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The Great Acceleration: An Environmental History of the Anthropocene since 1945
The Earth has entered a new age--the Anthropocene--in which humans are the most powerful influence on global ecology. Since the mid-twentieth century, the accelerating pace of energy use, greenhouse gas emissions, and population growth has thrust the planet into a massive uncontrolled experiment. The Great Acceleration explains its causes and consequences, highlighting the role of energy systems, as well as trends in climate change, urbanization, and environmentalism.
More than any other factor, human dependence on fossil fuels inaugurated the Anthropocene. Before 1700, people used little in the way of fossil fuels, but over the next two hundred years coal became the most important energy source. When oil entered the picture, coal and oil soon accounted for seventy-five percent of human energy use. This allowed far more economic activity and produced a higher standard of living than people had ever known--but it created far more ecological disruption.
We are now living in the Anthropocene. The period from 1945 to the present represents the most anomalous period in the history of humanity's relationship with the biosphere. Three-quarters of the carbon dioxide humans have contributed to the atmosphere has accumulated since World War II ended, and the number of people on Earth has nearly tripled. So far, humans have dramatically altered the planet's biogeochemical systems without consciously managing them. If we try to control these systems through geoengineering, we will inaugurate another stage of the Anthropocene. Where it might lead, no one can say for sure.
More than any other factor, human dependence on fossil fuels inaugurated the Anthropocene. Before 1700, people used little in the way of fossil fuels, but over the next two hundred years coal became the most important energy source. When oil entered the picture, coal and oil soon accounted for seventy-five percent of human energy use. This allowed far more economic activity and produced a higher standard of living than people had ever known--but it created far more ecological disruption.
We are now living in the Anthropocene. The period from 1945 to the present represents the most anomalous period in the history of humanity's relationship with the biosphere. Three-quarters of the carbon dioxide humans have contributed to the atmosphere has accumulated since World War II ended, and the number of people on Earth has nearly tripled. So far, humans have dramatically altered the planet's biogeochemical systems without consciously managing them. If we try to control these systems through geoengineering, we will inaugurate another stage of the Anthropocene. Where it might lead, no one can say for sure.
288 pages, Paperback
First published April 4, 2016
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 30 reviews
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November 17, 2025Basically an almanac of the second half of the 20th century. It rattles off lists of environmental impacts and events, with such sparse analysis that the destabilization of planetary systems and massive changes in how humans live come across less as the product of choices and historical events and more as inevitable. Narrator voice: *They weren't.*
Good facts, though.
Good facts, though.
November 9, 2020
Potrebbe esser un buon libro di testo per le quinte superiori: trasversale a molte materie, principalmente scienze, storia, geografia, fisica, economia, inserisce nelle spiegazioni diversi fatti e argomentazioni.
Certo non è sempre di semplice lettura, ma ne vale la pena.
Consigliato a tutti gli adolescenti di qualsiasi grado scolastico ma principalmente per quelli che sono interessati a capire il mondo in cui vivono e non solo a subirlo.
4 stelle.
Certo non è sempre di semplice lettura, ma ne vale la pena.
Consigliato a tutti gli adolescenti di qualsiasi grado scolastico ma principalmente per quelli che sono interessati a capire il mondo in cui vivono e non solo a subirlo.
4 stelle.
January 27, 2021
Broad in scope and deep in scholarship, The Great Acceleration turns to environmental history to make the convincing case that the Anthropocene began in the 1950s. Read the full review (#300!) at https://inquisitivebiologist.com/2021...
January 20, 2024
Briefly felt more optimistic about climate future after reading this book. But then I thought to myself, this guy is not a scientist, so why should I trust what he says??
January 23, 2021
Finito in due giorni. Interessante percorso di inquinamento e impatto dell'uomo, in particolare dopo l'enorme sviluppo avvenuto nel 1945.
Una lettura illuminante per tutti quanti
Una lettura illuminante per tutti quanti
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January 23, 2022I had some interesting readings and discussions on the so-called ‘Anthropocene’ in an STS class last semester that helped frame things for me, past the unceasing coinage that sometimes occurs in STS (e.g. plantationocene, Chthulucene, and so on). There was an article by Gabrielle Hecht that pointed out that ‘humans’ each year now are moving more sediment and rock than all other natural processes combined, which, like the use of nuclear weapons, would leave a mark legible to some imagined future geologist. Hecht, however, asked: who is actually moving the rock? And the answer, in my mind, is actually not that clear. Is it the people who built the mining machines, fossil fuel workers who effectively power the machines, the workers who sit in those machines, the managers who direct people around, the executives of mining companies, the financial institutions who fund these companies, the pensioners who give their savings to finance corporations? It is an assemblage of things that in my view, points to a system more than it does a species. Yet Hecht does not believe the term Capitolocene has legs (a term that I tend to lean on, and another student actually brought up in my class last week, referring to Raj Patel). Despite Hecht recognizing how responsibility and vulnerability are not evenly distributed when it comes to both the causes and effects of this massive planetary change, she ends up defending the concept of the ‘Anthropocene’ for a couple reasons. One, is that ‘communism’ (and she includes the scare quotes), meaning really-existing socialism I suppose, also produced toxins on a similar scale to capitalism (which is a continually resurfacing emphasis in the environmental history readings that have been selected in my class for some reason, maybe it’s a disciplinary thing). Secondly, and more importantly, Hecht sticks to the ‘Anthropocene’ out of pragmatism, noting that the Capitalocene would never be as widely adopted, and showing her real anxiety being in its rejection by geologists or climate scientists, whereas the Anthropocene being a term uniting the natural, social, and human sciences.
We also read an article (The Twelve-Year Warning) by Candis Callison, a Tahltan journalist and scholar, who enumerates a number of Indigenous critiques of this concept of the ‘Anthropocene’ (Heather Davis, Zoe Todd, and Kyle Powys Whyte) who would dissent against such a term, partly because it maintains science alone as holding primacy in understanding the other-than-human world. The notion of the Anthropocene, like the notion of the twelve-year window, leaves scientists as the ones who can authoritatively define relations between humans and the environment. By the way, Davis and Todd had an exhibit at the UofT Mississauga Blackwood gallery on this very issue.
Anyway, I won’t comment to much on this book by McNeill. I’m actually not rating it as I do with many books I feel largely ambiguous about. While Andreas Malm in Jacobin has pointed to McNeill as perpetuating a type of Anthropocene narrative that blames all humans (“If everyone is to blame, then no one is.”), McNeill is also a looming figure in environmental history and is widely cited in Marxist/eco-socialist publications like Monthly Review.
I thought this book was a very helpful overview of key themes within the discipline, and while McNeill’s emphasis on population was unsettling, he does qualify it throughout the book, showing various cases where large-scale environmental damage was not related to increased population growth, or the far larger role Western countries (more specifically affluent populations within those countries) have had in various facets of environmental change. The emphasis on per-capita and consumption-based statistics (or better yet class-based statistics) could have been greater though. This was interesting excerpt on the shift that occurred in China regarding population control:
“Soviet orthodoxy after World War II defined population control, for example, as a reactionary concept. All such proposals were said to stem from Thomas Robert Malthus, a Briton who had explained poverty in demographic terms and had thus committed the sin of failing to blame capitalist exploitation. Mao Zedong refused to be concerned about China’s rapidly growing population in part because he accepted Soviet orthodoxy on the matter. In the mid-1950s China’s leading demographer, Peking University president Ma Yinchu, had warned of catastrophe if the country did not bring growth under control. Mao, sensing the hand of a dead Englishman, branded Ma a rightist, thereby silencing him and ending all talk of population control until the early 1970s. By that time, alarm about overcrowding over- whelmed socialist orthodoxy, and the state resorted to increasingly strict family planning measures, culminating in the desperate one child per family policy in 1978 (discussed above).”
There were quite a few other interesting comments McNeill includes on early Soviet efforts at conservation that were largely abandoned as it attempted to compete with capitalist productivity:
“Although nature conservation had prospered in the Soviet Union’s first decade, by the time of Stalin’s first five-year plan (1929–1934) state policy had begun to shift dramatically toward using all available resources for productive purposes. Mining and logging operations began to encroach on the nation’s extensive system of protected areas (zapovedniki), the collectivization of agriculture began in earnest, and the country’s best conservationists were purged.”
This reminds me of something Demuth wrote in Floating Coast on the way five-year plans in Soviet Beringia structured production quotas in a way that would attempt to demonstrate the superiority of a planned economy in terms of productivity. McNeill also speaks to how socialist states saw pollution as a capitalist problem, and not a socialist one, which is interesting because there are some socialists who still see things this way, though most in my view see things very differently now:
“Socialist regimes took the correction of nature’s mistakes as a duty and put environmental protection near the bottom on their list of priorities. Ideology had much to do with it. Socialist orthodoxy simply defined environmental degradation as a capitalist problem. Pollution occurred under capitalism because profit-maximizing firms foisted their pollution on society as a way to save costs. Soviet theorists maintained that pollution could not exist under socialism.”
I’ve been pulling out a lot of excerpts from McNeill’s chapter on the Cold War because that’s a period I’m very fascinated by. There was one excerpt that I found particularly difficult to read yet very important. It was about how the British pioneered a particular form of chemical warfare on communists in Malaya (where my family is from) that the Americans would extend into other parts of Southeast Asia:
“…using the terrain and especially the vegetation to their advantage. To counter these tactics, the Americans turned to defoliants, various chemical agents that killed trees, bushes, and grasses. The most notorious of these—Agent Orange—contains dioxin, a particularly nasty and persistent chemical compound. This form of chemical warfare had been pioneered on a small scale in the British campaign against communist rebels in the 1950s in Malaya. The Americans used it far more widely.”
As an aside, this was during the same post-WW2 Malayan Emergency that British soldiers (supposed allies just a few years prior) now beheaded alleged Malayan communists and photographed themselves with these heads. Photographs of desecrated bodies were then printed on leaflets and dropped out of airplanes as a warning to their colonial subjects to stay in line.
Anyway, there were also lots of fascinating mentions of environmentalists from the tricontinent (Africa, Asia, Latin America) that I’d like to read up on more such as Ken Saro-Wiwa who took on the oil giant Shell in Nigeria, and an organization in China called Friends of Nature started by architectural historians Liang Congjie and Lin Huiyin. I’m especially fascinated by Lin Huiyin who participated in the May Fourth Movement. Anyway, I don’t know enough about environmental history to comment on this book. It was very accessible and sweeping, but not the sort of book I would pick up for myself to read. McNeill is definitely canonical though so glad I was forced to read this for class.
We also read an article (The Twelve-Year Warning) by Candis Callison, a Tahltan journalist and scholar, who enumerates a number of Indigenous critiques of this concept of the ‘Anthropocene’ (Heather Davis, Zoe Todd, and Kyle Powys Whyte) who would dissent against such a term, partly because it maintains science alone as holding primacy in understanding the other-than-human world. The notion of the Anthropocene, like the notion of the twelve-year window, leaves scientists as the ones who can authoritatively define relations between humans and the environment. By the way, Davis and Todd had an exhibit at the UofT Mississauga Blackwood gallery on this very issue.
Anyway, I won’t comment to much on this book by McNeill. I’m actually not rating it as I do with many books I feel largely ambiguous about. While Andreas Malm in Jacobin has pointed to McNeill as perpetuating a type of Anthropocene narrative that blames all humans (“If everyone is to blame, then no one is.”), McNeill is also a looming figure in environmental history and is widely cited in Marxist/eco-socialist publications like Monthly Review.
I thought this book was a very helpful overview of key themes within the discipline, and while McNeill’s emphasis on population was unsettling, he does qualify it throughout the book, showing various cases where large-scale environmental damage was not related to increased population growth, or the far larger role Western countries (more specifically affluent populations within those countries) have had in various facets of environmental change. The emphasis on per-capita and consumption-based statistics (or better yet class-based statistics) could have been greater though. This was interesting excerpt on the shift that occurred in China regarding population control:
“Soviet orthodoxy after World War II defined population control, for example, as a reactionary concept. All such proposals were said to stem from Thomas Robert Malthus, a Briton who had explained poverty in demographic terms and had thus committed the sin of failing to blame capitalist exploitation. Mao Zedong refused to be concerned about China’s rapidly growing population in part because he accepted Soviet orthodoxy on the matter. In the mid-1950s China’s leading demographer, Peking University president Ma Yinchu, had warned of catastrophe if the country did not bring growth under control. Mao, sensing the hand of a dead Englishman, branded Ma a rightist, thereby silencing him and ending all talk of population control until the early 1970s. By that time, alarm about overcrowding over- whelmed socialist orthodoxy, and the state resorted to increasingly strict family planning measures, culminating in the desperate one child per family policy in 1978 (discussed above).”
There were quite a few other interesting comments McNeill includes on early Soviet efforts at conservation that were largely abandoned as it attempted to compete with capitalist productivity:
“Although nature conservation had prospered in the Soviet Union’s first decade, by the time of Stalin’s first five-year plan (1929–1934) state policy had begun to shift dramatically toward using all available resources for productive purposes. Mining and logging operations began to encroach on the nation’s extensive system of protected areas (zapovedniki), the collectivization of agriculture began in earnest, and the country’s best conservationists were purged.”
This reminds me of something Demuth wrote in Floating Coast on the way five-year plans in Soviet Beringia structured production quotas in a way that would attempt to demonstrate the superiority of a planned economy in terms of productivity. McNeill also speaks to how socialist states saw pollution as a capitalist problem, and not a socialist one, which is interesting because there are some socialists who still see things this way, though most in my view see things very differently now:
“Socialist regimes took the correction of nature’s mistakes as a duty and put environmental protection near the bottom on their list of priorities. Ideology had much to do with it. Socialist orthodoxy simply defined environmental degradation as a capitalist problem. Pollution occurred under capitalism because profit-maximizing firms foisted their pollution on society as a way to save costs. Soviet theorists maintained that pollution could not exist under socialism.”
I’ve been pulling out a lot of excerpts from McNeill’s chapter on the Cold War because that’s a period I’m very fascinated by. There was one excerpt that I found particularly difficult to read yet very important. It was about how the British pioneered a particular form of chemical warfare on communists in Malaya (where my family is from) that the Americans would extend into other parts of Southeast Asia:
“…using the terrain and especially the vegetation to their advantage. To counter these tactics, the Americans turned to defoliants, various chemical agents that killed trees, bushes, and grasses. The most notorious of these—Agent Orange—contains dioxin, a particularly nasty and persistent chemical compound. This form of chemical warfare had been pioneered on a small scale in the British campaign against communist rebels in the 1950s in Malaya. The Americans used it far more widely.”
As an aside, this was during the same post-WW2 Malayan Emergency that British soldiers (supposed allies just a few years prior) now beheaded alleged Malayan communists and photographed themselves with these heads. Photographs of desecrated bodies were then printed on leaflets and dropped out of airplanes as a warning to their colonial subjects to stay in line.
Anyway, there were also lots of fascinating mentions of environmentalists from the tricontinent (Africa, Asia, Latin America) that I’d like to read up on more such as Ken Saro-Wiwa who took on the oil giant Shell in Nigeria, and an organization in China called Friends of Nature started by architectural historians Liang Congjie and Lin Huiyin. I’m especially fascinated by Lin Huiyin who participated in the May Fourth Movement. Anyway, I don’t know enough about environmental history to comment on this book. It was very accessible and sweeping, but not the sort of book I would pick up for myself to read. McNeill is definitely canonical though so glad I was forced to read this for class.
April 10, 2025
Un libro che ripercorre e sottolinea come dopo la rivoluzione industriale l'impatto antropico sul pianeta sia esploso.
Personalmente ritengo questo testo adatto ad un neofita in materia o utile per ragazzi.
Ad eccezione di alcuni passaggi più interessanti, si limita ad una snocciolatura di concetti arcinoti e abbastanza ormai scontati. Non mi sento di consigliarlo a chi voglia approfondire il tema del titolo.
Personalmente ritengo questo testo adatto ad un neofita in materia o utile per ragazzi.
Ad eccezione di alcuni passaggi più interessanti, si limita ad una snocciolatura di concetti arcinoti e abbastanza ormai scontati. Non mi sento di consigliarlo a chi voglia approfondire il tema del titolo.
May 31, 2020
Very interesting introduction to the history of environmental economics. A wide variety of examples from all over the world accompanied by pedagogical explanations.
April 29, 2019
You know, I already had barely any hope for humanity before this book. What is less than zero hope? I have negative amount of hope and a great deal of anxiety at this point. Thanks, McNeill
October 26, 2022
La grande accelerazione
Mac Neill- Engelke
I due storici ci consegnano un libro intenso e ‘obbligatorio’.
L’antropocene è il periodo che stiamo vivendo ovvero una fase in cui l’uomo è stato attore di una catastrofe ambientale che come recita il sottotitolo ha avuto una accelerazione fantastica dal 1945.
Parafrasando il gioco del calcio un incredibile autogoal dove la vittima di questo ‘omicidio’ non è solo un astratto ‘ambiente’ composto da una varietà di animali - molti dei quali sono stati già sterminati- piante - con un disboscamento che ha reso fragilissimi gli equilibri metereologici e incrementando il
Livello di CO2 nella atmosfera, Sciogliendo ghiacciai millenari delle montagne e i due poli. non solo quindi l‘intero pianeta soccombe ma la vita dello stesso genere umano che se non si faranno repentine scelte di rientro - al momento poco più che utopie in molte zone del mondo - è appesa a un filo.
Consiglio la lettura a chiunque voglia approfondire senza pregiudizio la materia e avesse voglia di studiare dati, numeri e fatti storici per contestualizzare il nostro tempo.
Mac Neill- Engelke
I due storici ci consegnano un libro intenso e ‘obbligatorio’.
L’antropocene è il periodo che stiamo vivendo ovvero una fase in cui l’uomo è stato attore di una catastrofe ambientale che come recita il sottotitolo ha avuto una accelerazione fantastica dal 1945.
Parafrasando il gioco del calcio un incredibile autogoal dove la vittima di questo ‘omicidio’ non è solo un astratto ‘ambiente’ composto da una varietà di animali - molti dei quali sono stati già sterminati- piante - con un disboscamento che ha reso fragilissimi gli equilibri metereologici e incrementando il
Livello di CO2 nella atmosfera, Sciogliendo ghiacciai millenari delle montagne e i due poli. non solo quindi l‘intero pianeta soccombe ma la vita dello stesso genere umano che se non si faranno repentine scelte di rientro - al momento poco più che utopie in molte zone del mondo - è appesa a un filo.
Consiglio la lettura a chiunque voglia approfondire senza pregiudizio la materia e avesse voglia di studiare dati, numeri e fatti storici per contestualizzare il nostro tempo.
March 23, 2020
If a solid primer on the various elements and drivers of climate change and environmental history is what you need - and you'd like it in around 200 pages, with not too many academic roundabouts - this is a good place to start. By assuming little in their reader's knowledge about environmental history, but much in their understanding of history and politics, The Great Acceleration makes a good public pitch for the story overall. There isn't too much in detail, save for a chapter about the Cold War, which left me flipping pages without engaging in the content. So: ups and downs and decent all around.
October 11, 2025
Not what I expected to be; the authors collate and describe a series of circumstances that have contributed to accelerate the human impact on the planet; not that I disagree with any of the facts described, but the authors to emphasize their thesis are only highlighting the negative effects of humans (the thesis that humans will destroy the planet is a bit ridiculous; Earth and nature are more resilient; a bit less hubris from both side would not be a bad thing), without going too deep into the positive effects. Humans (individuals, generally of one specific gender…) can do horrible things, but also quite the opposite. A more balanced discussion about the Anthropocene should include both
April 9, 2021
Mi aspettavo di meglio. Il libro tratta sicuramnete delle tematiche interessanti, ma credevo venissero ampliate maggiormente con più tecnicismi le dinamiche energetiche. Invece è poco più di una cronistoria energetico politica degli ultimi 70 anni.
August 20, 2021
If you should read any book on modern history, it should be this one. Brilliant, and extremely important. We have to understand how unique this situation in time is in order to feel the urgency of starting to build a better world right now.
May 30, 2022
A concisely, accessibly written introduction to the environmental impacts of the global events in the past century. It added an environmental glaze to the Cold War and Global economy histories i learnt in junior college
June 10, 2025
Important book but not an easy read, if you feel positively about humans and our role on the planet maybe not a read for you! That being said, as an academic book, I think the book covers some key historical moments of our history that will help us move forward in our attempt at sustainable living.
June 29, 2025
A bit too complimentary / giving benefit of the doubt to a lot of military action that devastated the environment in the last chapter. Felt lazy to avoid more research into deeper reasons but I understand that’s not what it was about. Very good tho
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October 9, 2020Till kursen jag tar just nu.
March 20, 2023
Good overview, makes case for Anthropocene
April 3, 2023
Libro interessante per alcuni aspetti, ma che in generale approfondisce poco
November 26, 2023
3.5 stars!
November 23, 2024
A really great review of environmental history, in a way that covers numerous facets of environmentalism and energy use. Dense and a bit dull though, but for a heavily academic work, who’s shocked
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March 11, 2025Could have been stronger if they had given more for the parallels between the rise in empire and their climate data post ww2. The way it is makes it seem as if this was all inevitable.
October 2, 2025
Het boek heeft een zwakke argumentatie en daarnaast is het geschreven door een Amerikaan dus dat houdt in dat het veel gaat over hoe geweldig Amerika is.
January 5, 2026
Not bad, learned a lot about environmental political history, the great acceleration.
December 14, 2025
Il testo di McNeill ed Engelke è eccezionale. Sicuramente uno dei migliori per una panoramica introduttiva e allo stesso tempo esaustiva dei processi umani che hanno coinvolto e sconvolto l'ambiente dalla fine della seconda guerra mondiale ad oggi, ponendo le basi per il cambiamento climatico.
I due autori sostengono la tesi dell'appropriatezza dell'espressione "antropocene" per caratterizzare l'epoca contemporanea, dal momento che abbiamo ormai innumerevoli prove del fatto che le attività umane abbiano e stiano influenzando in maniera determinante i cicli naturali della Terra, in particolare la concentrazione di anidride carbonica, responsabile del riscaldamento globale e di conseguenza di tutto ciò che segue a quest'ultimo.
Il titolo del libro, "la grande accelerazione", è un'espressione icastica per sintetizzare i decenni dopo il 1945, che hanno visto un'esplosione demografica, tecnologica ed energetica, che ha avuto importanti e diversificate ricadute sugli ambienti terrestri.
Il testo analizza varie tematiche, dal rapporto energia popolazione, a quello tra clima e biodiversità, fino allo sviluppo delle città e l'impatto della guerra fredda. L'andamento è per argomenti, ma seguendo un ordine cronologico.
Il grande pregio dell'opera è quello di riuscire a mantenere una visione a volo d'aquila, che riesca a rendere conto di innumerevoli processi, per poi effettuare affondi su argomenti specifici ed emblematici. Per ogni problematica affrontata viene anche trattato un esempio, con tanto di date, a volte immagini, e descrizione del contesto. Vastissimo e molto utile l'apparato di note, che fornisce spunti per eventuali approfondimenti.
Libro alla portata di chiunque e consigliato a chi è interessato a capire meglio i problemi della nostra contemporaneità. Eccezionale.
I due autori sostengono la tesi dell'appropriatezza dell'espressione "antropocene" per caratterizzare l'epoca contemporanea, dal momento che abbiamo ormai innumerevoli prove del fatto che le attività umane abbiano e stiano influenzando in maniera determinante i cicli naturali della Terra, in particolare la concentrazione di anidride carbonica, responsabile del riscaldamento globale e di conseguenza di tutto ciò che segue a quest'ultimo.
Il titolo del libro, "la grande accelerazione", è un'espressione icastica per sintetizzare i decenni dopo il 1945, che hanno visto un'esplosione demografica, tecnologica ed energetica, che ha avuto importanti e diversificate ricadute sugli ambienti terrestri.
Il testo analizza varie tematiche, dal rapporto energia popolazione, a quello tra clima e biodiversità, fino allo sviluppo delle città e l'impatto della guerra fredda. L'andamento è per argomenti, ma seguendo un ordine cronologico.
Il grande pregio dell'opera è quello di riuscire a mantenere una visione a volo d'aquila, che riesca a rendere conto di innumerevoli processi, per poi effettuare affondi su argomenti specifici ed emblematici. Per ogni problematica affrontata viene anche trattato un esempio, con tanto di date, a volte immagini, e descrizione del contesto. Vastissimo e molto utile l'apparato di note, che fornisce spunti per eventuali approfondimenti.
Libro alla portata di chiunque e consigliato a chi è interessato a capire meglio i problemi della nostra contemporaneità. Eccezionale.
September 13, 2023
Excellent - a comprehensive depiction of the unique period that started in 1945
Re-read/Sep 2023 Fascinating, seminal text by J.R. McNeil and @PeterEngelke1 on the post-1945 era that was so dramatically unlike all that came before, and which ended the Holocene and ushered in the earth-altering Anthropocene. Read to realize what has happened, where we are. #GreatAcceleration
Re-read/Sep 2023 Fascinating, seminal text by J.R. McNeil and @PeterEngelke1 on the post-1945 era that was so dramatically unlike all that came before, and which ended the Holocene and ushered in the earth-altering Anthropocene. Read to realize what has happened, where we are. #GreatAcceleration
December 31, 2016
Fair enough overview of human environmental impact, nice for reference to the wealth of data and trivia, but really not much more than that. Concludes with some criticism on social sciences, but this book fails exactly on that same point.
August 12, 2016
How much environmental history correlates with my/our generation's lifetime! A great overview of environmental history since 1945. And relevant for future policy and lifestyle decisions.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 30 reviews