Brand cites the example of France, which constructed fifty-six reactors providing nearly all of the nation’s electricity in just twelve years. Nuclear power provides about 77 percent of French electri...
And this is one of the great difficulties in thinking about climate change: what seems terrifyingly fast on the geological scale is unfathomably long on the human scale. By truly bad effects DeConto m...
About 40 percent of the fertilizer applied in the last sixty years wasn’t assimilated by plants; instead, it washed away into rivers or seeped into the air in the form of nitrous oxide.
Because of their obsession with gold, the conquistadors are often dismissed as gold crazy. In fact they were not so much gold crazy as status crazy. Like Hernán Cortés, who conquered Mexico, Pizarro w...
What this suggests is that, contrary to economists, the discount rate accounts for only part of our relationship to the future. People are concerned about future generations. Even if the logic is hard...
Weaver never published his ideas. His memorandum lay unnoticed in the archives of the foundation, now stored underground on one of the Rockefeller estates. And his dream of reworking photosynthesis wo...
Vogt was unable to test this hypothesis until late in 1940, when he persuaded the guano company to measure plankton abundance by dragging the sea at multiple locations with a fine silk net. He examine...
Vogt and Borlaug have the same mission: to use the discoveries of modern science to spare Mexico from a future of poverty and environmental degradation. But prospects are unlikely, in Mexico in 1946,...
There are two ideas at the base of today’s globe-spanning environmental movement. One is that Homo sapiens, like every other species, is bound by biological laws. The second is that one of these laws...
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.
Prophets smite their brows in exasperation at this logic. To their minds, evaluating farming systems wholly in terms of calories produced—in terms of usable energy—is a perfect example of the flaws of...
Much the same is occurring in India. Already the world’s fastest-growing economy, India will become the world’s most populous nation (probably by 2022) and its biggest economy (possibly by 2048). It,...
Modi shifted gears, refashioning himself as a nattily dressed, tech-friendly progressive who lured major companies, foreign and Indian alike, to invest in Gujarat.
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...
In the classic successional course, each suite of plants replaces its predecessor, until the arrival of the final, climax ecosystem, usually tall forest.
In all of history, humankind has been able to domesticate only twenty-five mammals, a dozen or so birds, and, possibly, a lizard.
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...
How could the colonists starve in the midst of plenty? One reason was that the English feared leaving Jamestown to fish, because Powhatan’s fighters were waiting outside the colony walls. A second rea...
Dobyns argued that the Indian population in 1491 was between 90 and 112 million people. Another way of saying this is that when Columbus sailed more people lived in the Americas than in Europe.