Today Charles Darwin is best known for establishing the fact of evolution and for recognizing the major role of natural selection in driving it.

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.

Why is it that you white people developed so much cargo and brought it to New Guinea, but we black people had little cargo of our own?

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

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.

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 make a difference.

To science we owe dramatic changes in our smug self-image. Astronomy taught us that our Earth is not the center of the universe, but merely one of nine planets circling one of billions of stars. From biology we learned that humans were not specially created by God but evolved along with tens of millions of other species.