J. R. McNeill reflects on his journey into environmental history, starting in 1981 after a failed academic job search. His interest in the field was sparked by Alfred Crosby’s The Columbian Exchange, leading him to combine historical research with ecological data on land use in Latin America. He later researched Mediterranean deforestation and soil erosion, which became the basis for his first book, The Mountains of the Mediterranean World. McNeill also worked on broader environmental history projects, including a general history of the twentieth-century environmental changes, the ecology—especially that of mosquitoes—in the Greater Caribbean during the modern period, and his current work on the global environmental history of the Industrial Revolution.