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...
Fifteen years ago, when I went to a park at the edge of the Hudson, I couldn’t step into the river—the sharp edges of open mussel shells were too thick underfoot. Nowadays at the park the creatures ar...
Because energy is critical to modern life, these utilities, as we now call them, became so politically important that many governments seized them as essential tools of the state; other nations conten...
Amazonians practiced a kind of agro-forestry, farming with trees, unlike any kind of agriculture in Europe, Africa, or Asia.
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...
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.
Becomes as hot as the sun? Earth, he knew, reflects some heat back into space. But why isn’t all of it reflected? What keeps our planet cozily warm, Goldilocks-style, and not too hot or too cold?
Vaclav Smil has calculated that fertilizer from the Haber-Bosch process was responsible for the prevailing diets of nearly 45% of the world’s population. Roughly speaking, this is equivalent to feedin...
Until Columbus, Indians were a keystone species in most of the hemisphere. Annually burning undergrowth, clearing and replanting forests, building canals and raising fields, hunting bison and netting...
Only when an unknown genius discovered naturally mutated grain plants that did not shatter—and purposefully selected, protected, and cultivated them—did true agriculture begin.
Metal tools largely created slash-and-burn agriculture, William M. Denevan, the Wisconsin geographer, told me. This picture of swidden as this ancient practice by which Indians kept themselves in a ti...
Maize had an equivalent impact on much of the rest of the world after Columbus introduced it to Europe. Central Europeans became especially hooked on it; by the nineteenth century, maize was the daily...
Likely the milpa cannot be replicated on an industrial scale. But by studying its essential features, researchers may be able to smooth the rough ecological edges of conventional agriculture. Mesoamer...
In November, after the harvest, Borlaug would take his four surviving varieties to Sonora, where he would breed them with each other and many other cultivars in an effort to produce new cultivars that...
Having grown separately for millennia, the [orginal] Americans were a boundless sea of novel ideas, drea,s, stories, philosophies, religions, ,oralities, discoveries, and all other products of the min...
Early farming villages worldwide were much less authoritarian places than later societies. But the Indians of the eastern seaboard institutionalized their liberty to an unusual extent—the Haudenosaune...
When scientists list mammals in order of their genetic diversity, humans are at the bottom, along with endangered species like wolverines and lynxes.
I kept waiting for the book to appear. The wait grew more frustrating when my son entered school and was taught the same things I had been taught, beliefs I knew had long been sharply questioned. Sinc...
Both choices led to social unrest: the Jacquerie (France, 1358), the Revolt of Ciompi (Florence, 1378), the Peasants’ Revolt (England, 1381), the Catalonian Rebellion (Spain, 1395), and dozens of flar...