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...
Roughly speaking, two peoples’ genomes differ in only about one out of every thousand bases. This is like having two pages in two different books differ by a single letter.
Planting their orchards for millennia, the first Amazonians slowly transformed large swaths of the river basin into something more pleasing to human beings. In the country inhabited by the Ka’apor, on...
Humans are no different, Margulis believed. The implication of evolutionary theory is that Homo sapiens is just one creature among many, no different at base than P. vulgaris. We and they are controll...
Who held title to all the land and its produce, could vote down decisions by the male leaders of the League and demand that an issue be reconsidered. Under this regime women were so much better off th...
The destruction of Indian societies by European epidemics both decreased native burning and increased tree growth. Each subtracted carbon dioxide from the air. In 2010 a research team led by Robert A....
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...
Mesoamerica would deserve its place in the human pantheon if its inhabitants had only created maize, in terms of harvest weight the world’s most important crop. But the inhabitants of Mexico and north...
Europeans won military victories in New England, historians say, partly because they were divided among themselves. Indians were unwilling, too, to match the English tactic of massacring whole village...
Cost and technical difficulty are not the primary reason so many modern cities have been unable to provide water to their inhabitants. Again and again, the biggest obstacle has been what social scient...
The parallels between Borlaug and Vogt are inexact. Borlaug never wrote a manifesto and mostly declined the roles of theorist and exponent. Instead he became, by the example of his life, the emblem of...
The chronological list of rulers differs on different lists, some lists do not include known kings, and some include kings who probably were mythological—as if a tally of English rulers matter-of-fact...
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...
Perversely, the most enduring consequence of the 1970s belief that energy supplies were running out was not to use less, but to look for more. In this quest, Jimmy Carter, arguably the most ecological...
On Columbus’s later voyages, his crew happily accepted godhood—until the Taino began empirically testing their divinity by forcing their heads underwater for long periods to see if the Spanish were, a...
In Mesoamerica, timekeeping provided the stimulus that accounting gave to the Middle East. Like contemporary astrologers, the Olmec, Maya, and Zapotec believed that celestial phenomena like the phases...
Humans weren’t always human in this third sense, as far as we can tell. In the beginning, Homo sapiens seems not to have created art, played music, invented new tools, worked out the motions of the pl...
Elvin Charles Stakman,