Quotes About Innovation

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.

Amazonians practiced a kind of agro-forestry, farming with trees, unlike any kind of agriculture in Europe, Africa, or Asia.

Vaclav Smil has calculated that fertilizer from the Haber-Bosch process was responsible for "the prevailing diets of nearly 45% of the world's population." Roughly speaking, this is equivalent to feeding about 3.25 billion people. More than 3 billion men, women, and children—an incomprehensibly vast cloud of dreams, fears, and explorations—owe their existence to two early-twentieth-century German chemists.

Farmers have injected so much synthetic fertilizer into their fields that soil and groundwater nitrogen levels have risen worldwide. Today, almost half of all the crops consumed by humankind depend on nitrogen derived from synthetic fertilizer. Another way of putting this is to say that Haber and Bosch enabled our species to extract an additional 3 billion people's worth of food from the same land.

it suggests that for a long time clever people who knew tricks that we have yet to learn used big chunks of Amazonia nondestructively. Faced with an ecological problem, the Indians fixed it. Rather than adapt to Nature, they created it. They were in the midst of terraforming the Amazon when Columbus showed up and ruined everything.

Having grown separately for millennia, the [orginal] Americans were a boundless sea of novel ideas, drea,s, stories, philosophies, religions, ,oralities, discoveries, and all other products of the mind....Here and there we see clues of what might have been. Pacific Northwest Indian artists carved beautiful masks, boxes, bas-relief S, and totem poles within the dictates of an elaborate aesthetic syste, based on an ovoid shapes that has no name in European languages.

In the second of Road's main innovations, Vogt summed up the relationship between humanity and this global environment with a single concept: carrying capacity.

The Olmec, Maya, and other Mesoamerican societies were world pioneers in mathematics and astronomy—but they did not use the wheel. Amazingly, they had invented the wheel but did not employ it for any purpose other than children's toys. Those looking for a tale of cultural superiority can find it in zero; those looking for failure can find it in the wheel.

Every society, big or little, misses out on "obvious" technologies. The lacunae have enormous impact on people's lives—imagine Europe with efficient plows or the Maya with iron tools—but not much effect on the scale of a civilization's endeavors, as shown by both European and Maya history.

Man minus the machine is a slave," proclaimed Henry Ford, touting his new tractor. "Man plus the machine is a free man.

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.

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?

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

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

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.

But the new picture doesn't automatically legitimate burning down the forest. Instead it suggests that for a long time clever people who knew tricks that we have yet to learn used big chunks of Amazonia nondestructively. Faced with an ecological problem, the Indians fixed it. Rather than adapt to Nature, they created it. They were in the midst of terra-forming the Amazon when Columbus showed up and ruined everything.

Slash-and-char is very clever," Ogawa told me. "Nobody in Europe or Asia that I know of ever understood the properties of charcoal in soil.

Plots with charcoal alone grew little, but those treated with a combination of charcoal and fertilizer yielded as much as 880 percent more than plots with fertilizer alone.

Faced with an ecological problem, the Indians fixed it. Rather than adapt to Nature, they created it. They were in the midst of terraforming the Amazon when Columbus showed up and ruined everything.

we are always slow in admitting any great change of which we do not see the intermediate steps

we are always slow in admitting great changes of which we do not see the steps.

The imagination is one of the highest prerogatives of man.

It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.