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.
Cahokia was one big piece in the mosaic of chiefdoms that covered the lower half of the Mississippi and the Southeast at the end of the first millennium A.D. Known collectively as Mississippian cultur...
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...
Mounting a sustained war. Unhappily, these intriguing speculations
Prophets see the mile-long stands of photovoltaic cells in projects like Charanka as inherently destructive to communities, natural and human.
Only in 1905 was the panels’ puzzling behavior explained—by Albert Einstein, a newly minted Ph.D. with a day job in the Swiss patent office. In what may have been the greatest intellectual sprint for...
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,...
Much of this world vanished after Columbus, swept away by disease and subjugation. So thorough was the erasure that within a few generations neither conqueror nor conquered knew that this world had ex...
Lacking a real theory of petroleum formation, early petroleum geologists had assumed that oil and gas deposits must be located in zones similar to those where oil and gas had been found before. They l...
Coastal flooding could wipe out up to 9.3 percent of the world’s annual output by 2100 (a Swedish-French-British team in 2015). It could create losses of up to $2.9 trillion in that year (a German-Bri...
Climate scientists encountered Lorenz’s ideas in 1965, when he gave the keynote address at a conference in Colorado called The Causes of Climate Change, the first big scientific gathering devoted to t...
But this second wave of conservationists rarely claimed that one race or culture was intrinsically superior to another. Vogt, again, is an example. No apologist for his own stock, he reserved special...
As any biologist would predict, this success led to an increase in human numbers—slow at first, then rapid, tracing Gause’s S-shaped curve. We began rising up the steepest part of the slope in the six...
American history is often described in terms of Europeans entering a nearly empty wilderness. For centuries, though, most of the newcomers were African and the land was not empty, but filled with mill...
Where does government come from? Haas asked. What makes people decide to surrender some of their personal liberty to it? What did they gain from it? Philosophers have been asking this question for cen...
Valencia’s plan was conversion by proxy: he and the rest of the twelve would open the eyes of the Indian priesthood to the beauties of the true faith, gaining their adherence by reasoned theological d...
Today most historians and economists instead view the oil shock as a product of mistaken government policies.
The conflict between these visions is not between good and evil, but between different ideas of the good life, between ethical orders that give priority to personal liberty and those that give priorit...
That was why archaeologists and anthropologists had come across the ruins of complex societies throughout Mesoamerica and the Andes, but saw only hunter-gatherers and slash-and-burners in Amazonia.
Prophets look at the world as finite, and people as constrained by their environment. Wizards see possibilities as inexhaustible, and humans as wily managers of the planet. One views growth and develo...