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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

Rincewind had never studied meteorology, although he had been an end-user all his life.

— The Last Continent by Terry Pratchett, Nigel Planer

Any seasoned traveller soon learns to avoid anything wished on them as a ‘regional speciality’, because all the term means is that the dish is so unpleasant the people living everywhere else will bite off their own legs rather than eat it. But hosts still press it upon distant guests anyway: ‘Go on, have the dog’s head stuffed with macerated cabbage and pork noses — it’s a regional speciality.’

— The Last Continent by Terry Pratchett, Nigel Planer