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 my first book... and I began putting more work into environmental history.

It invites a search for ultimate causes: why were Europeans, rather than Africans or Native Americans, the ones to end up with guns, the nastiest germs, and steel?

The past was still a Golden Age, of ignorance, while the present is an Iron Age of willful bliss.

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

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 what is it that's really going to bring change.

History as well as life itself is complicated -- neither life nor history is an enterprise for those who seek simplicity and consistency.

History followed different courses for different peoples because of differences among peoples' environments, not because of biological differences among peoples themselves