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884e1af
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who held title to all the land and its produce, could vote down decisions by the male leaders of the League and demand that an issue be reconsidered. Under this regime women were so much better off than their counterparts in Europe that nineteenth-century U.S. feminists like Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Matilda Joslyn Gage, all of whom lived in Haudenosaunee country, drew inspiration from their lot.
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Charles C. Mann |
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7170e99
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Europeans won military victories in New England, historians say, partly because they were divided among themselves. Indians were unwilling, too, to match the English tactic of massacring whole villages. But another, bigger part of the reason for the foreigners' triumph was that by the 1670s the newcomers outnumbered the natives. Groups like the Narragansett, which had been spared by the epidemic of 1616, were crushed by a smallpox epidemic ..
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Charles C. Mann |
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29c89db
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The Haudenosaunee thus would have the second oldest continuously existing representative parliaments on earth. Only Iceland's Althing, founded in 930 A.D., is older.
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Charles C. Mann |
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0f234fd
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Carrying their flints and torches, Native Americans were living in balance with Nature--but they had their thumbs on the scale. Shaped for their comfort and convenience, the American landscape had come to fit their lives like comfortable clothing. It was a highly successful and stable system, if "stable" is the appropriate word for a regime that involves routinely enshrouding miles of countryside in smoke and ash."
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Charles C. Mann |
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e1b3052
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Cahokia was one big piece in the mosaic of chiefdoms that covered the lower half of the Mississippi and the Southeast at the end of the first millennium A.D. Known collectively as "Mississippian" cultures, these societies arose several centuries after the decline of the Hopewell culture, and probably were its distant descendants. At any one time a few larger polities dominated the dozens or scores of small chiefdoms. Cahokia, biggest of all..
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Charles C. Mann |
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509a129
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Think of the fruitful impact on Europe and its descendants from contacting Asia. Imagine the effect on these places and people from a second Asia. Along with the unparalleled loss of life, that is what vanished when smallpox came ashore.
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Charles C. Mann |
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10594a5
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On October 7 the cormorants abruptly came back, hundreds of thousands of them, only to disappear after a week. On the 20th the birds returned, then vanished on the 24th. By November 7 they were back--only to bolt a few days later. In 1940 the warm waters came again. And in 1941. And they showed up earlier, at the beginning of nesting, so the birds then fled their nesting grounds and didn't reproduce. Entire generations were not being born. ..
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Charles C. Mann |
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dbe264e
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Vogt was unable to test this hypothesis until late in 1940, when he persuaded the guano company to measure plankton abundance by dragging the sea at multiple locations with a fine silk net. He examined the samples with the sole tool available, a magnifying glass he had managed to acquire on a trip to Lima. Despite the crude equipment he was able to gather enough data to see what was happening. The "general tendency," he wrote, was for "fall..
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Charles C. Mann |
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8b87799
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As any biologist would predict, this success led to an increase in human numbers--slow at first, then rapid, tracing Gause's S-shaped curve. We began rising up the steepest part of the slope in the sixteenth or seventeenth century. If we follow Gause's pattern, growth will continue at delirious speed until the second inflection point, when we have exhausted the global petri dish. After that, human life will be, briefly, a Hobbesian nightmar..
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Charles C. Mann |
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b8cdcab
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The conflict between these visions is not between good and evil, but between different ideas of the good life, between ethical orders that give priority to personal liberty and those that give priority to what might be called connection. To Borlaug, the landscape of late-twentieth-century capitalism, with its teeming global markets dominated by big corporations, was morally acceptable, though ever in need of repair. Its emphasis on personal..
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Charles C. Mann |
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51b4384
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Vogt spent ten months in Mexico, much of it with Juana, at the behest of the Mexican agricultural ministry, writing a guide to conservation for Mexican schoolchildren, and struggling with his cane and braces through twenty-six national parks. Although statistics showed that the country was Latin America's wealthiest, its landscapes were enshrouded by suffering: impoverished subsistence farmers, scratching at depleted soils, taking down the ..
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Charles C. Mann |
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d9c2cdf
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humankind, though "apt to forget it, is a creature of the earth. 'Dust thou art' and 'All flesh is grass' were not said by scientists, but they are sound biology." When lower creatures exhaust their resources, Vogt argued, bad things happen. Exactly the same is true for Homo sapiens. The article tallied example after example of overreaching, most drawn from Vogt's travels in Latin America. But then, provocatively, he switched to the United ..
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Charles C. Mann |
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f1e3da1
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Homo sapiens, she once told me, is an unusually successful species. And it is the fate of every successful species to wipe itself out--that is the way things work in biology. By "wipe itself out" Margulis didn't necessarily mean extinction--just that something comprehensively bad would happen, wrecking the human enterprise. Borlaug and Vogt might have wanted to stop us from destroying ourselves, she would have said, but they were kidding th..
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Charles C. Mann |
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d3b714f
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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 textbooks, Hollywood movies, newspaper articles, environmental campaigns, romantic adventure books, and silk-screened T-shirts. It existed in many forms and was embraced both by those who hated Indians and those who admired them. Holmberg's Mistake ..
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Charles C. Mann |
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2e3bf3d
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The Columbian Exchange had such far-reaching effects that some biologists now say that Colon's voyages marked the beginning of a new biological era: the Homogenocene. The term refers to homogenizing: mixing unlike substances to create a uniform blend. With the Columbian Exchange, places that were once ecologically distinct have become more alike.
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Charles C. Mann |
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92b47d6
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Although emperor after emperor refused entry to almost all human beings from Europe and the Americas, they could not keep out other species. Key players were American crops, especially sweet potatoes and maize;* their unexpected arrival, the agricultural historian Song Junling wrote in 2007, was "one of the most revolutionary events" in imperial China's history. The nation's agriculture, based on rice, had long been concentrated in river va..
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Charles C. Mann |
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5b7248f
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his tract The Road to Survival (1948), the first modern we're-all-going-to-hell book. Road was meant as a warning bell, based on objective science, but it was also an implicit vision of how we should live: a moral testament. Vogt was the first to put together, in modern form, the principal tenets of environmentalism, the twentieth century's only successful, long-lasting ideology.
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Charles C. Mann |
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e3a30f6
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Vogt and Borlaug have the same mission: to use the discoveries of modern science to spare Mexico from a future of poverty and environmental degradation. But prospects are unlikely, in Mexico in 1946, for this to happen; indeed, Vogt and Borlaug believe that the situation grows direr by the day.
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Charles C. Mann |
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164cb3b
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Vogt sees the city reaching across the dry lake bed to engulf the last fields and streams and says: Hold it back! We cannot let our species overwhelm the natural systems on which we all depend! Borlaug sees the pitiful scrim of wheat and maize on the tract of land and says: How can we give people a better chance to thrive? Vogt wants to protect the land; Borlaug wants to equip its occupants.
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Charles C. Mann |
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c85a876
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Margulis said, because rival organisms and lack of resources prevent the vast majority of P. vulgaris from reproducing. 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.
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Charles C. Mann |
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32cefab
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The two people were William Vogt and Norman Borlaug. Vogt, born in 1902, laid out the basic ideas for the modern environmental movement. In particular, he founded what the Hampshire College demographer Betsy Hartmann has called "apocalyptic environmentalism"--the belief that unless humankind drastically reduces consumption its growing numbers and appetite will overwhelm the planet's ecosystems. In best-selling books and powerful speeches, V..
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Charles C. Mann |
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6ed16d0
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Humans are no different, Margulis believed. The implication of evolutionary theory is that Homo sapiens is just one creature among many, no different at base than P. vulgaris. We and they are controlled by the same forces, produced by the same processes, subject to the same fate. When Borlaug and Vogt stood on the tract of bad land, looking at the city, they were on the edge of the petri dish. Wizard or Prophet, it didn't matter. Homo sapie..
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Charles C. Mann |
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e179fad
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Both men are dead now, but their disciples have continued the hostilities. Indeed, the dispute between Wizards and Prophets has, if anything, become more vehement. Wizards view the Prophets' emphasis on cutting back as intellectually dishonest, indifferent to the poor, even racist
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Charles C. Mann |
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e56db0d
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Prophets sneer that the Wizards' faith in human resourcefulness is unthinking, scientifically ignorant, even driven by greed (because remaining within ecological limits will cut into corporate profits).
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Charles C. Mann |
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b97ecda
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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 species seek to make more of themselves--that is their goal. By multiplying until we reach our maximum possible numbers, we are following the laws of biology, even as we take out much of the planet. Eventually, in accordance with those same laws, the..
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Charles C. Mann |
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abfc8af
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On May 30, 1539, Hernando De Soto landed his private army near Tampa Bay in Florida. De Soto was a novel figure: half warrior, half venture capitalist. He grew very rich very young in Spanish America by becoming a market leader in the nascent slave trade. The profits helped to fund the conquest of the Inka, which made De Soto wealthier still. He accompanied Pizarro to Tawantinsuyu (aka, The Inka Empire), burnishing his reputation for brutal..
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conquistadors
florida
hernando-de-soto
hernando-pizarro
small-pox
pigs
spain
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Charles C. Mann |
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108f74d
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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; ..
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Charles C. Mann |
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3960015
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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..
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Charles C. Mann |
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60826b8
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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.
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Charles C. Mann |
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194e70e
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When scientists list mammals in order of their genetic diversity, humans are at the bottom, along with endangered species like wolverines and lynxes.
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Charles C. Mann |
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29ec25e
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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.
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Charles C. Mann |
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5f8077f
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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."
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Charles C. Mann |
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6f4fcb9
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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.
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Charles C. Mann |
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60c79fb
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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.
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Charles C. Mann |
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2bc3ade
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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..
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Charles C. Mann |
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4e4f14d
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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..
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Charles C. Mann |
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888a8f4
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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.
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Charles C. Mann |
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13672eb
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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."
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Charles C. Mann |
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02832eb
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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.
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Charles C. Mann |
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a8567ec
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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..
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Charles C. Mann |
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a98a196
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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..
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Charles C. Mann |
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2c5d09f
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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."
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Charles C. Mann |
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387de19
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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.
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Charles C. Mann |
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e3c56ca
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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.
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Charles C. Mann |