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...
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...
Because of their obsession with gold, the conquistadors are often dismissed as gold crazy. In fact they were not so much gold crazy as status crazy. Like Hernán Cortés, who conquered Mexico, Pizarro w...
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...
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...
Rocketing up the growth curve, humankind every year takes ever more of the earth’s richness. An often quoted estimate by a team of Stanford biologists is that humans grab about 40% of the present net...
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...
Farmers have injected so much synthetic fertilizer into their fields that soil and groundwater nitrogen levels have risen worldwide. Today, almost half of all the crops consumed by humankind depend on...
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 Marajó, Meggers and Evans soon noticed an oddity: the earliest traces of Marajóara culture were the most elaborate. As the centuries advanced, the quality of the ceramics inexorably declined.
According to Peter Stahl, an anthropologist at the State University of New York in Binghamton, lots of researchers believe that what the eco-imagery would like to picture as a pristine, untouched Urwe...
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...
What this suggests is that, contrary to economists, the discount rate accounts for only part of our relationship to the future. People are concerned about future generations. Even if the logic is hard...
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...
The monks explain that they have been sent by the one who on the earth is the greater speaker of divine things, the pope, to bring the venerable word / of the One Sole True God to New Spain. By worshi...
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...
Some flows, like sunlight or wind, cannot be affected by human action. No matter how many solar panels I put on my roof to absorb sunlight, they will have no effect on what the sun does tomorrow. But...