Quotes from Charles C. Mann

Scientists have established huge numbers of links between particular diseases and snippets of DNA, but in the great majority of cases, this has not yet been translated into treatments that can help cure patients. These treatments will come - tomorrow, or the day after.

The queue of activists, interest groups, and ordinary people wringing their hands over what a President Donald Trump might do in office is long, and environmentalists are at the front of the line.

Indeed, for all Donald Trump's railing about the efforts to curb climate change, nobody in his administration seems to have paid any attention to what they actually are.

Farmers can't plant much more land because almost every accessible acre of arable soil is already in use. Nor can the use of fertilizer be increased: it is already being overused everywhere except some parts of Africa, and the runoff is polluting rivers, lakes, and oceans.

He that speaks seldom and opportunely, being as good as his word, is the only man they love," Wood explained. Character

Those looking for a tale of cultural superiority can find it in zero; those looking for failure can find it in the wheel. Neither line of argument is useful, though. What

Until Columbus, Indians were a keystone species in most of the hemisphere. Annually burning undergrowth, clearing and replanting forests, building canals and raising fields, hunting bison and netting salmon, growing maize, manioc, and the Eastern Agricultural Complex, Native Americans had been managing their environment for thousands of years.

visitors to Andean history note certain ways of doing things that recur in ways striking to the outsider, sometimes in one variant, sometimes in another, like the themes in a jazz improvisation.

The Wizard and the Prophet is a book about the way knowledgeable people might think about the choices to come, rather than what will happen in this or that scenario. It is a book about the future that makes no predictions.

Nature's success stories, they are like Gause's protozoans; the world is their petri dish. Their populations grow at a terrific rate; they take over large areas, engulfing their environment as if no force opposed them. Then they hit a barrier. They drown in their own wastes. They starve from lack of food. Something figures out how to eat them.

think of the adherents of these two perspectives as Wizards and Prophets—Wizards unveiling technological fixes, Prophets decrying the consequences of our heedlessness. Borlaug has become a model for the Wizards. Vogt was in many ways the founder of the Prophets.

testament to the human capacity to adapt (or, less charitably, to our ability to operate in ignorance).

That one's as much Master as another, and since Men are all made of the same Clay there should be no Distinction or Superiority among them. [Emphasis

How could these hierarchical, acquisitive, market-oriented, monotheistic, ethnocentric newcomers have absorbed ideas and customs from the egalitarian, reciprocal, noncapitalistic, pantheistic, ethnocentric natives? The

Both choices led to social unrest: the Jacquerie (France, 1358), the Revolt of Ciompi (Florence, 1378), the Peasants' Revolt (England, 1381), the Catalonian Rebellion (Spain, 1395), and dozens of flare-ups in the German states.

What Vogt saw in Peru would crystallize his picture of the world and the human place in it—a vision of limitation. It would bring him to the Prophet's essential belief: humans have no special dispensation to escape biological constraints.

Colonial writers knew that disease tilled the virgin soil of the Americas countless times in the sixteenth century. But what they did not, could not, know is that the epidemics shot out like ghastly arrows from the limited areas they saw to every corner of the hemisphere, wreaking destruction in places that never appeared in the European historical record.

the indigenous arsenal of cure.

I asked what she thought that voice might sound like—the voice of people attuned to tension and cloth, people who saw the stones of the world charged with spirit, people who had never seen animals larger than a llama, people who broke the world into complementary halves and thought more in terms of up and down than north and south, people who took in information about the world through their fingers. "Foreign," she said.

By the end of the first millennium A.D., Wari techniques had reclaimed more than a million acres of cropland from mountainsides that almost anywhere else would have been regarded as impossibly dry, steep, and cold.

North of Kaan, half a dozen small cities improved agricultural conditions by lifting up entire fields and carving out rain-retaining terraces on dry hillsides. Kaan itself dug out a series of reservoirs, established neighborhoods around each one, and linked the ensemble with roads and waterways.

Because Wayna Qhapaq had not actually married Washkar's mother—the union was properly incestuous but not properly legitimate—the new Inka demanded that his mother participate ex post facto in a wedding ceremony with his father's mummy.

By the twentieth century biologists were stoutly denying its existence. The "open, park-like woods" seen by early settlers, Harvard naturalist Hugh Raup asserted in 1937, were not caused by fire; they "have been, from time immemorial, characteristic of vast areas in North America.

More than 80 percent of the world's energy now comes from fossil fuels, and every bit of it is mined from the earth.