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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 108f74d | This meant, Stoneking hypothesized, that clothing also dated from about 107,000 years ago. The subject was anything but frivolous: donning a garment is a complicated act. Clothing has practical uses--warming the body in cold places, shielding it from the sun in hot places--but it also transforms the appearance of the wearer, something of inescapable interest to a visually oriented species like Homo sapiens. Clothing is ornament and symbol; .. | Charles C. Mann | ||
| 3960015 | Humans weren't always human in this third sense, as far as we can tell. In the beginning, Homo sapiens seems not to have created art, played music, invented new tools, worked out the motions of the planets, or worshiped gods in the celestial sphere. These capacities accumulated slowly, over tens of thousands of years. Sometimes a new trait--a new kind of art, a new kind of construction--arose, only to fade out. But over the long run, as the.. | Charles C. Mann | ||
| 60826b8 | Roughly speaking, two peoples' genomes differ in only about one out of every thousand bases. This is like having two pages in two different books differ by a single letter. | Charles C. Mann | ||
| 194e70e | When scientists list mammals in order of their genetic diversity, humans are at the bottom, along with endangered species like wolverines and lynxes. | Charles C. Mann | ||
| 29ec25e | Vogt, Leopold, Murphy, and their associates were not truly in this elitist company; in fact, they helped begin the transformation in which environmental issues switched from being a cause of the right to one of the left. Nonetheless, they shared much of the racial alarmists' intellectual framework and often dismissed nonwhites in terms that read uncomfortably today. | Charles C. Mann | ||
| 5f8077f | But this second wave of conservationists rarely claimed that one race or culture was intrinsically superior to another. Vogt, again, is an example. No apologist for his own stock, he reserved special ire for "American vandals abroad," the "despoilers" and "parasites" who ruin foreign landscapes and exploited foreign people in the name of "that sacred cow Free Enterprise." In his view, "we be of one blood." | Charles C. Mann | ||
| 6f4fcb9 | 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. | Charles C. Mann | ||
| 60c79fb | The parallels between Borlaug and Vogt are inexact. Borlaug never wrote a manifesto and mostly declined the roles of theorist and exponent. Instead he became, by the example of his life, the emblem of a way of thought--the Wizard's way. His success would show, at least to Wizards, that science and technology, properly applied, could allow humankind to produce its way into a prosperous future. | Charles C. Mann | ||
| 2bc3ade | This is natural selection, Darwin's great insight. All living creatures have the same purpose: to make more of themselves, ensuring their biological future by the only means available. And all living creatures have a maximum reproductive rate: the greatest number of offspring they can generate in a lifetime. (For people, she told the class, the maximum reproductive rate is about twenty children per couple per generation. The potential maxim.. | Charles C. Mann | ||
| 4e4f14d | 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 are mostly gone. Children splash happily in the shallows. Crumbled shells lie in the sediment, testament to the mussel's collapse. Humans are no different, Margulis believed. The implication of evolutionary theory is that Homo sapiens is just on.. | Charles C. Mann | ||
| 888a8f4 | 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 nitrogen derived from synthetic fertilizer. Another way of putting this is to say that Haber and Bosch enabled our species to extract an additional 3 billion people's worth of food from the same land. | Charles C. Mann | ||
| 13672eb | 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 primary production in terrestrial ecosystems"--40 percent of the entire world's output of land plants and animals." | Charles C. Mann | ||
| 02832eb | Most of all, the clash between Vogtians and Borlaugians is heated because it is less about facts than about values. Although the two men rarely acknowledged it, their arguments were founded on implicit moral and spiritual visions: concepts of the world and humankind's place in it. | Charles C. Mann | ||
| a8567ec | Prophets look at the world as finite, and people as constrained by their environment. Wizards see possibilities as inexhaustible, and humans as wily managers of the planet. One views growth and development as the lot and blessing of our species; others regard stability and preservation as our future and our goal. Wizards regard Earth as a toolbox, its contents freely available for use; Prophets think of the natural world as embodying an ove.. | Charles C. Mann | ||
| a98a196 | Road laid out the basic tenets for a now-common way of thought: environmentalism. Environmentalism is more than the simple recognition that polluting a neighbor's well or destroying a bald eagle's nest is a bad idea. In most cases that recognition can be viewed as a function of property rights. By poisoning a well, a polluter is, in effect, seizing the water without its owner's permission. (More precisely, it is seizing use of the water.) T.. | Charles C. Mann | ||
| 2c5d09f | Road to Survival, "environment" meant not the external natural factors that affected humans but the external natural factors that were affected by humans. Instead of Nature molding people, Vogt envisioned people molding Nature, usually negatively. And by "environment" he meant not a particular place, but a global totality." | Charles C. Mann | ||
| 387de19 | 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. | Charles C. Mann | ||
| e3c56ca | There are two ideas at the base of today's globe-spanning environmental movement. One is that Homo sapiens, like every other species, is bound by biological laws. The second is that one of these laws is that no species can long exceed the environment's carrying capacity. | Charles C. Mann | ||
| e43cccc | Vogt and Osborn were also the first to bring to a wide public a belief that would become a foundation of environmental thought: consumption driven by capitalism and rising human numbers is the ultimate cause of most of the world's ecological problems, and only dramatic reductions in human fertility and economic activity will prevent a worldwide calamity. | Charles C. Mann | ||
| 7116f95 | I have omitted the numbers to highlight that the basic argument is as simple as it was in Vogt's day. Stay within the limits, and people can develop freely. Go beyond the boundaries--exceed carrying capacity--and trouble will ensue. | Charles C. Mann | ||
| dfafc4f | To the question of how to survive, his work said: be smart, make more, share with everyone else. It said: we can build a world of gleaming richness for all. And the concomitants of this world--the giant installations, the whirring machinery in the garden, the glare of artificial light in the night sky--are to be embraced, not feared. | Charles C. Mann | ||
| dbbb8cd | Prophets smite their brows in exasperation at this logic. To their minds, evaluating farming systems wholly in terms of calories produced--in terms of usable energy--is a perfect example of the flaws of reductive thinking. It does not include the costs of overfertilization, habitat loss, watershed degradation, soil erosion and compaction, and pesticide and antibiotic overuse; it doesn't account for the destruction of rural communities; it d.. | Charles C. Mann | ||
| 2d429a9 | The better way, he decided, was to raise yields all over the nation--to target Mexico as a whole, rather than only the Bajio. As Vietmeyer put it, Borlaug thought the objective should be to "feed everyone; not just the hungry. Opt to feed the whole populace." Produce enough not only to feed every man and woman in Mexico but also to export to other food-short nations." | Charles C. Mann | ||
| 139d01c | Borlaug thought, the process would be too slow. As a rule of thumb, wheat breeders needed ten to fifteen harvests to select, test, and propagate a new variety. The process couldn't be hurried; farmers could grow only one crop of winter or spring wheat a year. But the Rockefeller Foundation wasn't going to wait fifteen years. And the farmers needed help now. | Charles C. Mann | ||
| 376e204 | 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 both resisted stem rust (as the four survivors did) and produced a lot of grain (as the other strains would if they didn't succumb to rust). In April he would harvest the seed from the best plants and take it to the Bajio, where he would perfo.. | Charles C. Mann | ||
| e1e5920 | Elvin Charles Stakman, | Charles C. Mann | ||
| 22163b7 | Stakman did not view science as a disinterested quest for knowledge. It was a tool--maybe the tool--for human betterment. Not all sciences were equally valuable, as he liked to explain. "Botany," he said, "is the most important of all sciences, and plant pathology is one of its most essential branches." | Charles C. Mann | ||
| fa991e2 | 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 feeding about 3.25 billion people. More than 3 billion men, women, and children--an incomprehensibly vast cloud of dreams, fears, and explorations--owe their existence to two early-twentieth-century German chemists." | Charles C. Mann | ||
| 9914c01 | About 40 percent of the fertilizer applied in the last sixty years wasn't assimilated by plants; instead, it washed away into rivers or seeped into the air in the form of nitrous oxide. | Charles C. Mann | ||
| 185b6c6 | The scientists had taken a route through Mexico that was much like the route taken by Bill and Marjorie Vogt two years later. Both groups wrote reports documenting the same terrible poverty and eroded land, but their ideas about the remedy were starkly different. To Vogt, the basic problem was land degradation, and the primary cure was to ease the burden on the land. By contrast, the scientists believed that Mexico's issues were caused, at .. | Charles C. Mann | ||
| a992f7b | 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 other flows--"critical-zone resources," in the jargon--can be exploited to exhaustion. Consider an archetypical critical-zone flow: the run of salmon swimming upstream to spawn. Drop a net across the watercourse and the fish will swim right int.. | Charles C. Mann | ||
| f3b221a | When people pump too much water from coastal aquifers, saltwater can rush in. Thick with salt and minerals, seawater is denser than freshwater; once in an aquifer, there is no known way of flushing it out. Coastal aquifers are imperiled from Maine to Florida; on the Arabian coast; in the suburbs of Jakarta (metropolitan population, more than 10 million); throughout the Mediterranean; and in a host of other places. | Charles C. Mann | ||
| a49d4dd | 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 because the water is unsafe, unaffordable, or unavailable. The problems are not restricted to poor nations. By 2025, the institute predicts, all of Africa and the Middle East, almost all of South and Central America and Asia, and much of North .. | Charles C. Mann | ||
| c4120ac | Agricultural losses are costly to prevent. Most irrigation is deployed through canals. They lose water because it seeps through the bottom, evaporates during transmission, and spills out at junctions; a rule of thumb is that almost two-thirds of the water is lost, and often much more. (The figures are imprecise, because some of the "lost" water flows usefully into neighboring fields or percolates back into rivers.)" | Charles C. Mann | ||
| e6a596e | To survive, Weaver said, humans have a single basic need: "usable energy." That energy comes in two forms: energy for the body (food and water, in other words), and energy for daily existence (that is, fuel to power vehicles, heat and cool buildings, and make essential materials like cement and steel). "In the United States," Weaver estimated, "each person uses, on the average, 3,000 calories per day for food, [and] 125,000 calories per day.. | Charles C. Mann | ||
| b2abb10 | Weaver could say something about the sun, though. In principle, the sun pours onto Earth enough energy--vastly more than enough--to provide all humanity with the necessary 128,000 calories a day. "If solar energy could be utilized with full efficiency, the United States alone could sustain, energy-wise, a population over 40 times the present total population of the planet." The global population then being about 2 billion, Weaver was sugges.. | Charles C. Mann | ||
| 922e04e | The true problem was not that humankind risked surpassing natural limits, but that our species didn't know how to tap more than a fraction of the energy provided by nature. | Charles C. Mann | ||
| ee61a2a | Weaver never published his ideas. His memorandum lay unnoticed in the archives of the foundation, now stored underground on one of the Rockefeller estates. And his dream of reworking photosynthesis would be almost forgotten for sixty years, until it was revived by the descendants of the molecular biologists whom Weaver had funded and the successor to Rockefeller as the world's biggest charitable foundation. | Charles C. Mann | ||
| c3c2096 | 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 team of twenty-nine European and American scientists argued in an influential report from 2009. (It was updated in 2015.) To prevent "non-linear, abrupt environmental change," they said, humankind must not transgress nine global limits. That.. | Charles C. Mann | ||
| 216d53e | Today most historians and economists instead view the oil shock as a product of mistaken government policies. | Charles C. Mann | ||
| 777b0b2 | More than 80 percent of the world's energy now comes from fossil fuels, and every bit of it is mined from the earth. | Charles C. Mann | ||
| 424429c | 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 in constant but limited amounts from rivers, lakes, and aquifers. | Charles C. Mann | ||
| b2db63c | food and water can be thought of as a flow--or, more precisely, a critical-zone flow, a current with a volume that must be maintained. By contrast, fossil fuels are like a stock, a fixed amount of a good. Few dispute that the flow of food and water could be interrupted, with terrible effects. But people have disagreed for a century and a half--since the days of Pithole--about whether the world has an adequate stock of fossil fuels. | Charles C. Mann | ||
| a7fafdd | Coursing through history like waves of panic, the conviction that civilization was hurtling toward an energy disaster has become embedded in the culture. Time after time, decade after decade, presidents, prime ministers, and politicians of every party have predicted that the world will soon run out of oil and gas. Time after time, decade after decade, new supplies have been found and old reservoirs extended. People forgot their apprehension.. | Charles C. Mann |