Another historian, J. R. McNeill in his Something New under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth-Century World (2001), made the bold statement that “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.”