Quotes from Charles C. Mann

Likely the milpa cannot be replicated on an industrial scale. But by studying its essential features, researchers may be able to smooth the rough ecological edges of conventional agriculture. "Mesoamerica still has much to teach us," Wilkes said.

The epicenter of what became known as "rubber fever" was Salem, Massachusetts, north of Boston. In 1825 a young Salem entrepreneur imported five hundred pairs of rubber shoes from Brazil. Ten years later, the number of imported shoes had grown to more than 400,000, about one for every forty Americans

Without any apparent volition by Cortés, the great city lost at least a third of its population to the epidemic, including Cuitlahuac.

Amazonia was not a dead end where the environment ineluctably strangled cultures in their cradles. It was a source of social and technological innovation of continental importance. By about four thousand years ago the Indians of the lower Amazon were growing crops—at least 138 of them, according to a recent tally. The staple then as now was manioc (or cassava, as it is sometimes called), a hefty root that Brazilians roast, chop, fry, ferment, and grind into an amazing variety of foods.

The first European adventurers in the Western Hemisphere did not make careful population counts, but they repeatedly described indigenous America as a crowded, jostling place—"a beehive of people," as Las Casas put it in 1542. To Las Casas, the Americas seemed so thick with people "that it looked as if God has placed all of or the greater part of the entire human race in these countries.

Felling a single four-foot tree with an indigenous stone axe would take 115 hours—nearly three weeks of eight-hour days. With a steel axe, workers could topple the same tree in less than three hours.

The consequences were horrific; Ireland was transformed into a post-apocalyptic landscape. Destitute men lined the roads in their rags, sleeping in crude shelters dug into roadside ditches. People ate dogs, rats, and tree bark. Reports of cannibalism were frequent and perhaps accurate. Entire families died in their homes and were eaten by feral pets.

many of the racial alarmists were also leaders in the nation's new conservation movement. The blue-blooded toffs who feared that the noble and superior white race was menaced by unwashed rabble also saw wild landscapes as noble and superior wildernesses menaced by the same rabble. Prizing the expert governance of resources, they found little difference between protecting forests and cleaning up the human gene pool.

According to Cieza de León, Wayna Qhapaq, Atawallpa's father, died when "a great plague of smallpox broke out [in 1524 or 1525], so severe that more than 200,000 died of it, for it spread to all parts of the kingdom.

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.

The Mi'kmaq in New Brunswick and Nova Scotia scoffed at the notion of European superiority. If Christian civilization was so wonderful, why were its inhabitants all trying to settle somewhere else?

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.

export of food from Ireland during the famine: 430,000 tons of grain in 1846 and 1847, the two worst years. "The Almighty indeed sent the potato blight," nationalist leader John Mitchel thundered, "but the English created the famine." Examples

Unsurprisingly, people with stone implements wanted metal tools as soon as they encountered them—the prospective reduction in workload was staggering

In all of history, humankind has been able to domesticate only twenty-five mammals, a dozen or so birds, and, possibly, a lizard.

As for Tawantinsuyu, smallpox wiped out Wayna Qhapaq and his court, which led to civil war as the survivors contested the spoils. The soldiers who died in the battle between Atawallpa and Washkar were as much victims of smallpox as those who died from the virus itself.

The better way, he decided, was to raise yields all over the nation—to target Mexico as a whole, rather than only the Bajío. 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.

According to Peter Stahl, an anthropologist at the State University of New York in Binghamton, "lots" of researchers believe that "what the eco-imagery would like to picture as a pristine, untouched Urwelt [primeval world] in fact has been managed by people for millennia.

Steel tools, he told me, "had a major, transformative effect on all the trade and marriage relations in a whole area. They led to new trade networks, they led to new political alliances, they even led to war.

Britain had just converted its entire fleet from the unsteady power of wind to the constant force provided by coal. Now, Churchill declared, Britain had to transform its navy a second time. Burning a pound of fuel oil produces about twice as much energy as burning a pound of coal. An oil-fueled ship could thus travel roughly twice as far as a coal-fueled ship of similar size. Oil's greater energy density meant that it, rather than coal, was the fossil fuel of choice.

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.

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.

Steel to the Yanomamo was like gold for the Spanish," Ferguson said. "It could push fairly ordinary people to do things that they wouldn't consider doing otherwise.

Despite the brevity of its existence, La Isabela marked the beginning of an enormous change: the creation of the modern Caribbean landscape.