Before Columbus, Holmberg believed, both the people and the land had no real history. Stated so baldly, this notion-that the indigenous peoples of the Americas floated changelessly through the milleni...
Agricultural losses are costly to prevent. Most irrigation is deployed through canals. They lose water because it seeps through the bottom, evaporates during transmission, and spills out at junctions;...
A milpa is a field, usually but not always recently cleared, in which farmers plant a dozen crops at once, including maize, avocados, multiple varieties of squash and bean, melon, tomatoes, chilis, sw...
Think of the fruitful impact on Europe and its descendants from contacting Asia. Imagine the effect on these places and people from a second Asia. Along with the unparalleled loss of life, that is wha...
Propelled by the oil shock, fears of scarcity wafted across the nation like a bad smell. Rumors of shortages in any number of goods—gasoline, salmon, cheese, onions, raisins—caused brief, unwarranted...
In this way the sacred mission of the Triple Alliance became translated into a secular mission: to obtain prisoners to sacrifice for the sun, the Alliance had to take over the world.
In Mesopotamia, the wheel dates back to at least the time of Sumer. It was a basic part of life throughout Eurasia. Chariot wheels, water wheels, potter’s wheels, millstone wheels—one can’t imagine Eu...
Holmberg’s Mistake.
Fuller and Pearson placed a thin layer of the first type of doped silicon (extra electrons) atop a layer of the second type (extra holes). The two Bell researchers attached the little assembly to a ci...
Energy from the sun today is responsible for about 1 percent of India’s electricity; even in Gujarat, it amounts to just 5 percent. Optimistic scenarios show its share rising to 10 percent by 2022.
Augustin Mouchot was far from the first to realize that the sun’s energy could be tapped. For more than two thousand years Chinese architects had been aligning windows and doors with the southern sky...
His tract The Road to Survival (1948), the first modern we’re-all-going-to-hell book. Road was meant as a warning bell, based on objective science, but it was also an implicit vision of how we should...
Virgin-soil death rates for smallpox are hard to establish because for the last century most potential research subjects have been vaccinated. But a study in the early 1960s of seven thousand unvaccin...
The belief that human life will continue, even if we ourselves die, is one of the underpinnings of society.
Recounted in numberless articles and books, the Maya collapse has become an ecological parable for green activists; along with Pleistocene overkill, it is a favorite cautionary tale about surpassing t...
Rapid urbanization is a hallmark of our age. In 1950 fewer than one out of three of the world’s people lived in cities. By 2050, according to United Nations projections, the figure will be almost two...
Puebla shopkeepers complained that the country was fighting an invasion of counterfeits from China—a Chinese imitation of a Chinese-made Mexican imitation of a Chinese original.
Pilgrim writers universally reported that Wampanoag families were close and loving—more so than English families, some thought. Europeans in those days tended to view children as moving straight from...
It is commonly asked, when will the world’s supply of oil be exhausted? wrote the MIT economist Morris Adelman. The best one-word answer: never. On its face, this seems ridiculous—how could a finite s...
Israel provided incentives for farmers to switch to drip irrigation, in which pipes with tiny holes provide small, precisely adjusted flows of water. Ideally, drip irrigation provides water at just th...