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...
Indian farmers grow maize in what is called a milpa. The term means maize field, but refers to something considerably more complex. A milpa is a field, usually but not always recently cleared, in whic...
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...
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...
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...
He that speaks seldom and opportunely, being as good as his word, is the only man they love, Wood explained. Character
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....
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...
By 1700, English colonies were studded along the Atlantic shore from what would become Maine to what would become South Carolina. Northern colonies coexisted with Algonkian-speaking Indian societies t...
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...
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 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...
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 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...