What Vogt saw in Peru would crystallize his picture of the world and the human place in it—a vision of limitation. It would bring him to the Prophet’s essential belief: humans have no special dispensa...
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...
Typically such reports focus on urban water supplies. The emphasis is understandable: most people live in metropolitan areas and water from their taps is what will make them sick if contaminated. But...
This is natural selection, Darwin’s great insight. All living creatures have the same purpose: to make more of themselves, ensuring their biological future by the only means available. And all living...
The scientists had taken a route through Mexico that was much like the route taken by Bill and Marjorie Vogt two years later. Both groups wrote reports documenting the same terrible poverty and eroded...
Scholars had known for more than fifteen hundred years that the world was large and round. Colón disputed both facts.
On October 7 the cormorants abruptly came back, hundreds of thousands of them, only to disappear after a week. On the 20th the birds returned, then vanished on the 24th. By November 7 they were back—o...
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...
Nature’s success stories, they are like Gause’s protozoans; the world is their petri dish. Their populations grow at a terrific rate; they take over large areas, engulfing their environment as if no f...
Like a painting, we will be erased. Like a flower, we will dry up here on earth. Like plumed vestments of the precious bird, That precious bird with the agile neck, We will come to an end.
In the second of Road’s main innovations, Vogt summed up the relationship between humanity and this global environment with a single concept: carrying capacity.
In the past few decades, China has lifted more than half a billion people out of destitution—an astonishing accomplishment. That advance was driven by industrialization, and that industrialization was...
In the middle, where most people spend their days, it is hard to distinguish morally between positions. It is easy to disparage people who think only of their family or neighborhood. But higher up the...
In the first two centuries of colonization, the border between natives and newcomers was porous, almost nonexistent. The two societies mingled in a way that is difficult to imagine now. In a letter to...
Holmberg’s Mistake.
He that speaks seldom and opportunely, being as good as his word, is the only man they love, Wood explained. Character
Having grown separately for millennia, the Americas were a boundless sea of novel ideas, dreams, stories, philosophies, religions, moralities, discoveries, and all the other products of the mind. Few...
Half of the 102 people on the Mayflower made it through the first winter, which to me seemed amazing. How did they survive? In his history of Plymouth colony, Governor Bradford himself provides one an...
Both Hubbertians and McKelveyans agree that an oil reserve is a physical stock: a finite pool of hydrocarbon molecules. To Hubbertians, the implication is clear: pump out too much and you will eventua...
Responses to my questions fell into two broad categories, each associated (at least in my mind) with one of two people, Americans who lived in the twentieth century.