Articles in Global Change
Guns, Germs and Carbon: post-Colombian pandemics drive global cooling

Diseases introduced by Europeans after 1492 are now known to have caused massive population declines in the Americas, and the failure of ancient agricultural systems across huge regions, many of which depended on the regular …
China’s rural revolution

China’s explosive economic growth has awed the world, and is now felt in every corner of the Earth. As a result, earth systems are being changed at unprecedented rates, while bringing more people into a …
Pushing back the Anthropocene at the AGU

The Early Anthropocene Hypothesis holds that human alteration of climate began with forest clearing and rice production more than 6 thousand years ago. Here are my personal impressions of recent work supporting this hypothesis, from …
Beyond good intentions: let’s think globally!
A couple weeks ago, I was invited by UMBC to provide a new year’s message to the world, in 100 words, prefaced with “In 2009, the world should resolve to…”
Here is the video version of …
Biofuels and other grand failures of thinking locally

Biofuels started off with such good intentions – energy self-sufficiency, reversing global warming and being green. Yet biofuels are now being blamed for creating much bigger problems than they ever would have solved. How did …
Land Use and Climate Change
by Erica Antill
At the end of August, my graduate adviser, Erle Ellis, was invited to a joint US-German conference in Berlin, Germany: Tough Choices: Land Use under a Changing Climate. (http://www.nkgcf.org/usg08) The NSF, which funded …
Anthromes on the cover of Frontiers in Ecology

At last! After nearly one year online, my paper with Navin Ramankutty introducing Anthropogenic Biomes (Anthromes), is now in print in the October issue of Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment. Even better, it is …
Is managing global climate now our duty?
We live in interesting times. We’ve now realized that our activities are changing global climate and thereby harming both ourselves and the rest of the biosphere. And we are begining to do something about it. …
The Earth We Created – an interview
Here is an interview about my work with anthropogenic biomes and opinions about sustainable management of the environment:
http://knowledge.allianz.com/search.cfm?156/the-environmental-impact-of-population-growth
The reporter, Thilo Kunzemann, of Allianz Knowledge, did a great job by asking me some hard questions- they …
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