He argued, was not perfectly round but in the shape of a pear,
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?
All the fossil fuels humankind will ever have are already here, waiting to be extracted from the ground—in contrast to food, which is grown every season from the soil, and freshwater, which is drawn i...
When microbes arrived in the Western Hemisphere, he argued, they must have swept from the coastlines first visited by Europeans to inland areas populated by Indians who had never seen a white person....
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...
Today the concept of global carrying capacity has evolved into the idea of planetary boundaries. The boundaries set the environmental terrain within which we expect that humanity can operate safely, a...
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...
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 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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
Beavers the size of armchairs; turtles that weighed almost as much as cars; sloths able to reach tree branches twenty feet high; huge, flightless, predatory birds like rapacious ostriches—the tally of...
Almost everyone agreed that the new name was a big improvement, logically speaking. Unfortunately, nobody used it. Not for the first time in Native American history, the confusing, incorrect name prev...