Some flows, like sunlight or wind, cannot be affected by human action. No matter how many solar panels I put on my roof to absorb sunlight, they will have no effect on what the sun does tomorrow. But...
Shanghai, with an average altitude of thirteen feet, is among the many Asian cities vulnerable to rising waters.
Hubbert, one of the nation’s most important petroleum scientists, built much of the intellectual framework for the environmental movement. He was a Wizard who became a Prophet.
How could these hierarchical, acquisitive, market-oriented, monotheistic, ethnocentric newcomers have absorbed ideas and customs from the egalitarian, reciprocal, noncapitalistic, pantheistic, ethnoce...
Governor Bradford is said to have attributed the plague to the good hand of God, which favored our beginnings by sweeping away great multitudes of the natives … that he might make room for us.
Farmers have injected so much synthetic fertilizer into their fields that soil and groundwater nitrogen levels have risen worldwide. Today, almost half of all the crops consumed by humankind depend on...
Every society, big or little, misses out on obvious technologies. The lacunae have enormous impact on people’s lives—imagine Europe with efficient plows or the Maya with iron tools—but not much effect...
Both men are dead now, but their disciples have continued the hostilities. Indeed, the dispute between Wizards and Prophets has, if anything, become more vehement. Wizards view the Prophets’ emphasis...
Borlaug thought, the process would be too slow. As a rule of thumb, wheat breeders needed ten to fifteen harvests to select, test, and propagate a new variety. The process couldn’t be hurried; farmers...
At Marajó, Meggers and Evans soon noticed an oddity: the earliest traces of Marajóara culture were the most elaborate. As the centuries advanced, the quality of the ceramics inexorably declined.
According to Peter Stahl, an anthropologist at the State University of New York in Binghamton, lots of researchers believe that what the eco-imagery would like to picture as a pristine, untouched Urwe...
About 3.5 percent of the weight of seawater consists of dissolved salts, most of it table salt. The most common way of removing the salt is known as reverse osmosis.
[T]he Indian deaths were such a severe financial blow to the colonies that...[t]o resupply themselves with labor, the Spaniards began importing slaves from Africa.
Wizard-style renewable advocates like the venture-capital-backed firm that built Crescent Dunes scoff at these ideas. Even in the best of circumstances, the process of replacing the present coal-and-g...
What happened in 1518 and 1519 is not. In those years, according to Bartolomé de Las Casas, a missionary priest who lived through the incident, Spanish orange, pomegranate, and cassia plantations were...
Vogt and Osborn were also the first to bring to a wide public a belief that would become a foundation of environmental thought: consumption driven by capitalism and rising human numbers is the ultimat...
The varieties are not like islands, carefully apart, Perales explained. They are more like gentle hills in a landscape—you see them, they are clearly present, but you cannot specify precisely where th...
The alliance Massasoit negotiated with Plymouth was successful from the Wampanoag perspective, for it helped to hold off the Narragansett. But it was a disaster from the point of view of New England I...
The Haudenosaunee thus would have the second oldest continuously existing representative parliaments on earth. Only Iceland’s Althing, founded in 930 A.D., is older.
Rocketing up the growth curve, humankind every year takes ever more of the earth’s richness. An often quoted estimate by a team of Stanford biologists is that humans grab about 40% of the present net...