Easter Island collapsed in not just an epidemic of civil war but cannibalism. Of all the collapses of the past, I find the one that grabs people the most is that of Easter Island.

One could say that Patagonia is radically environmentalist, a company that’s founded on those principles. But there are other examples, too. I spoke at a World Wildlife Fund dinner fundraiser last October hosted and funded...

Tasmania lies 130 miles southeast of Australia. When it was first visited by Europeans in 1642, Tasmania was occupied by 4,000 hunter-gatherers related to mainland Australians, but with the simplest technology of any recent people...

Science is often misrepresented as ‘the body of knowledge acquired by performing replicated controlled experiments in the laboratory.’ Actually, science is something broader: the acquisition of reliable knowledge about the world.

Technology has to be invented or adopted.

Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies.

Many of our problems are broadly similar to those that undermined … Norse Greenland, and that many other past societies also struggled to solve. Some of those past societies failed (like the Greenland Norse) and...

Australia is the most isolated continent.

Human societies vary in lots of independent factors affecting their openness to innovation.

Biology is the science. Evolution is the concept that makes biology unique.

Science is often misrepresented as Ӧthe body of knowledge acquired by performing replicated controlled experiments in the laboratory. Ӧ Actually, science is something broader: the acquisition of reliable knowledge about the world.

The Indian civilizations of Central and North America remained entirely without pack animals; and it took thousands of years for the corn that evolved in Mexico’s climate to become modified into a corn adapted to...

Much of human history has consisted of unequal conflicts between the haves and the have-nots.

The problem is that only a tiny minority of wild plants and animals lend themselves to domestication, and those few are concentrated in about half a dozen parts of the world.

Guns, Germs and Steel

Twelve thousand years ago, everybody on earth was a hunter-gatherer; now almost all of us are farmers or else are fed by farmers. The spread of farming from those few sites of origin usually did...

Tasmanians actually abandoned some technologies that they brought with them from Australia and that persisted on the Australian mainland. For example, bone tools and the practice of fishing were both present in Tasmania at the...

No government is here forever. And there are other forces – the most potent force in our society, in fact, big business – doing good for the environment.

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...

AIDS and malaria and TB are national security issues. A worldwide program to get a start on dealing with these issues would cost about $25 billion… It’s, what, a few months in Iraq.

Science is often misrepresented as the body of knowledge acquired by performing replicated controlled experiments in the laboratory. Actually, science is something broader: the acquisition of reliable knowledge about the world.

The history of interactions among disparate peoples is what shaped the modern world through conquest, epidemics and genocide. Those collisions created reverberations that have still not died down after many centuries, and that are actively...

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.

I’d rather spend my leisure time doing what some people call my work and I call my fun.

Thanks to this availability of suitable wild mammals and plants, early peoples of the Fertile Crescent could quickly assemble a potent and balanced biological package for intensive food production. That package comprised three cereals, as...

If one of those friendly societies itself runs into environmental problems and collapses for environmental reasons, that collapse may then drag down their trade partners.

People are responding so well to the book – it’s really an upper.

Lest those islands still seem to you too remote in space and time to be relevant to our modern societies, just think about the risks… of our increasing globalization and increasing worldwide economic interdependence.

African cavalry mounted on rhinos or hippos would have made mincemeat of European cavalry mounted on horses. But it couldn’t happen.

Although native Africans domesticated some plants in the Sahel and in Ethiopia and in tropical West Africa, they acquired valuable domestic animals only later, from the north.

(On the beginning of the mid-1990s’ genocidal war in Rwanda:)Within six weeks, an estimated 800,000 Tutsi, representing about three-quarters of the Tutsi then remaining in Rwanda, or 11% of Rwanda’s total population, had been killed.

If you gave me 10 million dollars, I wouldn’t live any differently. Although nowadays I guess you’d have to raise that to 20 million to mean anything.

All human societies go through fads in which they temporarily either adopt practices of little use or else abandon practices of considerable use.

Technology causes problems as well as solves problems. Nobody has figured out a way to ensure that, as of tomorrow, technology won’t create problems. Technology simply means increased power, which is why we have the...

Why did human development proceed at such different rates on different continents for the last 13,000 years?

I’ve always been interested in a lot of things, and a lot of things at the same time, and I always tried to explain them to myself. I ask a lot of questions.

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,...