The Wizard and the Prophet2

  ALSO BY CHARLES C. MANN

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  GRAPHIC NOVEL

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  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  Copyright © 2018 by Charles C. Mann

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.

  www.aaknopf.com

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Portions of this work first appeared, sometimes in significantly different form, in The Atlantic, National Geographic, The New York Times Magazine, Orion, Pacific Standard, Science, Vanity Fair, and Wired.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Mann, Charles C., author.

  Title: The wizard and the prophet : two remarkable scientists and their dueling visions to shape tomorrow’s world / by Charles C. Mann.

  Description: New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2018. | “A Borzoi book.” | Includes bibliographical references and index.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017024776 | ISBN 9780307961693 (hardcover)

  ISBN 9780307961709 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Vogt, William, 1902–1968. | Borlaug, Norman E. (Norman Ernest), 1914–2009. | Environmental sciences—History—20th century. | Food security. | Water security. | Energy security. | Climatic changes. | Environmentalists—United States—Biography.

  Classification: LCC GE56.V64 M36 2018 | DDC 363.70092/273—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017024776

  Ebook ISBN 9780307961709

  Cover illustration by Steven Stines

  Cover design by Oliver Munday

  v5.1

  a

  To Ray—

  Just two words,

  because a thousand would not be enough

  No wonder they disagreed so endlessly; they were talking about different things.

  —ROBERT L. HEILBRONER

  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Charles C. Mann

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  ONE LAW

  1 State of the Species

  TWO MEN

  2 The Prophet

  3 The Wizard

  FOUR ELEMENTS

  4 Earth: Food

  5 Water: Freshwater

  6 Fire: Energy

  7 Air: Climate Change

  TWO MEN

  8 The Prophet

  9 The Wizard

  ONE FUTURE

  10 The Edge of the Petri Dish

  Appendix A: Why Believe? (Part One)

  Appendix B: Why Believe? (Part Two)

  Acknowledgments

  Abbreviations

  Notes

  Works Cited

  Map and Illustration Credits

  A Note About the Author

  [ PROLOGUE ]

  All parents must remember the moment when they first held their children—the tiny crumpled face emerging, an entire new person, from the hospital blanket. I extended my hands and took my daughter in my arms. I was so overwhelmed that I could hardly think.

  After the birth, I wandered outside for a while so that mother and child could rest. It was three in the morning, late February in New England. There was ice on the sidewalk and a cold drizzle in the air. As I stepped from the curb, a thought popped into my head: when my daughter is my age, almost 10 billion people will be walking the earth.

  I stopped in midstride. I thought: How is that going to work?

  Like other parents, I want my children to be comfortable in their adult lives. But in the hospital parking lot this suddenly seemed unlikely. Ten billion mouths, I thought. How can they possibly be fed? Twenty billion feet—how will they be shod? Ten billion bodies—how will they be accommodated? Is the world big enough, rich enough, for all these people to flourish? Or have I brought my children into a time of general collapse?

  —

  When I began as a journalist, I envisioned myself, romantically, as an eyewitness to history. I wanted to chronicle the important events of my time. Only after I began work did the obvious question occur: What are those important events? My first article, essentially the caption for a photograph of a bad automobile accident, certainly didn’t document one. But what was the standard? Hundreds of years from now, what will historians view as today’s most significant developments?

  For a long time I believed that the answer was “discoveries in science and technology.” I wanted to learn about the curing of diseases, the rise of computer power, the unraveling of the mysteries of matter and energy. Later, though, it seemed to me that what was important was less the new knowledge than what it had enabled. In the 1970s, when I was in high school, about one out of every four people in the world was hungry—“undernourished,” to use the term preferred by the United Nations. Today, the U.N. says, the figure is one out of ten.*1 In those four decades, the global average life span has risen by more than eleven years, with most of the increase occurring in poor places. Hundreds of millions of people in Asia, Latin America, and Africa have lifted themselves from destitution into something like the middle class. In the annals of humankind, nothing like this surge of well-being has occurred before. It is the signal accomplishment of this generation, and its predecessor.

  This enrichment has not occurred evenly or equitably; millions upon millions are not prosperous, and millions more are falling behind. Nonetheless, on a global level—the level of 10 billion—the increase in affluence is undeniable. The factory worker in Pennsylvania and the farmer in Pakistan may both be struggling and angry, but they are also, by the standards of the past, wealthy people.

  Today the world has about 7.3 billion inhabitants. Most demographers believe that around 2050 the world’s population will reach 10 billion or a bit less. About this time, human numbers will probably begin to level off—as a species, we will be around “replacement level,” each couple having, on average, just enough children to replace themselves. All the while, economists say, the world’s development should continue, however unevenly, however slowly. The implication is that when my daughter is my age a sizable percentage of the world’s 10 billion souls will be middle class. Jobs, homes, cars, fancy electronics, a few occasional treats—these are what the affluent multitudes will want. (Why shouldn’t they?) And though the lesson of history is that the great majority of these men and women will make their way, it is hard not to be awed by the magnitude of the task facing our children. A couple of billion jobs. A couple of billion homes. A couple of billion cars. Billions and billions of occasional treats.

  Can we provide these things? That is only part of the question. The full question is: Can we provide these things w
ithout wrecking much else?

  —

  As my children were growing up, I took advantage of journalistic assignments to speak, from time to time, with experts in Europe, Asia, and the Americas. Over the years, as the conversations accumulated, it seemed to me that the responses to my questions fell into two broad categories, each associated (at least in my mind) with one of two people, Americans who lived in the twentieth century. Neither is well known to the public, yet one man has often been called the most important person born in that century and the other is the principal founder of the most significant cultural and intellectual movement of that time. Both recognized and tried to solve the fundamental question that will face my children’s generation: how to survive the next century without a wrenching global catastrophe.

  The two people were barely acquainted—they met only once, so far as I know—and had little regard for each other’s work. But in their different ways, they were largely responsible for the creation of the basic intellectual blueprints that institutions around the world use today for understanding our environmental dilemmas. Unfortunately, their blueprints are mutually contradictory, for they had radically different answers to the question of survival.

  The two people were William Vogt and Norman Borlaug.

  Vogt, born in 1902, laid out the basic ideas for the modern environmental movement. In particular, he founded what the Hampshire College demographer Betsy Hartmann has called “apocalyptic environmentalism”—the belief that unless humankind drastically reduces consumption its growing numbers and appetite will overwhelm the planet’s ecosystems. In best-selling books and powerful speeches, Vogt argued that affluence is not our greatest achievement but our biggest problem. Our prosperity is temporary, he said, because it is based on taking more from Earth than it can give. If we continue, the unavoidable result will be devastation on a global scale, perhaps including our extinction. Cut back! Cut back! was his mantra. Otherwise everyone will lose!

  Borlaug, born twelve years later, has become the emblem of what has been termed “techno-optimism” or “cornucopianism”—the view that science and technology, properly applied, can help us produce our way out of our predicament. Exemplifying this idea, Borlaug was the primary figure in the research that in the 1960s created the “Green Revolution,” the combination of high-yielding crop varieties and agronomic techniques that raised grain harvests around the world, helping to avert tens of millions of deaths from hunger. To Borlaug, affluence was not the problem but the solution. Only by getting richer, smarter, and more knowledgeable can humankind create the science that will resolve our environmental dilemmas. Innovate! Innovate! was Borlaug’s cry. Only in that way can everyone win!

  William Vogt, 1940 Credit 1

  Both Borlaug and Vogt thought of themselves as environmentalists facing a planetary crisis. Both worked with others whose contributions, though vital, were overshadowed by theirs. But that is where the similarity ends. To Borlaug, human ingenuity was the solution to our problems. One example: by using the advanced methods of the Green Revolution to increase per-acre yields, he argued, farmers would not have to plant as many acres. (Researchers call this the Borlaug hypothesis.) Vogt’s views were the opposite: the solution, he said, is to get smaller. Rather than grow more grain to produce more meat, humankind should, as his followers say, “Eat lower on the food chain.” If people ate less beef and pork, valuable farmland would not have to be devoted to cattle and pig feed. The burden on Earth’s ecosystems would be lighter.

  I think of the adherents of these two perspectives as Wizards and Prophets—Wizards unveiling technological fixes, Prophets decrying the consequences of our heedlessness. Borlaug has become a model for the Wizards. Vogt was in many ways the founder of the Prophets.

  Borlaug and Vogt traveled in the same orbit for decades, but rarely acknowledged each other. Their first meeting, in the mid-1940s, ended in disagreement. So far as I know, they never spoke afterward. Not one letter passed between them. They each referred to the other’s ideas in public addresses, but never attached a name. Instead, Vogt rebuked the anonymous “deluded” scientists who were actually aggravating our problems. Meanwhile, Borlaug derided his opponents as “Luddites.”

  Norman Borlaug, 1944 Credit 2

  Both men are dead now, but their disciples have continued the hostilities. Indeed, the dispute between Wizards and Prophets has, if anything, become more vehement. Wizards view the Prophets’ emphasis on cutting back as intellectually dishonest, indifferent to the poor, even racist (because most of the world’s hungry are non-Caucasian). Following Vogt, they say, is a path toward regression, narrowness, and global poverty. Prophets sneer that the Wizards’ faith in human resourcefulness is unthinking, scientifically ignorant, even driven by greed (because remaining within ecological limits will cut into corporate profits). Following Borlaug, they say, at best postpones an inevitable day of reckoning—it is a recipe for what activists have come to describe as “ecocide.” As the name-calling has escalated, conversations about the environment have increasingly become dialogues of the deaf. Which might be all right, if we weren’t discussing the fate of our children.

  Wizards and Prophets are less two ideal categories than two ends of a continuum. In theory, they could meet in the middle. One could cut back here à la Vogt and expand over there, Borlaug-style. Some people believe in doing just that. But the test of a categorization like this one is less whether it is perfect—it is not—than whether it is useful. As a practical matter, the solutions (or putative solutions) to environmental problems have been dominated by one of these approaches or the other. If a government persuades its citizenry to spend huge sums revamping offices, stores, and homes with the high-tech insulation and low-water-use plumbing urged by Prophets, the same citizenry will resist ponying up for Wizards’ new-design nuclear plants and monster desalination facilities. People who back Borlaug and embrace genetically modified, hyper-productive wheat and rice won’t follow Vogt and dump their steaks and chops for low-impact veggie burgers.

  Moreover, the ship is too large to turn quickly. If the Wizardly route is chosen, genetically modified crops cannot be bred and tested overnight. Similarly, carbon-sequestration techniques and nuclear plants cannot be deployed instantly. Prophet-style methods—planting huge numbers of trees to suck carbon dioxide from the air, for instance, or decoupling the world’s food supply from industrial agriculture—would take equally long to pay off. Because backtracking is not easy, the decision to go one way or the other is hard to change.

  Most of all, the clash between Vogtians and Borlaugians is heated because it is less about facts than about values. Although the two men rarely acknowledged it, their arguments were founded on implicit moral and spiritual visions: concepts of the world and humankind’s place in it. Entwined with the discussion of economics and biology, that is, were whispers of “ought” and “should.” As a rule, these views were articulated more explicitly by those who followed Vogt and Borlaug than by the two men themselves. But they were there from the beginning.

  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. One views growth and development as the lot and blessing of our species; others regard stability and preservation as our future and our goal. Wizards regard Earth as a toolbox, its contents freely available for use; Prophets think of the natural world as embodying an overarching order that should not casually be disturbed.

  The conflict between these visions is not between good and evil, but between different ideas of the good life, between ethical orders that give priority to personal liberty and those that give priority to what might be called connection. To Borlaug, the landscape of late-twentieth-century capitalism, with its teeming global markets dominated by big corporations, was morally acceptable, though ever in need of repair. Its emphasis on personal autonomy, social and physical mobility, and the rights of the individual were resonant. Vogt thought diff
erently. By the time he died, in 1968, he had come to believe that there was something fundamentally wrong with Western-style consumer societies. People needed to live in smaller, more stable communities, closer to the earth, controlling the exploitative frenzy of the global market. The freedom and flexibility touted by advocates of consumer society were an illusion; individuals’ rights mean little if they live in atomized isolation, cut off from Nature and each other.

  These arguments have their roots in long-ago fights. Voltaire and Rousseau disputing whether natural law truly is a guide for humankind. Jefferson and Hamilton jousting over the ideal character of citizens. Robert Malthus scoffing at the claims of the radical philosophers William Godwin and Nicolas de Condorcet that science could overcome limits set by the physical world. T. H. Huxley, the famed defender of Darwin, and Bishop Samuel Wilberforce of Oxford, contending whether biological laws truly apply to creatures with souls. John Muir, champion of pristine wilderness, squaring off against Gifford Pinchot, evangelist for managing forests with teams of experts. The ecologist Paul Ehrlich and the economist Julian Simon betting whether ingenuity can outwit scarcity. To the philosopher-critic Lewis Mumford, all of these battles were part of a centuries-long struggle between two types of technology, “one authoritarian, the other democratic, the first system-centered, immensely powerful, but inherently unstable, the other man-centered, relatively weak, but resourceful and durable.” And all of them were about, at least in part, the relationship of our species to Nature—which is to say they were debates about the nature of our species.

  Borlaug and Vogt, too, took sides in the dispute. Both believed that Homo sapiens, alone among Earth’s creatures, can understand the world through science, and that this empirical knowledge can guide societies into the future. From this point, though, the two men diverged. One of them believed that ecological research has revealed our planet’s inescapable limits, and how to live within them. The other believed that science could show us how to surpass what would be barriers for other species.