In a letter to Thomas Jefferson, the aging John Adams recalled the Massachusetts of his youth as a multiracial society. Aaron Pomham the Priest and Moses Pomham the Kind of the Punkapaug and Neponsit...
The embrace of a new technology by ordinary people leads inevitably to its embrace by people of malign intent.
As the Yale historian Paul Sabin has written, the oil shock seemingly confirmed the thesis of The Limits to Growth.
Vogt spent ten months in Mexico, much of it with Juana, at the behest of the Mexican agricultural ministry, writing a guide to conservation for Mexican schoolchildren, and struggling with his cane and...
Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century European maps proudly depicted Africa’s Atlantic coast as bristling with Danish, Dutch, English, French, Portuguese, Spanish, and Swedish forts, garrisons, and trad...
The Columbian Exchange had such far-reaching effects that some biologists now say that Colón’s voyages marked the beginning of a new biological era: the Homogenocene. The term refers to homogenizing:...
Stories like that of Kern River have occurred all over the world for decades. After hearing them over and over again from geologists, I realized Hubbert and Limits were going about matters the wrong w...
Germany, richer than India, has about seventy energy-storage projects, about a third of which collect the output from wind and solar plants into banks of batteries. The price of batteries, like the pr...
Of venereal soldiers along the way. A more effective
Humankind, though apt to forget it, is a creature of the earth. ‘Dust thou art’ and ‘All flesh is grass’ were not said by scientists, but they are sound biology. When lower creatures exhaust their res...
Smoke rose into the sky in great, juddering pillars. In
Rare is the human spirit that remains buoyant in a holocaust.
Like most Maya rulers, Chak Tok Ich’aak spent a lot of his time luxuriating in his court while dwarf servants attended to his whims and musicians played conch shells and wooden trumpets in the backgro...
In contemporary hunting and gathering societies, anthropologists have learned, gathering by women usually supplies most of the daily diet. The meat provided by male hunters is a kind of luxury, a spec...
Testament to the human capacity to adapt (or, less charitably, to our ability to operate in ignorance).
Of bacteria, algae, and other truly important creatures. The third was that species, like sullen teenagers, don’t pick up after themselves. Cyanobacteria sprayed their oxygen garbage all over Earth wi...
Politicians and economists who argued for perpetual economic growth were deluded, Hubbert said. The population of the United States would hit a maximum of probably not more than 135,000,000 people in...
Few things are more sublime or characteristically human than the cross-fertilization of cultures.
Anything goes now, apparently, Fiedel told me. The lunatics have taken over the asylum.
The very existence of so much healthy forest after twelve thousand years of use by large populations suggests that whatever Indians did before swidden must have been ecologically more sustainable.