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...
Two years after winning the divisive 1968 election, President Richard Nixon, a Republican, declared that the environment, the great question of the ’70s, was a cause beyond party and beyond factions....
To a biologist like Margulis, who spent her career arguing that humans are simply part of evolution’s handiwork, the answer should be clear. All life is similar at base, she and others say. All specie...
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 two people were William Vogt and Norman Borlaug. Vogt, born in 1902, laid out the basic ideas for the modern environmental movement. In particular, he founded what the Hampshire College demographe...
The true problem was not that humankind risked surpassing natural limits, but that our species didn’t know how to tap more than a fraction of the energy provided by nature.
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.
Shanghai, with an average altitude of thirteen feet, is among the many Asian cities vulnerable to rising waters.
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...
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.
Look to the Southeast, where, as Taylor has noted, colonial societies sustained a slave system more oppressive than anything practiced in Europe and the slave-owners relied on Indians to catch runaway...
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...
In 1491 the Inka ruled the greatest empire on earth. Bigger than Ming Dynasty China, bigger than Ivan the Great’s expanding Russia, bigger than Songhay in the Sahel or powerful Great Zimbabwe in the W...
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...
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...