Realizing that solar had become essential to oil production, petroleum firms set up their own photovoltaic subsidiaries. Exxon became, in 1973, the first commercial manufacturer of solar panels; the s...
Prophets sneer that the Wizards’ faith in human resourcefulness is unthinking, scientifically ignorant, even driven by greed (because remaining within ecological limits will cut into corporate profits...
Our visit to Calakmul did nothing to suggest that Folan’s advice was wrong. Trees enveloped the great buildings, their roots slowly ripping apart the soft limestone walls. Peter photographed a monumen...
Most of the salt occurred in the sediments on the swamp bottoms. To make the water potable, the Maya laid a layer of crushed limestone atop the sediments, effectively paving over the salt. As the rese...
Menaced by environmental problems, torn by struggles between the tiny coterie of wealthy Spaniards at the center and a teeming, fractious polyglot periphery, battered by a corrupt and inept civic and...
Measurement began in February 1958. Within two years his instruments showed that the world’s store of airborne carbon dioxide had increased in that period from about 313 parts per million to about 315...
Many if not most tlamatinime saw existence as Nabokov feared: a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.
Logically speaking, the desolation in Children of Men is peculiar. As Scheffler points out, all people have known from childhood that they will die. As individuals, we have no long-term future. Person...
In the Amazon, the turn to swidden was unfortunate. Slash-and-burn cultivation has become one of the driving forces behind the loss of tropical forest. Although swidden does permit the forest to regro...
In 1966 Israel invited a California scientist, Sidney Loeb, to spend a year at Ben-Gurion University in Beer-Sheva (the new Hebrew name for Beersheba). Loeb had worked for industry after taking an und...
I have omitted the numbers to highlight that the basic argument is as simple as it was in Vogt’s day. Stay within the limits, and people can develop freely. Go beyond the boundaries—exceed carrying ca...
Hubbert laid this out in the Technocracy Study Course: Should the fruit flies continue to multiply at their initial compound interest rate, it can be shown by computation that in a relatively few week...
Historians estimate that in 1800 all of the steam engines in Britain could generate perhaps 50,000 horsepower. By 1870 the figure had soared to more than 1.3 million horsepower, a twenty-six-fold incr...
For a geophysicist, what’s going on is stunning, my friend told me. We used to believe these systems needed thousands of years to make these shifts. Instead it’s happening so fast that it’s terrifying...
Far too often, we have been told that the future will be wracked by crises of energy scarcity, when the problems our children will face will be due to its abundance.
Escaping from fascism, European Jews had poured into Palestine—more than sixty thousand in 1935 alone. Arab residents reacted angrily to the flood of immigrants. The British government was convinced t...
Einstein received the Nobel Prize in 1921 for explaining the photoelectric effect. But Fritts’s invention remained a laboratory curiosity.
Drought indeed stressed the system, but the societal disintegration in the south was due not to surpassing inherent ecological limits but the political failure to find solutions.
Coursing through history like waves of panic, the conviction that civilization was hurtling toward an energy disaster has become embedded in the culture. Time after time, decade after decade, presiden...
By the eve of the American Revolution, a third of the native people in Rhode Island were enslaved. Indian bondage was more common still in the southern colonies.