Prophets see the mile-long stands of photovoltaic cells in projects like Charanka as inherently destructive to communities, natural and human.
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...
President Theodore Roosevelt in 1908 invited all forty-six U.S. governors to the White House to decry the imminent exhaustion of fossil fuels and other natural resources—the weightiest problem now bef...
One of the French sailors had learned enough Massachusett to inform his captors before dying that God would destroy them for their misdeeds. The Nauset scoffed at the threat. But the Europeans carried...
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...
Monte Albán is today a decorous sprawl of walls and pyramids enveloped by a lush lawn (this last is an import from Europe; lawn grass did not exist in the Americas prior to Columbus).
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...
But Mouchot was learning the limitations of solar power. Sunlight is plentiful and free, but it comes as an intermittent flow, not a reliable stock. Mouchot’s engines were useless at night or on cloud...
As it does today, malaria played a huge role in the past—a role unlike that of other diseases, and arguably larger. When Europeans brought smallpox and influenza to the Americas, they set off epidemic...
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...
About 85 percent of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions come from fossil fuels, and about 80 percent of those come from just two sources: coal (46 percent) in its various forms, including anthracite...
When people pump too much water from coastal aquifers, saltwater can rush in. Thick with salt and minerals, seawater is denser than freshwater; once in an aquifer, there is no known way of flushing it...
Today most historians and economists instead view the oil shock as a product of mistaken government policies.
More than a hundred sets of casta paintings are known. Many are beautifully crafted. Some were painted by mixed people themselves. Looking
Colonial writers knew that disease tilled the virgin soil of the Americas countless times in the sixteenth century. But what they did not, could not, know is that the epidemics shot out like ghastly a...
A prerequisite for a successful scientific career is an enthusiastic willingness to pore through the minutiae of subjects that 99.9 percent of Earth's population find screamingly dull.
Inside the settlement was a world of warmth, family, and familiar custom. But the world outside, as Thomas put it, was a maze of confusing actions and individuals fighting to maintain an existence in...