The embrace of a new technology by ordinary people leads inevitably to its embrace by people of malign intent.
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...
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:...
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...
As the Yale historian Paul Sabin has written, the oil shock seemingly confirmed the thesis of The Limits to Growth.
Testament to the human capacity to adapt (or, less charitably, to our ability to operate in ignorance).
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...
Anything goes now, apparently, Fiedel told me. The lunatics have taken over the asylum.
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...
Strikingly, Crescent Dunes has been fought by Prophets. As a rule, renewable-energy leaders see their goal as building giant, centralized facilities like Crescent Dunes—they are Borlaugians through an...
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...
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...
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.
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.
When Chapin tested these novel photovoltaics, they converted about five times more solar energy to electricity than the older selenium panels. But they were still terribly inefficient. Chapin estimate...
To Hubbert, this kind of thinking was sheer mysticism. Earth, being finite, contains a finite number of hydrocarbon molecules in a finite set of locations. Supplies are therefore limited
The staple crop of the highlands was the potato, which unlike maize regularly grows at altitudes of 14,000 feet; the tubers, cultivated in hundreds of varieties, can be left in the ground for as long...
Road to Survival, environment meant not the external natural factors that affected humans but the external natural factors that were affected by humans. Instead of Nature molding people, Vogt envision...