The twenty-five cities were not sited strategically and did not have defensive walls; no evidence of warfare, such as burned buildings or mutilated corpses, has been found. Instead, he said, the basis...
Smallpox has an incubation period of about twelve days, during which time sufferers, who may not know they are sick, can infect anyone they meet. With its fine roads and great population movements, Ta...
On the one hand, forcing other people to clean up our mess violates basic notions of fairness. On the other hand, actually preventing climate-change problems would require societies today to make inve...
Most of all, the clash between Vogtians and Borlaugians is heated because it is less about facts than about values. Although the two men rarely acknowledged it, their arguments were founded on implici...
Margulis said, because rival organisms and lack of resources prevent the vast majority of P. vulgaris from reproducing. This is natural selection, Darwin’s great insight. All living creatures have the...
Katrina was a relatively modest storm that overwhelmed inadequate dikes and levees. Many climate scientists believe that in days to come governments will need to get better at shoreline defense. The w...
Hubbert visited a friend who was attending a big natural-resource conference sponsored by the new United Nations. At the conference Hubbert was startled to hear a prominent geologist assert that the w...
Geoengineering may reduce temperatures globally, but there will still be local losers and winners—places that experience too much or too little rainfall, places subject to sudden temperature extremes....
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...
By mining the forests upstream for firewood and floating the logs downriver to the city, they were removing ground cover and increasing the likelihood of catastrophic floods. When these came, as they...
By fall the settlers’ situation was secure enough that they held a feast of thanksgiving. Massasoit showed up with ninety people, most of them young men with weapons. The Pilgrim militia responded by...
Amazonians practiced a kind of agro-forestry, farming with trees, unlike any kind of agriculture in Europe, Africa, or Asia.
Although emperor after emperor refused entry to almost all human beings from Europe and the Americas, they could not keep out other species. Key players were American crops, especially sweet potatoes...
A world with a sudden limit on air travel would be tremendously different from the one we live in now.
The world of 10 billion, water experts project, the demand for water could be 50 percent higher than it is now. Where will it all come from? New supplies will not be easy to find. Few lakes and rivers...
The production curve of any given species of fossil fuel will rise, pass through one or several maxima, and then decline asymptotically to zero. Decline asymptotically to zero! The potential consequen...
The king was talking with Bartolomé de las Casas, a fiery Dominican priest who had just completed Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies, an indictment of Spanish conduct that remains a landma...
Of venereal soldiers along the way. A more effective
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...
Food and water can be thought of as a flow—or, more precisely, a critical-zone flow, a current with a volume that must be maintained. By contrast, fossil fuels are like a stock, a fixed amount of a go...