Today, according to the International Water Management Institute, a Sri Lanka–based cousin to IRRI and CIMMYT, one person out of every three on the planet lacks reliable access to freshwater, whether...
To their dismay, DeConto and Pollard had realized that Antarctica might be more vulnerable than previously thought. Increasing temperatures would attack the ice in two ways: warmer air would melt it f...
More than 80 percent of the world’s energy now comes from fossil fuels, and every bit of it is mined from the earth.
Hubbert’s views echoed those in The Road to Survival, published the year before, except that he thought in terms of physical limits, rather than biological limits. Still, he ended up in the same place...
For almost five centuries, Holmberg’s Mistake—the supposition that Native Americans lived in an eternal, unhistoried state—held sway in scholarly work, and from there fanned out to high school textboo...
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...
Evolution has provided the human brain with marvelous tools for detecting and resolving fast-moving, clearly visible, small-scale, near-future risks. By the same token, the brain is easily overwhelmed...
Elvin Charles Stakman,
Could the doomsayers have been correct, but rung the alarm a little too early? After all, Earth is finite, so the amount of energy it contains must also be finite. Isn’t it wholly rational to expect f...
Chestnut was especially popular—not the imported European chestnut roasted on Manhattan street corners in the fall, but the smaller, soft-shelled, deeply sweet native American chestnut, now almost ext...
By the eve of the American Revolution, a third of the native people in Rhode Island were enslaved. Indian bondage was more common still in the southern
At the same time, Wari and Tiwanaku kept themselves separate. Although they shared resources, there is little evidence that people from one culture visited the other often, or had friendships across t...
Many of the racial alarmists were also leaders in the nation’s new conservation movement. The blue-blooded toffs who feared that the noble and superior white race was menaced by unwashed rabble also s...
With its federal government that can supersede state and local law, its dependence on rule by the majority rather than consensus, its bicameral legislature (members of one branch being elected at fixe...
When scientists list mammals in order of their genetic diversity, humans are at the bottom, along with endangered species like wolverines and lynxes.
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...
To a biologist like Margulis, who spent her career arguing that humans are simply part of evolution’s handiwork, the answer should be clear. All life is similar at base, she and others say. All specie...
The drumbeat of negative forecasts had its effect: the United States and the European powers rushed to control every drop of oil in the Middle East, Latin America, and Africa. In light of the last eig...
The better way, he decided, was to raise yields all over the nation—to target Mexico as a whole, rather than only the Bajío. As Vietmeyer put it, Borlaug thought the objective should be to feed everyo...
The Maya collapsed because they overshot the carrying capacity of their environment. They exhausted their resource base, began to die of starvation and thirst, and fled their cities en masse, leaving...