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...
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...
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...
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.
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 Wizard and the Prophet is a book about the way knowledgeable people might think about the choices to come, rather than what will happen in this or that scenario. It is a book about the future that...
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...
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...
Modi shifted gears, refashioning himself as a nattily dressed, tech-friendly progressive who lured major companies, foreign and Indian alike, to invest in Gujarat.
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...
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.
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...
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...
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.