Quotes About Environment

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.

Rocketing up the growth curve, humankind every year takes ever more of the earth's richness. An often quoted estimate by a team of Stanford biologists is that humans grab "about 40% of the present net primary production in terrestrial ecosystems"—40 percent of the entire world's output of land plants and animals.

Inexperienced in agriculture, the Pilgrims were also not woodspeople; indeed, they were so incurious about their environment that Bradford felt obliged to comment in his journal when Francis Billington . . . climbed to the top of a tall tree to look around. As Thoreau noted with disgust, the colonists landed at Plymouth on December 16, but it was not until January 8 that one of them went as far away as two miles--and even then the traveler was, again, Francis Billington.

By mining the forests upstream for firewood and floating the logs downriver to the city, they were removing ground cover and increasing the likelihood of catastrophic floods. When these came, as they later did, kings who gained their legitimacy from their claims to control the weather would face angry questioning from their subjects.

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. As Cahokia shows, they made mistakes. But by and large they modified their landscapes in stable, supple, resilient ways.

becomes as hot as the sun? Earth, he knew, reflects some heat back into space. But why isn't all of it reflected? What keeps our planet cozily warm, Goldilocks-style, and not too hot or too cold?

Prophets see the mile-long stands of photovoltaic cells in projects like Charanka as inherently destructive to communities, natural and human.

Indians as people who never changed their environment from its original wild state. Because history is change, they were people without history.

Road to Survival, "environment" meant not the external natural factors that affected humans but the external natural factors that were affected by humans. Instead of Nature molding people, Vogt envisioned people molding Nature, usually negatively. And by "environment" he meant not a particular place, but a global totality.

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.

Tree planting, advocates say, is simpler and less risky than high-tech Wizardly schemes.

There are two ideas at the base of today's globe-spanning environmental movement. One is that Homo sapiens, like every other species, is bound by biological laws. The second is that one of these laws is that no species can long exceed the environment's carrying capacity.

To we moderns the sensation of being in a constructed environment is so ubiquitous as to be invisible—in the cocoon of our strip malls and automobiles, we are like the fish that cannot feel the water through which they swim. In Cahokia's day it was different. A thousand years ago it was the only place for a thousand miles in which one could be completely enveloped in an artificial landscape.

Vogt sees the city reaching across the dry lake bed to engulf the last fields and streams and says: Hold it back! We cannot let our species overwhelm the natural systems on which we all depend! Borlaug sees the pitiful scrim of wheat and maize on the tract of land and says: How can we give people a better chance to thrive? Vogt wants to protect the land; Borlaug wants to equip its occupants.

In the 1930s, Sylvanus G. Morley of Harvard, probably the most celebrated Mayanist of his day, espoused what is still the best-known theory: The Maya collapsed because they overshot the carrying capacity of their environment. They exhausted their resource base, began to die of starvation and thirst, and fled their cities en masse, leaving them as silent warnings of the perils of ecological hubris.

Their alarm was easy to understand. The law would give control of a substantial part of the Amazon to its residents

Traditionally, archaeologists have regarded the wet tropics as unpromising. Because Amazonia has little stone or metal, "99 percent of material culture was perishable," Erickson told me. "Cane, chonta [palm wood], bones, basketry, wood—none of it survives these conditions. The whole culture, even if it was there for thousands of years, seems to be gone.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

The key to terra preta's long-term fertility, Glaser says, is charcoal: terra preta contains up to sixty-four times more of it than surrounding red earth.