by Kevin Reilly
A Diminished World
In the long run of human history, the past century will perhaps be remembered above all else as the time when humankind began to impinge dramatically on the natural environment of the planet. Human activity had altered the environment since the days of the first hunters and early farmers, sometimes with disastrous results. The collapse of early civilizations in places as far apart as Mesopotamia, the Indus River valley, and Mesoamerica owed something to the pressures of local overpopulation, deforestation, erosion, and other environmental stresses. But in the twentieth century, global modernity, combining unprecedented population growth and even more massive economic growth, encroached on—and diminished—the natural environment far more extensively than had any other form of human culture. According to environmental historian John McNeill, humankind has undertaken in the twentieth century “a gigantic uncontrolled experiment on the earth” and “has begun to play dice with the planet, without knowing all the rules of the game.”11
Defining the Environmental Impact . Indications of this human assault on the natural order are not hard to find. Air pollution, due largely to the burning of fossil fuels, increased enormously in the growing urban areas and industrial complexes of the world. McNeill estimated that air pollution in the twentieth century killed 25 million to 40 million people, largely through various respiratory diseases and cancer, to say nothing of chronic illness for millions more. This is a death toll approaching that of World War II. The buildup of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere began to generate “global warming” and threatened dramatic climate change in the twenty-first century, while the release of chlorofluorocarbons demonstrably thinned the ozone layer, allowing more ultraviolet radiation to reach the earth’s surface, where it has caused in excess of a million additional cases of skin cancer.
Industrialization and urbanization polluted the world’s waters perhaps even more than its air, creating “easily humanity’s most costly pollution problem” and generating deaths in the tens of millions. The sacred Ganges River in India, where millions bathed to cleanse their souls, became heavily polluted as a growing population along its banks deposited their untreated sewage in its waters. The Rhine River in Germany was polluted by industrial rather than human waste to the point that the fish population virtually disappeared in some places. Human use of water grew ninefold in the twentieth century and involved the construction of millions of dams, wells, canals, and pipelines; an enormous increase in irrigated land; and the draining of large wetland areas. Massive Soviet irrigation for cotton production virtually destroyed the Aral Sea, diminishing its size by two-thirds and tripling its salinity by the 1990s. Conflict over water resources occasioned serious international tensions between Egypt and Sudan, between the United States and Mexico, between Israel and neighboring Arab states, and elsewhere. Globalization too has contributed to the problem of pollution. Zebra mussels, small marine bivalves native to the Caspian Sea region, were transported to the North American Great Lakes and rivers by means of water ballast in transoceanic ships. There, they reproduced rapidly, depriving native species of essential nutrients, clogging water intake pipes, and coating tourist beaches with their sharp shells. In 2010, Asian carp that could devour all native fish began to enter into the Great Lakes despite all efforts to block them.
Human impact on the environment has not been all negative, of course. What technological ingenuity polluted it sometimes also remedied, as in the case of the smog cities of London and Pittsburgh and the cleanup of the American Great Lakes and the Rhine River in Europe. Dramatic improvements in public health and medical science enabled at least a partial human victory over certain microbes that had long plagued humankind. Smallpox was eliminated in the 1970s, and major campaigns put a dent in pneumonia, diphtheria, cholera, typhus, tuberculosis, and other disease-causing pathogens. Degenerative diseases, such as cancer and heart disease, replaced infectious diseases as the leading cause of human death in many places.
Some effects have been neutral or varied. At the level of plant life, forests and grasslands substantially contracted, while pasture and croplands doubled in area and deserts expanded. Some animals, useful to humankind, expanded their numbers dramatically—cattle, sheep, goats, pigs, and poultry—with corresponding pressures on the lands they occupied. But human breeding of favored plants and animals often meant the reduction of other species. Many others were driven to the edge of extinction. By 2000, some 24 percent of mammal species were defined as “threatened,” 11 percent of bird species, 4 percent of reptile species, 3 percent of amphibian and fish species, and 10 percent of the higher-plant species.12 If accelerating trends of species extinction continue, some experts predict that 30 to 50 percent of all terrestrial species could vanish within a century or two. Should that occur, it would rank as a “sixth extinction,” similar in magnitude to five others on the planet since life began but, of course, the only one caused by the deliberate activity of a single species, Homo sapiens.
Environmentalism . A growing awareness of the human impact on the planet gave rise to the modern environmental movement, which began in the 1960s.13 That movement began with the publication in 1962 of Silent Spring by the American biologist Rachel Carson, highlighting the chemical contamination of the environment. A number of other books followed, many of which were widely read and provided an intellectual foundation for a growing popular movement in the wealthy industrialized countries. Millions of people joined environmental or conservationist groups; the Green Party in Germany attracted substantial public support; petitions, marches, and teach-ins pushed environmental issues onto the political agenda in many countries and often resulted in legislative action to address environmental problems; non-Russian peoples within the Soviet Union cited disastrous environmental policies directed from Moscow as one reason for their desire to exit the Soviet Union; numerous civic and religious groups of ordinary people embraced environmentalism as an overriding moral and practical concern; and many people began to think about their private lifestyle choices in light of environmental perspectives. Thus, modern environmentalism took shape first in the already developed countries where the ecological impact of industrial economies was most apparent and where wealth, leisure time, and nostalgia for a simpler past gave energy to the movement.
But environmentalist movements also emerged in a number of developing countries around issues of forests, dams, pollution, and biodiversity. Often they grew out of grassroots activism by threatened local communities. The Chikpo, or tree-hugging, movement in India was one of many intended to preserve the resources of local communities against the claims of loggers or other large commercial or government enterprises. Brazilian forest dwellers in the Amazon basin likewise took direct action to protect their environment from ranchers seeking to clear the land for pasture. Kenya’s Green Belt Movement, largely a project of village women, planted millions of trees on denuded land in an effort to counter the encroachment of the desert.
Environmentalism has challenged many of the central assumptions of industrial society: that bigger and more is always better, that endless consumption is the route to a satisfying life, that the earth’s resources are limitless, and that humankind stands above and apart from the rest of creation. The central issues have been those of sustainability and restraint. Does the “modern way of life”—reflected in the most developed industrial regions of Europe, Japan, and the United States—represent a viable future for the rest of the world’s people or even for the minority who currently enjoy its benefits? Can a capitalist system of private profit protect the most public of spaces—the planet?
Since some environmental problems so clearly transcend national boundaries, environmentalism has also challenged the autonomy of sovereign nation-states. Attempts to work out broad international agreements on environmental questions have inevitably come up against sharp differences between the rich and poor nations. Developing countries have sometimes felt that environmental protection measures advocated by the industrialized natio
ns would limit their own prospects for growth while locking in the current advantages of the rich countries, which have been responsible for most of the world’s environmental problems. Some people in developing countries resent the West’s emphasis on population control in poor countries, when each new child born in North America or Europe both consumes far more of the earth’s resources and contributes much more to its pollution than a child born in Asia or Africa. They have also felt that the cost of expensive environmental protection measures should be borne disproportionately by the rich countries. The Montreal Protocol of 1987, designed to halt the depletion of the ozone layer and ratified by 184 countries, was successful in part because the richer states agreed to establish a fund of $240 million to assist developing countries to make the transition away from harmful chlorofluorocarbons. In negotiations surrounding the global warming treaty, a central issue has been which countries should limit their production of greenhouse gases and by how much. In early 2001, the United States backed out of preliminary agreements in part on the grounds that the developing countries had been largely excluded from the requirement to cut their carbon dioxide emissions. The environmental movement has thus confronted global industrialization with profound questions about both sustainability and social justice.
Political Globalization
Alongside economic globalization, two important political trends have shaped the world’s many societies in the twentieth century—nationalism and democracy. Both of them, like industrialization, had their origins in the West but have been appropriated all across the world and have lost much of their earlier association with European culture.
The National Idea:
Triumphant and Challenged?
The idea of the nation—the belief that some group of people share a unique and common culture, history, and territory and deserve to govern themselves independently—has become so common as to appear wholly natural and deeply rooted in human experience. Yet at the beginning of the twentieth century, much of the world’s population still lived in empires, governed by foreigners. For many people, it was not the “foreignness” of their rulers that was so objectionable but their oppressive policies. Political loyalties were still primarily local, rooted in the village or clan, and where larger loyalties came into play, they were mostly religious, such as the identification with the Islamic world as a whole. Mass identification with an abstraction called the “nation” was limited largely to the West, and even there it was little more than a century old. But during the twentieth century, nationalism became a primary political loyalty in much of the rest of the world, and the sovereign nationstate became the universal political unit into which human communities were organized.
Anticolonial Nationalism . The first stage in this triumph of the nation lay in the dissolution of those empires, which had for centuries governed much of humankind. This process, described in Chapter 11, brought to an end the powerful Austrian, Ottoman, and Russian empires after World War I; the German and Japanese empires during World War II; the Afro-Asian empires of the western European powers after the war; and the Soviet empire in the early 1990s. Here lies one of the great ironies of modern world history. While the competitive nationalisms of European states had given energy to Western empire building in the nineteenth century, the ideology of nationalism also undermined those empires by providing the leaders of anticolonial movements a set of Western-derived ideas with which to protest their domination by foreigners. Nationalism, it turned out, was a double-edged sword, both building and destroying empires.
Nationalism and Communism . Twentieth-century nationalism revealed its power not only in the end of old empires but also in confounding some of the fondest hopes of the communist movement. Blaming war and national rivalries on capitalist competition, Karl Marx and other socialist thinkers assumed that socialism would diminish narrow and antagonistic nationalisms and that revolution would lead to an international socialist commonwealth. Class solidarity among workers of every country would triumph over national loyalties, for “workers have no fatherland.” Within the newly formed Soviet Union, the leadership fully expected that diverse national loyalties such as Ukrainian, Georgian, and even Russian would merge into a new soviet and socialist identity. But no such thing occurred. Soviet policies in fact inadvertently promoted national or ethnic consciousness by encouraging the use of native languages in schools and newspapers, by creating ethnically based “republics” within the Soviet Union, and by fostering Russian migration into non-Russian areas, where the newcomers were widely resented. Under Stalin’s leadership, the Soviet Union drew increasingly on its Russian past. Amid the flames of World War II, it was the call to defend mother Russia rather than the revolution and socialism that produced such heroic resistance. But defining the Soviet Union as a Russian project provoked a defensive nationalism among various non-Russian peoples, and when Gorbachev’s reforms allowed this to be expressed, the Soviet Union dissolved.
Elsewhere in the communist world, nationalism also found expression. In the eastern European communist countries, many people deeply resented Russian or Soviet domination, and in Hungary (1956), Czechoslovakia (1968), and Poland (1981), massive expressions of discontent led to direct Soviet intervention or the clear threat of it. Even more startling, the two communist giants, the Soviet Union and China, had become seriously estranged by the 1960s as territorial disputes, ideological differences, and rivalry for world communist leadership drove them almost to the point of war. China and Vietnam, both communist countries, did in fact go to war briefly in 1979. National loyalties clearly trumped communist loyalties in the twentieth century.
The Failure of Alternatives . Other political alternatives to territorial nationalism also failed. Efforts to bring Egypt and Syria together in a United Arab Republic lasted only several years (1958-1961). Similar attempts to join various African countries in larger federations likewise were unable to overcome the entrenched interests of separate nation-states. The territorially divided nation of Pakistan, founded in 1947 expressly as a Muslim state, broke apart 25 years later when East Pakistan became Bangladesh. The independent nation-state thus seemed to triumph over empire, communist internationalism, and larger cultural or religious identities alike. Strangely enough, it was in Europe, tempered by the horrific excesses of nationalism in the early twentieth century, that efforts toward economic and political integration gained the most ground with the formation of the European Union, a European parliament, and a European currency.
Challenges to the National Idea: Globalization . But the triumph of the nation was far from complete, for during the twentieth century, nation-states were also undermined, eroded, and challenged. One such challenge derived from the multiple processes of economic globalization. Developing countries, many of them small and poor, found their national sovereignty challenged by the global economy in which they had to operate. They were often in a weak bargaining position when negotiating with transnational firms with resources greater than that of entire countries. Furthermore, fluctuating world market prices and rapidly changing terms of trade dramatically affected the fortunes of these countries, many of which relied on only a few exports. President Julius Nyerere of Tanzania estimated that his country had to export 38 tons of sisal (a fiber used for making rope) to buy a seven-ton truck in 1972, but in 1982 the same truck required the sale of 134 tons of sisal, as the price of that fiber dropped precipitously in relation to the price of trucks. By the 1980s and 1990s, many developing countries, heavily in debt, were compelled to accept strict monitoring of their economic policies by the World Bank or the IMF in order to qualify for further desperately needed loans. They had to abandon tariff protection for their industries, remove restrictions on foreign investment, focus heavily on exports, cut government spending on social services, and privatize state enterprises.14 For many, the grand dreams of national independence, nurtured during the struggle against colonial rule, were punctured by an increasing dependence on international market forces over which they
had little control. Political pressures and periodic interventions by the great powers further limited the national sovereignty of developing countries.
Even industrialized countries found their national life increasingly penetrated by the global economy. When oil-producing countries sharply raised the price of that essential commodity in the 1970s, a postwar economic boom sputtered into a global recession and Americans waited in long lines for gasoline. By the 1990s, many Americans felt that the global economy hurt U.S. workers, small businesses, and local communities as competition from low-wage countries in Latin America and Asia pulled jobs abroad. Mounting protests against the regulations of the WTO included the argument that American national sovereignty was endangered by a too-willing acceptance of economic globalization.
Challenges to the National Idea: Ethnic Separatism . If globalization posed a challenge to the nation from outside, separatism in the form of movements seeking greater autonomy or independence for particular regions or peoples did so from the inside. Separatism resulted in the dismemberment of a number of nation-states in the second half of the twentieth century: India, Pakistan, Ethiopia, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, and, of course, the Soviet Union, which dissolved into 15 separate states in 1991. It also contributed to civil wars or the collapse of central governments in many others: Nigeria, Iraq, Lebanon, Indonesia, Philippines, Sudan, Angola, Somalia, Rwanda, Sri Lanka, Burma, Mozambique, and Congo. Elsewhere, separatist or culturally based movements have troubled the political life of China, India, Great Britain, Spain, Canada, and the United States.
