butcher to the world, stacker of wheat" in 1916, some 15 million to 20 million hogs and cattle per year entered its stockyard gates on foot and left as meat. Broad swaths of North America, from Texas to Ohio to Montana, had been converted to livestock habitat because Chicago's packers could find outlets for all that meat. Similarly, Chicago's grain traders helped drive the conversion of prairie grassland into corn and wheat belts, while Chicago's timber merchants encouraged the great cutover of the northern woods of the Great Lakes basin. Few cities matched Chicago's role in organizing and speeding the transformation of

[p.294] rural ecologies, but every city had major impacts on the surrounding environment. Delhi in the 1980s imported fuelwood from forests 700 kilometers away. Vancouver around 1990 needed more than 20 times its own area for its food and fuel needs. Most cities after 1960 imported petroleum from thousands of kilometers away: the Persian Gulf became a crucial hinterland for thousands of cities.

Conclusion

Among the many engines of environmental change in the twentieth century, urbanization, together with population growth and migration, were among the most powerful. The choices, both individual and sometimes political, that affected the reproductive behavior and geographic movement of billions of people over the century helped give environmental change its impetus and directions. Almost none of the choices took environmental considerations consciously into account.

The growth of cities, and their transformation into demographically self-sustaining entities, marked a turning point in human history and in environmental history alike. Cities had for many centuries dominated political life and high culture, but in the twentieth century they became common habitat for the human species. This shift recast the cities themselves, which grew spatially and evolved into new combinations of materials, energy, and wastes. It also reshaped much of the rural world, a larger share of which was converted to serving the needs of city populations.

The expansion of the cities derived both from migration and from population growth. Rural migrants not only drifted to the cities, but also to new rural terrain. Often they were encouraged or compelled by political programs to find new homes in new lands. They brought their own knowledge and practices with them and normally applied them to their new surroundings, with unusually powerful environmental consequences….

Chapter 10 – Fuels, Tools, and Economics

[p.296] Over the course of the twentieth century, more and more people acquired greater and greater leverage over the environment, through new energy sources, new tools, and new market connections. Energy, technology, and economic systems were tightly interlocked. They coevolved, each one influencing the paths of the others. At times, new combinations of energy sources, machines, and ways of organizing production came together, meshed well, and reoriented society and economy. Borrowing from the vocabulary of the history of technology, I will call these combinations of simultaneous technical, organizational, and social innovations "clusters." Early industrial clusters were built around water-powered textile mills and then factories and steam engines. After the mid-nineteenth century the dominant cluster emerged as coal, iron, steel, and railroads: heavy-engineering industries centered in smokestack cities. Call it the "coketown cluster" in honor of Charles Dickens's Coketown in

[p.297] his novel Hard Times (1854). The next cluster coalesced in the 1920s and 1930s and predominated from the 1940s (helped along by World War II) until the 1990s: assembly lines, oil, electricity, automobiles and aircraft, chemicals, plastics, and fertilizers—all organized by big corporations. I will dub that the "motown cluster" in honor of Detroit, the world center of motor vehicle manufacture….

These clusters, and the rapid changes to society, economics, and environment that came with them, affected the whole world, but unevenly. The dominant innovations came disproportionately from the Unite States, Europe, and Japan, and the wealth and power they helped to create were concentrated there. But the ecological ramifications of these clusters were felt everywhere, if not in the same ways….

[p.314] The three dominant features of twentieth-century economic history were industrialization, "Fordism," and economic integration. They

[p.315] were all intertwined, and together intermingled with the spread of fossil fuels and technological change. They, too, helped spread disruption and prosperity foment the economic miracles of the twentieth century, and provoke massive environmental change.

INDUSTRIALIZATION. In the late eighteenth century in Britain, industrialization took off, quickly reaching an intensity never before approached…. From there it spread by leaps and bounds, intensified further, and changed form several times. Industrial labor efficiency increased about 200-fold between 1750 and 1990, so that modern workers produce as much in a week as their eighteenth-century forbears did in four years. In the twentieth century alone, global industrial output grew 40-fold.

The coketown cluster centered in the United States and northwestern Europe. It spread to Japan early in the century, the USSR in the 1930s, and to Soviet satellite countries in the 1950s, some of which already had pockets of it, in Bohemia and Silesia. The motown cluster first took shape in the United States but quickly crystallized in Canada, western Europe, Japan, Australia, and New Zealand. It extended only partially to the USSR (where innovations often met stern resistance after Stalin's consolidation of power) and to Latin America, and scarcely at all to Africa and southern Asia. China in effect attempted to create a version of the coketown cluster overnight with the backyard steel furnaces of the Great Leap Forward of 1958 to 1960. Despite the geographic spread of industrialization, since the 1920s about two-thirds of industrial production (by value) occurred in the core areas: the United States, Canada, Japan, and western Europe.

Like urbanization, industrialization changed the structure and pace of energy and material flows. Industry too has metabolisms. Here I will pass over specifics and examples and offer only two generalizations, one obvious and one hidden. First, industrialization everywhere and at all times increased resource use and pollution. The coketown cluster was especially dirty, even in some of its late-twentieth century incarnations (such as Silesia). The 40-fold increase in industrial output in the twentieth century implied a vast rise in raw material use and industrial pollution. Vast but not 40-fold.

[p.316] Second and less obviously, industries over time grew less dirty and less demanding. Their energy efficiency improved, and so they emitted less carbon into the atmosphere per unit of production, allowing industrial economies to "decarbonize." Industries also learned to use less raw material per unit of output, permitting "dematerialization." The energy intensity (ratio of energy use to GDP) of the British economy peaked around 1850 to 1880; it was probably the most inefficient, energy-guzzling economy in world history. Energy intensity in Canada declined after about 1910, in the United States and Germany after about 1918, in Japan after 1970, in China 1980, and Brazil 1985. The United States used half as much energy and emitted less than half as much carbon per (constant) dollar of industrial output in 1988 as in 1958. South Korea achieved the same efficiency gains in half the time, between 1972 and 1986. In the world as a whole, energy intensity peaked around 1925 and by 1990 had fallen by nearly half. This meant far less pollution (and resource use) than would otherwise have been the case in the twentieth century. But this happy trend was masked by the strong overall expansion of the scale of industry.

FORDISM AND MASS CONSUMPTION. Fordism here refers to both assembly-line production and the historic compromise of the twentieth century between industrial workers and employers. As a result of a myriad of managerial developments, including Henry Ford's electrified assembly line, inaugurated in 1912, and Taylorism, the so-called scientific management involving the choreography of each laborer's motions, industrial economies achieved enormous productivity gains in the early twentieth century. Henry Ford saw that sharing these gains with his workforce suited his own interests, and from January 5, 1914—the birthday of consumer society—he paid laborers enough that they could hope to buy a Model-T. In 1923 his workers could buy one with 58 days' wages. Mil-

[p.317] lions of Americans did buy cars, radios, phonographs, then refrigerators and washing machines. They enjoyed an affluence and leisure that in the nineteenth century would have required an army of household servants. Fordism amounted to a renegotiation of the social contract of industrial society.

The production systems pioneered by Ford in the United States spread to Canada, Europe, Japan, the Soviet Union, and outposts elsewhere. The social compromise that converted the gains of mass production into mass consumption took many different forms and took varying lengths of time. In Europe the state brokered Fordism, striking bargains between unions and employers. (In France and Italy the employer was often the state itself.) In Japan, Fordism made rapid headway after 1945, when both factories and society were reconfigured under the American occupation (1945-1952). Mass consumption arrived in the 1960s. In the USSR the state was in effect the sole employer, and its rulers from the 1920s

[p.318] were much smitten by American factory efficiency. The Soviet Union committed itself ideologically to sharing its gains with industrial workers, but it did so in the form of secure employment, not mass consumption, creating a variant of Fordism in which industry produced mainly for the state, not the citizen. Whatever their prevailing ideology and political economy; industrialized societies spread the wealth sufficiently to keep the machines humming, the workers working—and usually buying. In short, outside the Soviet sphere, the enormous revolutions in production permitted—and required—enormous revolutions in consumption….

Ecological arrangements had to change too. To sustain the new social arrangements, fields, factories, and offices needed more fuels, fertilizers, water, wood, paper, cement, ores—more of almost everything except horses, oats, whalebone, and a handful of other raw materials consigned to the dustbin of history. All these inputs were converted into energy, food, goods, pollution, and garbage. Without Fordism, without mass consumption, the environmental history of the twentieth century would have been much calmer….

ECONOMIC INTEGRATION. Now often called globalization, economic integration has a long history of fits and starts. In modem times it got boosts from the explorations and trade links pioneered mainly by Europeans and Chinese between 1405 and 1779, then from colonialism, and new transport and communications technologies—railroad, steamship, telegraph—in the nineteenth century. Indeed the era 1870 to 1914 was one of great integration and consolidation in the world economy, observable in flows of trade, migration, and capital. World War I and the Russian Revolution stopped this trend. Soviet Russia veered toward an ideal of autarky, followed by fascist Italy in the 1920s. Then international trade and investment flows plummeted during the Great Depression and World War II.

That disastrous experience weighed on the minds of the architects of the postwar economic order. They understood that prosperity depended on trade, and fashioned a new regime of monetary and trade agreements under American leadership. This regime promoted and achieved rapid integration of western Europe and North America from the late 1940s, Japan from the time of the Korean War (1950-1953), the big oil exporters of the Middle East by the mid-1950s, South Korea and Taiwan from about 1970, and, less thoroughly and less quickly, Latin America, Africa, and South Asia….

[p.320] Despite slumps and setbacks the momentum of integration continued. Indeed, it accelerated in the 1980s and 1990s, propelled by falling transport costs, instant electronic communications, by assertive privatization and deregulation of financial markets and major industries, and most importantly by the ideological collapse of autarkic socialism in China (after 1978) and its political collapse in eastern Europe and the USSR (1989-1991)….

All this, while socially disruptive everywhere and grating for those who did not enjoy American leadership, served with industrialization and Fordism as impetus for the world's amazing economic growth after 1945. The environmental consequences of this surging economic integration extended beyond those of mass consumption.

Economic integration often commodified nature suddenly. When groups of consumers, through the magic of markets, were presented with the opportunity to buy something hitherto unavailable, they often did so. If that thing was elephant ivory, rhinoceros horn, giant panda skin, alligator hide, ostrich feathers, beaver fur, tortoiseshell, whale oil, teak, or the like, then the linkup between consumer and source of supply changed ecology in the zone of supply—often drastically. This was because supply was governed by rhythms of reproduction not subject to rapid acceleration. Rhinos will not procreate on demand. After 1970 the market for rhino horn in East Asia (for medicines) and in North Yemen (for dagger handles) overwhelmed the rate of rhino reproduction. By 1997 their numbers fell 90 percent, to about 5,000 to 7,000 worldwide.

Economic integration focused the dispersed demand of millions upon limited zones of supply. These zones were often sparsely populated frontiers, where the human touch had hitherto been light and where social restraints upon rapacity were few. The result was rapid exhaustion of commodities and transformation of ecologies. While this effect was most dramatic in the case of wildlife, it extended to valuable plants and trees, such as mahogany and cedar, and to landscapes under which valuable minerals lay. The impact of nickel mining on New Caledonia … would have been negligible had New Caledonia not been integrated into an international trading system. New Zealand and Argentina converted suitable land into pasture to meet the overseas demand for meat, butter, and cheese after transport changes—in particular, refrigerated shipping, invented in the 1880s—connected these landscapes to distant urban markets. From the 1950s, Central American forests became cattle ranches to meet North American demand for beef. Malayan forests became rubber plantations, Brazilian ones coffee plantations, and Ghanaian ones cocoa plantations—all because of market integration. Even illegal trades, in cocaine or marijuana, drove ecological change in places such as Peru, Bolivia, and northern Morocco. After 1965 the borderlands of northern Mexico--a different kind of frontier—industrialized rapidly and dirtily because Mexican manufactures achieved greater access to the U.S. market. Economic integration, especially modern globalization, left fewer and fewer landscapes, seascapes, or habitats untouched by the effects of "frontier economics"….

[p.323] The changes in energy regime, technology, and economy in the twentieth century were closely linked. Together as clusters of innovation, these changes propelled environmental history, both in pace and direction, in the industrialized world. Their impact elsewhere, while great enough, was limited by the fact that technological change and energy-intensive economies made a fainter imprint. Indeed, the coketown and motown clusters affected many lands only indirectly, through economic linkages with Europe, Japan, and North America. Most people in Mongolia, Borneo, Chad, and Bolivia experienced little change in the way of automobile use, industrialization, and Fordism, but oil and new trans-

[p.324] port technology helped connect them to industrial heartlands in the USSR, Japan, Europe, and the United States, bringing environmental alterations through new crops or intensified resource extraction. The patterns of technological change and energy use shaped the international division of labor, and thus the international distribution of environmental effects. The rich countries, with their energy- and technology-intensive economies, suffered more from air and water pollution, whereas the poor countries, with their low-energy and low-technology economies, got more deforestation, soil erosion, or desertification. Some big and diverse countries, like Russia and China, suffered from all of these effects because their areas were so vast as to allow them to turn their backs on the world economy and thereby reproduce its division of labor within their own borders.

The strongly linked trajectories of energy, technology, and economy together exercised paramount influence over twentieth century environmental history.

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 Part II 8