I decided that now is the time to start doing the things that really interest me and I find important. It was in the 10 years of the MacArthur grant that I began working on...

I read that a false alarm of a tsunami in Hawaii would cost about $68 million.

Eurasia’s main axis is east/west, whereas the main axis of the Americas is north/south. Eurasia’s east/west axis meant that species domesticated in one part of Eurasia could easily spread thousands of miles at the same...

To me, the conclusion that the public has the ultimate responsibility for the behavior of even the biggest businesses is empowering and hopeful, rather than disappointing. My conclusion is not a moralistic one about who...

Starbucks goes to a great effort, and pays twice as much for its coffee as its competitors do, and is very careful to help coffee producers in developing countries grow coffee without pesticides and in...

We can’t manipulate some stars while maintaining other stars as controls; we can’t start and stop ice ages, and we can’t experiment with designing and evolving dinosaurs.

The metaphor is so obvious. Easter Island isolated in the Pacific Ocean — once the island got into trouble, there was no way they could get free. There was no other people from whom they...

The main thing that gives me hope is the media. We have radio, TV, magazines, and books, so we have the possibility of learning from societies that are remote from us, like Somalia. We turn...

Introspection and preserved writings give us far more insight into the ways of past humans than we have into the ways of past dinosaurs. For that reason, I’m optimistic that we can eventually arrive at...

The rate of human invention is faster, and the rate of cultural loss is slower, in areas occupied by many competing societies with many individuals and in contact with societies elsewhere.

Livestock adopted in Africa were Eurasian species that came in from the north. Africa’s long axis, like that of the Americas, is north/south rather than east/west. Those Eurasian domestic mammals spread southward very slowly in...

Humans have been evolving for millions of years longer in Africa than in Europe, and even anatomically modern Homo sapiens may have reached Europe from Africa only within the last 50,000 years. If time were...

…neither life nor history is an enterprise for those who seek simplicity and consistency.

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,...

All of Africa’s mammalian domesticates – cattle, sheep, goats, horses, even dogs – entered sub-Saharan Africa from the north, from Eurasia or North Africa.

Isn’t language loss a good thing, because fewer languages mean easier communication among the world’s people? Perhaps, but it’s a bad thing in other respects. Languages differ in structure and vocabulary, in how they express...

I personally am not conscious of my accent.

The broadest pattern of history – namely, the differences between human societies on different continents – seems to me to be attributable to differences among continental environments, and not to biological differences among peoples themselves.

With the MacArthur grant, I realized that people have high expectations of me, that they were placing me in this group of achievers. I compared what I’d actually achieved in my life with what I...

Native Americans had only stone and wooden weapons and no animals that could be ridden. Those military advantages repeatedly enabled troops of a few dozen mounted Spaniards to defeat Indian armies numbering in the thousands.

The southward advance of native African farmers with Central African crops halted in Natal, beyond which Central African crops couldn’t grow – with enormous consequences for the recent history of South Africa.

Two types of choices seem to me to have been crucial in tipping the outcomes [of the various societies’ histories] towards success or failure: long-term planning and willingness to reconsider core values. On reflection we...

What did the last Easter Islander say as he chopped down the last tree? The Easter Islanders didn’t have anthropologists.

People are not helpless in the face of big business. It’s up to the public to say what it wants. Only when the public bans single-hulled oil tankers from American waters, only when the public...

Above all, it seems to me wrongheaded and dangerous to invoke historical assumptions about environmental practices of native peoples in order to justify treating them fairly. … By invoking this assumption [i.e., that they were/are...

Even to this day, no native Australian animal species and only one plant species-the macadamia nut-have proved suitable for domestication. There still are no domestic kangaroos.

Domesticated plants and animals yield far more calories per acre than do wild habitats, in which most species are inedible to humans.

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.

Domestic animals revolutionized land transport. They also revolutionized agriculture, by letting one farmer plough and manure much more land than the farmer could till or manure by the farmer’s own efforts.

Why were there far more species of domesticated animals in Eurasia than in the Americas? The Americas harbor over a thousand native wild mammal species, so you might initially suppose that the Americas offered plenty...

History as well as life itself is complicated — neither life nor history is an enterprise for those who seek simplicity and consistency.

How is it that Pizarro and Cortes reached the New World at all, before Aztec and Inca conquistadors could reach Europe? That outcome depended partly on technology in the form of oceangoing ships. Europeans had...

Australia is the smallest continent, and most of it can support only small human populations because of low rainfall and productivity.

Perhaps our greatest distinction as a species is our capacity, unique among animals, to make counter-evolutionary choices.

why, for instance, only 2 per cent of Europeans contract the disease as opposed to 13 per cent of African Americans, 17 per cent of U.S. Latinos and up to 50 per cent of Native...

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...

We study the injustices of history for the same reason that we study genocide, and for the same reason that psychologists study the minds of murderers and rapists… to understand how those evil things came...

Infectious diseases introduced with Europeans, like smallpox and measles, spread from one Indian tribe to another, far in advance of Europeans themselves, and killed an estimated 95% of the New World’s Indian population.

People often ask, “What is the single most important environmental population problem facing the world today?” A flip answer would be, “The single most important problem is our misguided focus on identifying the single most...

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...

Differences between the Old and New Worlds in domesticated plants,especially in large-seeded cereals, are qualitatively similar to the differences in domesticated mammals, though the difference is not so extreme.

I’ve worked very hard in this book to keep the lines of communication open. I don’t want to turn someone away from this information for partisan political reasons.

It’s striking that Native Americans evolved no devastating epidemic diseases to give to Europeans in return for the many devastating epidemic diseases that Indians received from the Old World.

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...

The Norse held values that would not allow them to deal with… pagans and certainly would not let them eat fish and hunt ringed seals the way these pagans did. So here is a case...

The metaphor is so obvious. Easter Island, isolated in the Pacific Ocean ”’ once the island got into trouble, there was no way they could get free. There was no other people from whom they...

In modern times, Australia was the sole continent still inhabited only by hunter-gatherers… Native Australia had no farmers or herders, no writing, no metal tools, and no political organization beyond the level of the tribe...

[T]he values to which people cling most stubbornly under inappropriate conditions are those values that were previously the source of their greatest triumphs.

For anyone inclined to caricature environmental history as ‘environmental determinism,’ the contrasting histories of the Dominican Republic and Haiti provide a useful antidote. Yes, environmental problems do constrain human societies, but the societies’ responses also...

for men and 5′ for women.