The Wizard and the Prophet

Charles C. Mann, “The Wizard and the Prophet: Two Scientists and their dueling visions to shape tomorrow’s World,” Alfred A. Knopf, 2018, 474 pp.

Author, Charles C. Mann, in The Wizard and the Prophet, examines the lives and philosophies of two, now forgotten, scientists who had competing visions for the Earth’s future.  The great virtue of Mann’s book is that it raises very large questions like these that are usually either ignored or answered in slogans--bumper stickers come to mind.

In this book, William Vogt and Norman Borlaug lives as they relate to environmentalism and feeding the planet are examined.  Vogt, mostly unread these days is a writer whose 1948 book, “Road to Survival,” Mann credits with helping birth modern environmentalism with its sense that humans should respect natural limits — Vogt is the title’s “Prophet.” Borlaug is the Nobel-winning Midwest agronomist whose patiently bred strains of wheat kicked off the Green Revolution, and is here Mann’s “Wizard,” imbued with a technological worldview that seeks always to overcome Earth’s limits.

This notion of balance, limits that should not be pushed, undergird the increasing alarms Vogt issued in his books and articles, and from various perches in the global conservation hierarchy, where his disdain for economic growth cost him one post after another. He committed suicide in 1968, thinking his cause lost, less than two years before Paul Ehrlich published “The Population Bomb.” Earth Day drew millions into the streets in 1970 and a groundbreaking 1972 report, “The Limits to Growth,” firmly established the argument Vogt helped pioneer before his death.

As Mann showed in his earlier book “1491”, which I read, his storytelling skills are notable.  Borlaug’s (the Wizard in this present book) story is a classic product of the Midwest land-grant colleges that are one of America’s greatest successes, Borlaug found his way to a dusty plant-breeding station in a desolate part of Mexico, where he figured out how to breed wheat that combined high yields with resistance to the ancient plague of stem rust. The new varieties made full use of fertilizers and other inputs — harvests soared first in South America and then, crucially in India. (The story of getting the seed to the subcontinent, amid wars between India, China and Pakistan is a fine Cold War saga.) What followed were honors, and also questions — the Green Revolution did raise yields, at least for a while, but it also wrecked much of peasant agriculture, driving poor people to the big cities and polluting farmlands with pesticides.

An interesting part of the book deals with solar power.  Mann explains that if you point a sheet of glass with some inlaid silicon at the sun, out the back flows cold, light and communications--pure Hogwarts. What’s more, it can be deployed in giant centralized arrays as well as house by house — so much sunlight falls on the Earth that, in theory, an area smaller than Texas would suffice to power the whole planet. Mann’s analysis of solar power also shows the inevitable danger of writing a book that takes several years when the subject is changing so quickly: He characterizes renewable energy as “surprisingly expensive” and finds only one installation, in Nevada, that provides reliable round-the-clock power. But the price of panels and batteries has continued to plummet. In the past few months (in 2018), bids for new solar farms in Mexico and Saudi Arabia have produced the cheapest electrons ever generated on the planet, and Elon Musk (who seems a combination alloy of Borlaugish wizardliness and Vogtian alarmism) has built (in less than 100 days) the world’s largest battery, turning South Australia’s abundant sun into a 24/7 source of power.

Mann confines what may be his most controversial points to a pair of appendixes, one on just how bad we can expect global warming to be, and the other in which he explains that the most reputable scientific bodies have by now agreed that genetically modified food is safe to eat. That’s an important fact, but as he acknowledges, it doesn’t satisfy critics’ main objections to the technology: “Whether the current version of industrial agriculture can, with the addition of new technologies, provide for a world of 10 billion in a long-lasting way — or if the perils involved (ecological, economic, spiritual) are large enough to require it to be radically revamped.”

Addenda:

William Vogt (15 May 1902 – 11 July 1968) was an ecologist and ornithologist, with a strong interest in both the carrying capacity and population control. He was the author of best-seller Road to Survival (1948), National Director of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America and secretary of the Conservation Foundation.

Norman Ernest Borlaug (March 25, 1914 – September 12, 2009) was an American agronomist who led initiatives worldwide that contributed to the extensive increases in agricultural production termed the Green Revolution. Borlaug was awarded multiple honors for his work, including the Nobel Peace Prize, the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Congressional Gold Medal.