Quotes from Charles C. Mann

puts the final seal on the replacement of the authentic, billion-year-old natural world by a new, artificial world whose every surface bears the greasy human fingerprint.

becomes as hot as the sun? Earth, he knew, reflects some heat back into space. But why isn't all of it reflected? What keeps our planet cozily warm, Goldilocks-style, and not too hot or too cold?

of bacteria, algae, and other truly important creatures. The third was that species, like sullen teenagers, don't pick up after themselves. Cyanobacteria sprayed their oxygen garbage all over Earth without concern for the consequences—littering on an epic scale. People were doing the same with carbon dioxide.

the forest islands of Bolivia are comparable to any place in South America. The same is true of the Beni savanna, it seems, with its different complement of species. Ecologically, the region is a treasure, but one designed and executed by human beings. Erickson regards the landscape of the Beni as one of humankind's greatest works of art, a masterpiece that until recently was almost completely unknown

To Margulis, the Great Oxidation Event had lessons for today. The first was that people who thought that living creatures couldn't affect the climate had no idea of the power of life. The second was that the onset of climate change meant that Homo sapiens was getting into the biological big leagues—we were tiptoeing into the

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.

For each European, the colony had more than twenty-five Africans.

Noble Savage. Positive or negative, in both images Indians lacked what social scientists call agency—they were not actors in their own right, but passive recipients of whatever windfalls or disasters happenstance put in their way.

Prophets see the mile-long stands of photovoltaic cells in projects like Charanka as inherently destructive to communities, natural and human.

Indians as people who never changed their environment from its original wild state. Because history is change, they were people without history.

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 colonies.

Energy from the sun today is responsible for about 1 percent of India's electricity; even in Gujarat, it amounts to just 5 percent. Optimistic scenarios show its share rising to 10 percent by 2022.

Like Las Casas, Bancroft believed that Indians had existed in societies without change—except that Bancroft regarded this timelessness as an indication of sloth, not innocence.

One of George Washington's most brilliant moves was to inoculate the army against smallpox during the Valley Forge winter of '78." Without inoculation, she said, the smallpox epidemic could easily have handed the colonies back to the British. Even

Modi shifted gears, refashioning himself as a nattily dressed, tech-friendly progressive who lured major companies, foreign and Indian alike, to invest in Gujarat.

Writing in 1934, Alfred L. Kroeber, one of the founders of American anthropology, theorized that the Indians in eastern North America could not develop—could have no history—because their lives consisted of "warfare that was insane, unending, continuously attritional

Four decades later, Samuel Eliot Morison, twice a Pulitzer Prize winner, closed his two-volume European Discovery of America with the succinct claim that Indians had created no lasting monuments or institutions.

One of George Washington's most brilliant moves was to inoculate the army against smallpox during the Valley Forge winter of '78." Without inoculation, she said, the smallpox epidemic could easily have handed the colonies back to the British.

Africans themselves controlled the supply of African slaves, selling them to Europeans in the numbers they chose at prices they negotiated as equals. To be sure, Europeans tried to play off slavers against each other to get lower prices. But Africans played off European buyers against each other, too, captain against captain, nation against nation.

Throughout all of the nineteenth and much of the twentieth century, nationalism was ascendant, and historians identified history with nations, rather than with cultures, religions, or ways of life.

Communications in those days were too poor to permit us to document a transmission chain, but records show smallpox flaring in separate explosions to the south like a chain of firecrackers: Guatemala (1780–81), Colombia (1781–83), Ecuador (1783).

Broadly speaking, says to Thornton, the Boston University historian, "slaves were the only form of private, revenue-producing property recognized in African law.

The passenger pigeon remained an emblem of natural bounty, but now it also represented the squandering of that bounty. In 1947 the conservationist Aldo Leopold dedicated a monument to the pigeon near the site of its greatest recorded nesting, at which hunters slaughtered 1.5 million birds. The plaque read: "This species became extinct through the avarice and thoughtlessness of man.

Smallpox raced along the network through the Great Plains and the Rocky Mountains, ricocheting among the Mandan, Hidatsa, Ojibwe, Crow, Blackfoot, and Shoshone, a helter-skelter progress in which the virus leapfrogged from central Mexico to the shore of Hudson Bay in less than two years.