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...
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...
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...
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,...
The portraits were intended to parade their fellows like specimens in a zoo. Yet at the same time most show the castizos, mestizos, and mulattos dressed sumptuously, moving happily about their daily b...
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...
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...
In other words, as one mother-culture advocate put it, I am swallowing Marcus’s [nonsense] whole.
Homo sapiens, she once told me, is an unusually successful species. And it is the fate of every successful species to wipe itself out—that is the way things work in biology. By wipe itself out Marguli...
But the new picture doesn’t automatically legitimate burning down the forest. Instead it suggests that for a long time clever people who knew tricks that we have yet to learn used big chunks of Amazon...
Britain had just converted its entire fleet from the unsteady power of wind to the constant force provided by coal. Now, Churchill declared, Britain had to transform its navy a second time. Burning a...
Because they did not burn the land with the same skill and frequency as its previous occupants, the forests grew thicker. Left untended, maize fields filled in with weeds, then bushes and trees. My an...
The Inka style was severe, abstract, stripped down to geometric forms—startlingly contemporary, in fact. (According to the Peruvian critic César Paternosto, such major twentieth-century painters as Jo...
To we moderns the sensation of being in a constructed environment is so ubiquitous as to be invisible—in the cocoon of our strip malls and automobiles, we are like the fish that cannot feel the water...
To overcome rubisco’s lassitude and maladroitness, plants make a lot of it. As much as half of the protein in many plant leaves, by weight, is rubisco—it is often said to be the world’s most abundant...
To Margulis, the Great Oxidation Event had lessons for today. The first was that people who thought that living creatures couldn’t affect the climate had no idea of the power of life. The second was t...
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...