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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 2e3bf3d | 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. | Charles C. Mann | ||
| 92b47d6 | 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.. | Charles C. Mann | ||
| 5b7248f | 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. | Charles C. Mann | ||
| e3a30f6 | 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. | Charles C. Mann | ||
| 164cb3b | 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. | Charles C. Mann | ||
| c85a876 | 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. | Charles C. Mann | ||
| 32cefab | 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.. | Charles C. Mann | ||
| 6ed16d0 | 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.. | Charles C. Mann | ||
| e179fad | 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 | Charles C. Mann | ||
| e56db0d | 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). | Charles C. Mann | ||
| b97ecda | 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.. | Charles C. Mann | ||
| abfc8af | 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.. | conquistadors florida hernando-de-soto hernando-pizarro small-pox pigs spain | Charles C. Mann | |
| 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 | ||
| eae3d54 | The first principle is that you must not fool yourself--and you are the easiest person to fool."8 --Physicist Richard Feynman, advising how to avoid pseudo-science that masquerades as science" | Barbara Oakley | ||
| 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 |