Greenpeace banner deployed on Mt. Rushmore. Image: S.J. Carrera / Greenpeace
There have been few more passionate and prescient figures in the history of science than the Russian naturalist and political radical Peter Kropotkin. Upon the confirmation of his geological research that demonstrated an ancient ice sheet had once extended across the Russian landscape, this evolutionary theorist and gentle anarchist reported in 1894 that "we must accustom ourselves to the idea that climate, like everything else on the earth, is a changeable element." In his many books and articles he regularly…