Is the Anthropocene recent? Defined solely by the accelerating impacts of an industrial society that threatens the future of both humanity and the biosphere (Barnosky et al., 2012,  Rockstrom et al., 2009)? A closer look at the history of human use of land yields a very different story.  ... [More]

Human populations grow until they overshoot their carrying capacity and collapse. Game over.  Thank you Malthus! (1798; and Ehrlich 1968). Not so fast! There’s something wrong with this story: it almost never happens.   Human populations do collapse – but not because of p... [More]

"Farming is hard work, so why do more of it?” That is what many early farmers were probably thinking when deciding between fuller bellies or keeping their long off-seasons of leisure time-- at least from the perspective of Ester Boserup. Since its 1965 release, Ester Boserup's seminal study T... [More]

"So how did the biosphere become anthropogenic anyway?” asked an astute audience member at my 2007 AGU presentation (powerpoint).  I had just given a presentation on my work with Navin Ramankutty demonstrating that human populations and their use of land have reshaped most of the terrestr... [More]

When did rice change the planet?  Rice is the most important food crop on earth, feeding more than half of all humans.  Most is produced in Asia in the flooded paddy systems that form the core of the most intensively-managed of all ancient agricultural anthromes, the rice villages, where i... [More]

If you still think of rural China as remote, traditional, and unchanged for millennia, think again.  China’s ancient village landscapes are among the most dynamic and densely populated on Earth, with a global extent more than twice that all of Earth’s cities combined (2.5 million km... [More]

"How do we feed a growing world without destroying the planet?" asks Jon Foley’s new 3 minute video (see below).   It’s a great question.  To get enough food for our existing billions, we already use about 40% of Earth’s ice-free land to produce crops and livestock.&nbs...; [More]

Will the census of the future ask homeowners how many trees they have on their property? With humanity now faced with a changing climate under even the most stringent efforts to reduce carbon emissions, carbon accounting has become a hot topic for scientists, politicians and economists.  While... [More]