Quotes from Charles C. Mann

The product of demographic calamity, the newly created wilderness was indeed beautiful. But it was built on Indian graves and every bit as much a ruin as the temples of the Maya.

Visitors are always amazed that you can walk in the forest here and constantly pick fruit from trees," Clement said. "That's because people planted them. They're walking through old orchards

What this suggests is that, contrary to economists, the discount rate accounts for only part of our relationship to the future. People are concerned about future generations. Even if the logic is hard to parse, they think that humanity's fate is worth more than an apartment.

The only thing more mysterious than failing to invent the wheel would be inventing the wheel and then failing to use it. But that is exactly what the Indians did. Presumably countless thousands of people rolled the toylike figurines back and forth. How could none of them have thought of making their wheels bigger and more useful?

There have been water highways in the forest since before Columbus.

Almost everyone agreed that the new name was a big improvement, logically speaking. Unfortunately, nobody used it. Not for the first time in Native American history, the confusing, incorrect name prevailed.

Indians might have bred the modern peach palm by hybridizing palms from several areas, including the Peruvian Amazon. Whatever the origin, people domesticated the species thousands of years ago and then spread it rapidly, first through Amazonia and then up into the Caribbean and Central America.

European and U.S. environmentalists insist that the forest should never be cut down or used—it should remain, as far as possible, a land without people. In an ecological version of therapeutic nihilism, they want to leave the river basin to its own devices. Brazilians I have encountered are usually less than enthusiastic about this proposal.

Antoine-Augustin Parmentier, the Johnny Appleseed of S. tuberosum.

Even with animals, though, the Olmec would not have had much use for wheeled vehicles. Their country is so wet and boggy that Stirling's horses sank to their chests in mud; boats were a primary means of transportation until recently. In addition one might note that Mesoamerican societies were not alone in their wheel-blindness. Although Mesopotamia had the wheel in about 4000 B.C., nearby Egypt did not use the wheel until two thousand years later, despite being in close contact

Evolution has provided the human brain with marvelous tools for detecting and resolving fast-moving, clearly visible, small-scale, near-future risks. By the same token, the brain is easily overwhelmed by slow, abstract, large, long-term problems.

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 for heat and power.

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries many Amazonian Indians, the Yanomamo among them, abandoned their farm villages, which had made them sitting ducks for European diseases and slave trading. They hid out in the forest, preserving their freedom by moving from place to place; in what Balée calls "agricultural regression," these hunted peoples necessarily gave up farming and kept body and soul together by foraging.

Most of the salt occurred in the sediments on the swamp bottoms. To make the water potable, the Maya laid a layer of crushed limestone atop the sediments, effectively paving over the salt. As the researchers noted, the work had to be done before the Maya could move in and set up their milpas and gardens.

These old forests, called fallows, have traditionally been classified as high forest (pristine forest on well-drained ground) by Western researchers," Balée wrote in 2003. But they "would not exist" without "human agricultural activities.

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.

Landscape," in this case, is meant exactly—Amazonian Indians literally created the ground beneath their feet.

Understanding that nature is not normative does not mean that anything goes. The fears come from the mistaken identification of wildness with the forest itself. Instead the landscape is an arena for the interaction of natural and social forces, a kind of display, and one that like all displays is not fully under the control of its authors.

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. My ancestor Billington's great-grandchildren may not have realized it, but the impenetrable sweep of dark forest admired by Thoreau was something that Billington never saw. Later, of course, Europeans stripped New England almost bare of trees.

They build their monuments as if their intent was never to finish them," the Spanish academic Polo de Ondegardo marveled in 1571.

terra preta is "not associated with a particular parent soil type or environmental condition," suggesting that it was not produced by natural processes. Another clue to its human origin is the broken ceramics with which it is usually mixed. "They practiced agriculture here for centuries," Glaser told me. "But instead of destroying the soil, they improved it, and that is something we don't know how to do today" in tropical soils.

Smith returned to Maine and then England. He had a map drawn of what he had seen, persuaded Prince Charles to look at it, and curried favor with him by asking him to award British names to all the Indian settlements. Then he put the maps in the books he wrote to extol his adventures. In this way Patuxet acquired its English name, Plymouth, after the city in England (it was then spelled "Plimoth").

that both sides of an uncoerced exchange gain from it.

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.