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The establishment of North American settlements added a new, confusing dimension to England’s comparisons with Spain. The references pushed against themselves: The English were and weren’t the Spanish. The Irish were and weren’t Native Americans. Some of the most vicious Irish haters imagined the English flying across the Atlantic on a humanitarian mission saving noble innocent Indians from the Spanish. “The people of America crye out to us,” wrote Richard Hakluyt, an English historian and ceaseless promoter of colonialism, “to come and helpe them.” There was “no doubt” that were the queen to take the “firme of America,” all the “natural people there with all humanitie, curtesie, and freedoms” will place themselves under her authority and “revolte cleane from the Spaniarde.”

— America, América by Greg Grandin

The English also confirmed their own goodness by reading Las Casas on Spanish badness. Las Casas’s Brevísima Relación had been translated into English many times throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. As relentless as a modern slasher film, with its descriptions of Spanish hounds ripping a “little sweet babie” to shreds, the book helped give rise to what scholars later called the Black Legend. Against Spanish avariciousness and excess, England saw itself as moderate. Against Catholic decadence and superstition, Protestants were modern and rational. Cruel Spain. Just England. Yet the English also read Las Casas to rouse themselves to violence against the Irish. The Puritan translation of A Brief History urged Cromwell to avenge the “twenty millions of the souls of the slaughter’d Indians” destroyed by “Popish Cruelties.” The logic went that since the Catholic Irish were allied with Catholic Spain, they were as responsible for the destruction of the Indies as were Cortés and Pizarro.

— America, América by Greg Grandin

The famous tapadas limeñas moved through public life completely veiled, with only one eye showing, a vexing mix of burlesque and provocation. Before Toledo’s arrival, efforts to ban the style were met with a women’s strike: “Domestic anarchy loomed. Women refused to tend to their houses, servants dallied, cooking was bland, and children couldn’t find their mother to hug them and wipe their noses …. Everything was upside down.” Women resisted Toledo’s renewed efforts to ban the saya y manto, as the skirt and cloak that made up the attire was called. The fashion would transfix visitors to Lima for centuries. Some saw Islam: “They could be taken for those phantoms of invisible women that travelers to the Orient find in Constantinople and all the Muslim cities,” wrote a French traveler. Others glimpsed Indian sorcery in the “one sinister eye peering” out of the veil. Another observer thought Africa lay behind the “treacherous” shawls, which made it impossible “to guess the color of the skin” and might conceal “an African, black as the night” and “flat-nosed as death.” Wealthy and poor women alike adopted the dress, adding to the uncertainty. The cloak “afforded women only advantages” and “men only discomforts.”

— America, América by Greg Grandin

Erasmus, Thomas Moore, and other Christians were, at the time of Las Casas’s most active period, elaborating a new humanism. But it was Las Casas, and only Las Casas, who hitched the Catholic Church’s prophetic, communitarian tradition that promised deliverance to political action. And such action: he witnessed, he wrote, he preached, he lobbied, he theorized, he consoled, he condemned, and he conspired. Las Casas stood against the unfathomable brutalities of the Spanish Conquest of the New World, advancing a moralism that, no matter how much he appealed to the laws of medieval Catholicism, pointed toward a modern ethics of equality. In this, he was a kind of Adam.

— America, América by Greg Grandin

Switching whole hog to renewable energy at today’s level of electricity consumption is not possible for the United States, although I’ve heard people talk about it as if it were an attainable goal. At today’s rates of electricity consumption and generation, powering America using only hydropower would require fifty functioning Hoover Dams within each one of the fifty states of the Union. Powering America using only wind power would require more than one million wind turbines, or one every mile or so across the whole of the continental United States. As for solar energy, a land area the size of South Carolina would have to be sacrificed to solar panels in order to generate America’s annual diet of electricity. Entirely switching over to renewables at their present rate of efficiency is, unfortunately, a pipe dream.

— The Story of More by Hope Jahren

To get one pound of salmon, you need three pounds of fish meal. To get a pound of fish meal, you need to grind up five pounds of fish. Thus, each pound of cage-raised salmon “costs” fifteen pounds of fish from the ocean. At present, about one-third of the total catch fished out of the ocean is ground up into fish meal and then fed to fish that live in pens. Anchovies, herring, and sardines are the most fished fish in the world, and almost all of the catch is used as fish meal for aquaculture. These small fish are also foragers, which means that they survive on plankton—the tiniest plants and animals of the ocean. Foragers are near the base of the ocean’s food web, where they serve as a staple food source for more charismatic species, including dolphins, sea lions, and humpback whales. More small fish diverted into aquaculture to feed us means less food left in the ocean to feed them.

— The Story of More by Hope Jahren