Georgetown College. Georgetown University.

Dr. John McNeill is currently editing two books. (Photo: Roland Dimaya)

By LiAnna Davis

Like most scholars, environmental history professor Dr. John McNeill not only writes his own books, he also edits and contributes chapters to books that arise out of conferences on interdisciplinary topics. In addition to the three books Dr. McNeill is currently writing, he is also editing two more.

In the first edited book, Dr. McNeill is working with proceedings from a conference he organized that explored aspects of the environmental history of the Cold War. In addition to editing the volume, he is putting together a short history that sketches the obvious and not so obvious environmental ramifications of the Cold War.

For example, Dr. McNeill says that the Cold War motivated the green revolution in agriculture—practices like scientific crop breeding and the use of pesticides, mechanization, nitrogenous fertilizers, and irrigation. Fear of social unrest, especially in post-World War II Asia, caused the U.S. government to invest in science that would attempt to head off the poverty and hunger at the root of global problems. More obvious examples include environmental degradation around military bases in Eastern Europe and the impacts of nuclear weapon development.

“There’s also a connection between the environmental movement and the Cold War,” Dr. McNeill adds. “In the Soviet Union, almost the only permissible form of dissent was environmentalism, so many people channeled their dissatisfaction with the state into the environmental movement.”

For Dr. McNeill’s other edited book project, he is partnering with Mahesh Rangarajan, a colleague from India, and Jose Agusto Padua, a colleague from Brazil. The trio are editing proceedings from the International Society for Ecological Economics Conference in India, and Dr. McNeill’s part is to bridge the discourses of ecological economics and environmental history.

“Ecological economics is often called ‘economics as if nature existed,’” Dr. McNeill says. “It’s a heretical sect within the profession of economics that understands human economic actions to be part of the workings of ecosystems, rather than seeing ecosystems as a storehouse of resources for use in the economy, as traditional economics does. Environmental history, too, is an effort to take nature seriously. Both disciplines situate their subject within the ecological context.”

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