The Wizard And The Prophet – Charles Mann

The one-sentence summary: Can we bend nature to our will or are we bound by its inexorable laws? Two groundbreaking scientists had conflicting visions of the future of our planet.

WHAT THE BOOK SAYS

  • By 2050 the human population of the earth will reach 10 billion, presenting fundamental problems. How to feed them and provide them with enough water? How to keep warm in the cold and cool in the heat? And all without irreparably harming the planet?
  • Two distinct schools of thought dominate our ideas about these issues and they originated from the scientists that are the subject of this book.
  • The Prophet is ecologist William Vogt, who assembled the basic ideas behind today’s global environmental movement, which sees the world as bound by immutable biological limits, and our rising affluence as a threat. Unless we drastically reduce consumption, we will overwhelm the planet’s ecosystems.
  • The Wizard is Norman Borlaug, a legendary plant breeder who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970. He was the prime figure in the Green Revolution of the 1960s, which used new agricultural technology to raise global grain harvests, averting tens of millions of deaths from hunger. He has become the emblem of ‘techno-optimism’ – the view that science and technology can help us produce our way out of our difficulties. Supporters of this view believe that affluence is not the problem but the solution. Getting richer allows us to invent and apply discoveries that hold the key to a prosperous tomorrow.
  • Given that their blueprints are mutually contradictory because they had radically different answers to the question of survival, it is perhaps surprising that they were barely acquainted – meeting only once and having little regard for each other’s work.
  • The clash been Vogtians and Borlaugians is heated because it is less about facts than about values. Prophets look at the world as finite, and people as constrained by their environment. Wizards see possibilities as inexhaustible, and humans as wily managers of the planet.
  • Biologists tell us that all species, including us presumably, if given the chance, overreach, overreproduce and overconsume. The Russian microbiologist Georgii Gause showed how microorganisms multiply slowly at first, then rapidly after a first inflection point, then flattening off as they begin to die, eventually falling back to zero. From this standpoint, the answer to the question “Are we doomed to destroy ourselves?” is “Yes.” So why should we be any different? Perhaps both scientists were wrong?

WHAT’S GOOD ABOUT IT

  • Vogt founded what has been called apocalyptic environmentalism. He believed that consumption was stripping nature bare. He described President Truman as a growth maniac and wrote a top-selling book called Road To Survival. He redefined the environment to mean a global totality and summed up our relationship with it using the concept of carrying capacity. We are bound by biological laws and no species can exceed the environment’s carrying capacity.
  • Those opposing this view claim it is prone to exaggerations, inaccurate, mired in the traditions of the past, and inappropriately based on biology when it should be based on physics and chemistry. Wizards see an essential part of the answer in the new technology of genetic engineering. Hacking photosynthesis exemplifies its potential.
  • But of course all choices involve a leap into the unknown – a choice expressing a preference for the unknown risks associated with one course versus another, based on a future that any particular individual likes better.
  • The Law of Minimum decrees that plants require many nutrients, but their growth rate is limited by the one least present in the soil. In most cases, that is nitrogen. After guano supplies in South America became exhausted, various fertilizers were produced and invented, including synthetic ammonia. The so-called Haber-Bosch process is responsible for almost all the world’s synthetic fertilizer. It has been noted that only 1% of the world’s industrial energy is devoted to it, and yet incredibly that 1% doubles what the world can grow.
  • The Prophet Vogt killed himself in 1968, having spent his last days believing that all his efforts had been futile because humankind was still on an idiot’s march to destruction. But it wasn’t true, because at the same time Paul Ehrlich, the Stanford biologist, published The Population Bomb, based largely on Vogt’s ideas.
  • The Wizard Norman Borlaug won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970, having fronted the Green Revolution and tripled harvests in countries such as India. Both men were thinking of the future but were bewildered and hurt when the world of the present pushed back, and it haunted their last days.
  • The author concludes by summing up the conundrum. It would be tragic to have the imagination to see our potential end, but not have the cultural forces to avoid it. To send mankind to the moon but fail to pay attention to the Earth. To have the potential but be unable to use it – to be, in the end, no different from protozoa in a petri dish that meet their inevitable end. Should that be the case, we would be, at the last count, not an especially interesting species.

WHAT YOU HAVE TO WATCH

  • This book is fantastically written but vast at over 500 pages, so it’s not for the faint-hearted.