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Started reading
October 10, 2019
Until about 75,000 years ago—that is, for the majority of our existence on Earth—humankind was restricted to Africa,
As recently as ten thousand years ago we numbered perhaps 5 million,
10,000 years ago, give or take a millennium—our species swung around the first inflection point, with the invention of agriculture.
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.
humans grab “about 40% of the present net primary production in terrestrial ecosystems”—40
Gause’s S-shaped curve. We began rising up the steepest part of the slope in the sixteenth or seventeenth century.
Economists talk about the “discount rate,” which is their term for the way that humans almost always value the local, concrete, and immediate over the faraway, abstract, and distant in time.
Given the discount rate, nothing could be more understandable than a government’s failure to grapple with, say, climate change.
Shouting from the edge of the petri dish, Borlaug and Vogt might as well be trying to hold back the tide.
