Quotes from Charles C. Mann

This symbiosis was fantastically improbable. In 3.5 billion years of history and trillions of trillions of interactions between protozoa and cyanobacteria it seems to have happened exactly once. But this single incident had huge effects—it is responsible for the existence of plants.

Fire benefits plants that need sunlight, while inhibiting those that love the cool gloaming of the forest floor; it encourages the animals that need those plants even as it discourages others; in turn, predator populations rise and fall.

For a geophysicist, what's going on is stunning," my friend told me. "We used to believe these systems needed thousands of years to make these shifts. Instead it's happening so fast that it's terrifying. Conceivably, you could start seeing truly bad effects in a hundred years.

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 eighty years of history in these regions, it is hard to view these moves as enduring successes.

On the one hand, forcing other people to clean up our mess violates basic notions of fairness. On the other hand, actually preventing climate-change problems would require societies today to make investments, some of them costly, to benefit people in the faraway future. It's like asking teenagers to save for their grandchildren's retirement. Or, maybe, for somebody else's grandchildren. Not many would do it.

Most geoglyphs seem to be late, dating to only a few hundred years before Columbus. The ubiquity of the geoglyphs may indicate that some type of cultural movement swept over earlier social arrangements. "But whatever was there, these societies have been completely forgotten

Could the doomsayers have been correct, but rung the alarm a little too early? After all, Earth is finite, so the amount of energy it contains must also be finite. Isn't it wholly rational to expect fossil fuels to run out?

Rather than the thick, unbroken, monumental snarl of trees imagined by Thoreau, the great eastern forest was an ecological kaleidoscope of garden plots, blackberry rambles, pine barrens, and spacious groves of chestnut, hickory, and oak. The first Europeans in Ohio found woodlands that resembled English parks—they could drive carriages through the trees.

Anything goes now, apparently," Fiedel told me. "The lunatics have taken over the asylum.

Hubbert, one of the nation's most important petroleum scientists, built much of the intellectual framework for the environmental movement. He was a Wizard who became a Prophet.

In the Disney version, Smith returns to England after a bad colonist shoots him in the shoulder. In truth, he did leave Virginia in 1609 for medical treatment, but only because he somehow blew up a bag of gunpowder while wearing it around his neck.

It's only been 400 years since they vanished," he told me. "Why does nobody here know anything about them?

Now, these were hungry people who were very interested in acquiring protein. The simplest explanation for the lack of passenger pigeon bones is a lack of passenger pigeons. Prior to 1492, this was a rare species.

For obvious reasons its farmers did not relish the prospect of buffalo herds trampling through their fields. Nor did they want deer, moose, or passenger pigeons eating the maize. They hunted them until they were scarce around their homes. At the same time, they tried to encourage these species to grow in number farther away, where they would be useful. "The net result was to keep that kind of animal at arm's length

The post-Columbian abundance of bison," in his view, was largely due to "Eurasian diseases that decreased [Indian] hunting." The massive, thundering herds were pathological, something that the land had not seen before and was unlikely to see again.

After Columbus everything changed. The Indian population collapsed. Clams and mussels exploded in number; they also grew larger. Game overran the land. Sir Francis Drake sailed into San Francisco's harbor in 1579 and saw a land of plenty.

Historians estimate that in 1800 all of the steam engines in Britain could generate perhaps 50,000 horsepower. By 1870 the figure had soared to more than 1.3 million horsepower, a twenty-six-fold increase. Nobody was going to wait for solar enthusiasts to fiddle with mirrors that didn't work on rainy days. Mouchot was trying to persuade society to switch from a stable stock of coal to an inconstant flow of sunlight. And society was not terribly interested.

Indian fire had its greatest impact in the middle of the continent, which Native Americans transformed into a prodigious game farm.

Smoke rose into the sky in great, juddering pillars. In

Nonetheless, ecologists and archaeologists increasingly agree that the destruction of Native Americans also destroyed the ecosystems they managed. Throughout the eastern forest the open, park-like landscapes observed by the first Europeans quickly filled in. Because they did not burn the land with the same skill and frequency as its previous occupants, the forests grew thicker. Left untended, maize fields filled in with weeds, then bushes and trees.

The belief that human life will continue, even if we ourselves die, is one of the underpinnings of society.

Even the idea of contagion itself was novel. "We had no belief that one Man could give [a disease] to another," the Blackfoot raider remembered, "any more than a wounded Man could give his wound to another." Because they knew of no protective measures, the toll was even higher than it would have been.

The virgin forest was not encountered in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries," wrote historian Stephen Pyne, "it was invented in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries." Far from destroying pristine wilderness, that is, Europeans bloodily created it.

Valencia's plan was conversion by proxy: he and the rest of the twelve would open the eyes of the Indian priesthood to the beauties of the true faith, gaining their adherence by reasoned theological discussion, and then the priests would fan out and spread the Gospel in their native tongue.