Cultures are like books, the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss once remarked, each a volume in the great library of humankind. In the sixteenth century, more books were burned than ever before or sin...
As schoolchildren learn, the sun washes Earth with every imaginable type of light wave—X-rays, ultraviolet light, visible light, infrared radiation, microwaves, radio waves, you name it. About a third...
After 1492 the world’s ecosystems collided and mixed as European vessels carried thousands of species to new homes across the oceans.
Mistaken. 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 homo...
He argued, was not perfectly round but in the shape of a pear,
To survive, Weaver said, humans have a single basic need: usable energy. That energy comes in two forms: energy for the body (food and water, in other words), and energy for daily existence (that is,...
Stakman did not view science as a disinterested quest for knowledge. It was a tool—maybe the tool—for human betterment. Not all sciences were equally valuable, as he liked to explain. Botany, he said,...
Road laid out the basic tenets for a now-common way of thought: environmentalism. Environmentalism is more than the simple recognition that polluting a neighbor’s well or destroying a bald eagle’s nes...
One way to sum up the new scholarship is to say that it has begun, at last, to fill in one of the biggest blanks in history: the Western Hemisphere before 1492. It was, in the current view, a thriving...
Oil and gasoline use is diffuse, scattered in the global crowd. The world has 1.3 billion vehicles and perhaps 1.5 billion households. Cutting emissions from these cars and homes means changing the da...
In the Norte Chico, in other words, Homo sapiens experienced a phenomenon that at that time had occurred only once before, in Mesopotamia: the emergence, for better or worse, of leaders with enough pr...
Visitors to Andean history note certain ways of doing things that recur in ways striking to the outsider, sometimes in one variant, sometimes in another, like the themes in a jazz improvisation.
Think of the adherents of these two perspectives as Wizards and Prophets—Wizards unveiling technological fixes, Prophets decrying the consequences of our heedlessness. Borlaug has become a model for t...
When microbes arrived in the Western Hemisphere, he argued, they must have swept from the coastlines first visited by Europeans to inland areas populated by Indians who had never seen a white person....
Weaver could say something about the sun, though. In principle, the sun pours onto Earth enough energy—vastly more than enough—to provide all humanity with the necessary 128,000 calories a day. If sol...
Today, about 85 percent of Israel’s wastewater—more than 100 million gallons a year—is used for irrigation, according to Seth M. Siegel, the author of Let There Be Water (2015), a study of Israeli wat...
Today the concept of global carrying capacity has evolved into the idea of planetary boundaries. The boundaries set the environmental terrain within which we expect that humanity can operate safely, a...
To the question of how to survive, his work said: be smart, make more, share with everyone else. It said: we can build a world of gleaming richness for all. And the concomitants of this world—the gian...
Those looking for a tale of cultural superiority can find it in zero; those looking for failure can find it in the wheel. Neither line of argument is useful, though. What
The viruses that cause smallpox, influenza, hepatitis, measles, encephalitis, and viral pneumonia; the bacteria that cause tuberculosis, diphtheria, cholera, typhus, scarlet fever, and bacterial menin...