A blueprint for disaster in any society is when the elite are capable of insulating themselves.
The single most important problem is our misguided focus on identifying the single most important problem!
Australia is the most isolated continent.
All human societies go through fads in which they temporarily either adopt practices of little use or else abandon practices of considerable use.
Biology is the science. Evolution is the concept that makes biology unique.
Eurasia ended up with the most domesticated animal species in part because it’s the world’s largest land mass and offered the most wild species to begin with.
Federal elections happen every two years in this country. Presidential elections every four years. And four years just isn’t long enough to dismantle all the environmental laws we’ve got in this country.
When you have seen the errors in which you live, you will understand the good that we have done you by coming to your land by order of his Majesty the King of Spain. Our Lord permitted that your pride should be brought low and that no Indian should be able to offend a Christian.
One way to explain the complexity and unpredictability of historical systems, despite their ultimate determinacy, is to note that long chains of causation may separate final effects from ultimate causes lying outside the domain of that field of science.
Not until the beginning of the 20th century did Europe’s urban populations finally become self-sustaining: before then, constant immigration of healthy peasants from the countryside was necessary to make up for the constant deaths of city dwellers from crowd diseases.
In parts of Montana, salt concentrations in soil water, have reached those double those of seawater.
Recent discoveries about apes suggest, however, that a gorilla or common chimp stands at least as good a chance being murdered as the average human.
We’re uncomfortable about considering history as a science. It’s classified as a social science, which is considered not quite scientific.
Measles and TB evolved from diseases of our cattle, influenza from a disease of pigs, and smallpox possibly from a disease of camels. The Americas had very few native domesticated animal species from which humans could acquire such diseases.
Twenty years ago, you might have been pessimistic and said there’s no hope. But these days, some of our very biggest companies are acting remarkably cleanly. And in some cases, although not all cases, the CEOs are the driving forces behind that.
I personally am not conscious of my accent.
Some people have much more pull than other people. But when I say that the public has ultimate responsibility, I’m not saying it in a moral sense. I’m just saying it in the sense of what is it that’s really going to bring change.
The United States has long thought of itself as the land of infinite plenty, and historically we did have abundant resources. But now we are gradually exhausting our fisheries, our topsoil, our water. On top of that, we’re coming to the end of world resources.
Take air quality in the United States today: It’s about 30 percent better than it was 25 years ago, even though there are now more people driving more cars.
Thousands of years ago, humans domesticated every possible large wild mammal species fulfilling all those criteria and worth domesticating, with the result that there have been no valuable additions of domestic animals in recent times, despite the efforts of modern science.