The Wizard and the Prophet2

by Charles C. Mann

  Who is right, Vogt or Borlaug? Better to have your feet on the ground or live, however chancily, in the air? Cut back or produce more?

  Wizard or Prophet? No question is more important to our crowded world. Willy-nilly, our children will have to answer it.

  —

  What this book is not: a detailed survey of our environmental dilemmas. Many parts of the world I skip over completely; many issues I do not discuss. The subjects are too big and complicated to fit in a single book—at least, not a book that I can imagine anyone reading. Instead I am describing two ways of thinking, two views of possible futures.

  Another thing this book is not: a blueprint for tomorrow. The Wizard and the Prophet presents no plan, argues for no specific course of action. Part of this aversion reflects the opinion of the author: in our Internet era, there are entirely too many pundits shouting out advice. I believe I stand on firmer ground when I try to describe what I see around me than when I try to tell people what to do.

  In the first chapter I step back to consider what biology suggests about the trajectory of any species—that is, why one would imagine that Homo sapiens actually has a future. Biologists tell us that all species, if given the chance, overreach, overreproduce, overconsume. Inevitably, they encounter a wall, always to catastrophic effect, and usually sooner rather than later. From this vantage, Vogt and Borlaug were equally deluded. Here I ask here whether there is reason to believe the scientists are wrong.

  Next I turn to Vogt and Borlaug themselves. I follow Vogt from his birth in pre-suburban Long Island to his near death from polio to his ecological conversion experience off the coast of Peru. I close the first part of his story with the publication of his tract The Road to Survival (1948), the first modern we’re-all-going-to-hell book. Road was meant as a warning bell, based on objective science, but it was also an implicit vision of how we should live: a moral testament. Vogt was the first to put together, in modern form, the principal tenets of environmentalism, the twentieth century’s only successful, long-lasting ideology.

  Borlaug’s tale begins with his birth into a poor Iowa farming community. Borlaug was released from what he saw as endless toil by the great good fortune of having Henry Ford invent a tractor that could be built and sold cheaply enough to replace his labor on the farm. Allowed to attend college, he labored through the Depression until a concatenation of accidents put him into the research program that led to the Green Revolution. In 2007, when Borlaug was ninety-three, The Wall Street Journal editorialized that he had “arguably saved more lives than anyone in history. Maybe one billion.”

  In the middle section of this book, I invite the reader to put on, as it were, Vogtian and Borlaugian spectacles and look at four great, oncoming challenges: food, water, energy, and climate change. Sometimes I think of them as Plato’s four elements: earth, water, fire, and air. Earth represents agriculture, how we will feed the world. Water is drinking water, as vital as food. Fire is our energy supply. Air is climate change, a by-product, potentially catastrophic, of our hunger for energy.

  Earth: If present trends continue, most agronomists believe, harvests will have to rise 50 percent or more by 2050. Different models with different assumptions make different projections, but all view the rise in demand as due both to the increase in human numbers and the increase in human affluence. With few exceptions, people who became wealthier have wanted to consume more meat. To grow more meat, farmers will need to grow more grain—much more. Wizards and Prophets have radically different ways of approaching these demands.

  Water: Although most of Earth is covered by water, less than 1 percent of it is accessible freshwater. And the demand for that water is constantly increasing. The increase is a corollary of the rising demand for food—almost three-quarters of global water use goes to agriculture. Many water researchers believe that as many as 4.5 billion people could be short of water by as early as 2025. As with food, the disciples of Borlaug tend to react in one way to this worry; those of Vogt, in another.

  Fire: Predicting how much energy tomorrow’s world will need depends on assumptions about, for instance, how many of the roughly 1.2 billion people who do not have electricity will actually get it, and how that electricity will be provided (solar power, nuclear power, natural gas, wind, coal). Still, the main thrust of every attempt to estimate future requirements that I am aware of is that the human enterprise will require more energy—probably quite a lot more. What to do about it depends on whether you ask Borlaugians or Vogtians.

  Air: In this list, climate change is odd man out. The other three elements (food, freshwater, energy supply) reflect human needs, whereas climate change is an unwanted consequence of satisfying those needs. The first three are about providing benefits to humankind: food on the table, water from the tap, heat and air-conditioning in the home. With climate change, the benefit is invisible: avoiding problems in the future. Societies put their members through wrenching changes and then, with a bit of luck, nothing especially noteworthy occurs. Temperatures don’t rise much; sea levels stay roughly where they are. Little wonder that Wizards and Prophets disagree about what to do!

  Climate change is different from the others in a second way, too. It is rare to encounter people who don’t accept that the world’s increasingly prosperous population will ratchet up demand for food, water, and energy. But a significant minority believe that climate change is not real, or is not attributable to human activity, or is so minimal as to be not worth bothering about. The disagreement is so passionate that it’s easy for one side to say, “Well, if he gives any credence to this claim, then he belongs on the other team, and forget about anything else he reports!” Hoping to avoid this fate, I split the discussion of climate change in two. In the first section, I ask the skeptics to accept—just for the moment—that climate change is a real future problem, so I can look at how Borlaugians and Vogtians would address it. In an appendix, I address in what ways some of the skeptics could be correct.

  The question this book asks is not “How will we resolve these four challenges?” but “How would a Vogt or Borlaug approach them?” I close with the last years of both men, melancholy in both cases. Tying up a loose philosophical end, an epilogue returns to the discussion of why one might believe that our species could succeed, and even thrive.

  The Wizard and the Prophet is a book about the way knowledgeable people might think about the choices to come, rather than what will happen in this or that scenario. It is a book about the future that makes no predictions.

  —

  In college I read two Vogtian classics: The Population Bomb (1968), by the ecologist Paul Ehrlich, and The Limits to Growth (1972), by a team of computer modelers. Famously, The Population Bomb begins with a thunderous claim: “The battle to feed all of humanity is over.” Matters go downhill from there. “Sometime in the next fifteen years, the end will come,” Ehrlich told CBS News in 1970. “And by ‘the end’ I mean an utter breakdown of the capacity of the planet to support humanity.” The Limits to Growth was a bit more hopeful. If humankind changed its habits completely, it said, civilizational collapse could be avoided. Otherwise, the researchers argued, “the limits to growth on this planet will be reached sometime within the next one hundred years.”

  The two books scared the pants off me. I became a Vogtian, convinced that the human enterprise would fall apart if our species didn’t abruptly reverse course. Long afterward, it occurred to me that many of the Prophets’ dire forecasts had not come true. Famines had occurred in the 1970s, as The Population Bomb had predicted. India, Bangladesh, Cambodia, West and East Africa—in that decade all were wracked, horribly, by hunger. But the death tally was nowhere near the “hundreds of millions” predicted by Ehrlich. According to a widely accepted count by the British development economist Stephen Devereux, starvation claimed about 5 million lives during that period—with most of the deaths due to warfare, rather than environmental exhaustion. Compared to the past, in fact, famine has not been increasing but ha
s become rarer. Nor did anything like Ehrlich’s planetary breakdown occur by 1985, though there have been awful losses that will not be easy to set right. Similarly, pesticides did not lead to lethal epidemics of heart disease, cirrhosis, and cancer, a prospect Ehrlich warned of in 1969. Farmers continued to spray their fields, but U.S. life expectancy did not fall to “42 years by 1980.”

  In the mid-1980s I began work as a science journalist. I met many Wizard technologists and grew to admire them. I became a Borlaugian, scoffing at the catastrophic scenarios I had previously embraced. Cleverness will get us through, I thought, as it had in the past. To think anything else, given recent history, seemed foolishly pessimistic.

  Nowadays, though, worrying about my children, I am waffling. My daughter, in college as I write, is headed into a future that seems ever more jostling and contentious, ever closer to overstepping social, physical, and ecological margins.

  Ten billion affluent people! The number is unprecedented, the difficulties like nothing before. Maybe my optimism is as ill-founded as my previous pessimism. Maybe Vogt was right after all.

  Thus I oscillate between the two stances. On Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, I think Vogt was correct. On Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday, I go for Borlaug. And on Sunday, I don’t know.

  I wrote this book to satisfy my own curiosity, and to see if I could learn something about the roads my children could take.

  * * *

  *1 In absolute terms, the decrease seems less impressive. Several hundred million still live in destitution. In recent years, moreover, the number of hungry has risen a bit. Researchers disagree on whether this reversal is a long-term problem or a temporary blip due to violence (Southwest Asia, parts of Africa) and falling commodity prices, which have lowered national incomes in some places. Nonetheless, a child born in the twenty-first century has less chance of emerging into a life of absolute want than at any other century in known history.

  ONE LAW

  [ ONE ]

  State of the Species

  Special People

  Begin with an image, a man alone on a tract of land near a city. The man is thirty years old and just beginning to discover his own ambition. His name is Norman Borlaug, the Wizard of my title. His greatest advantage is a remarkable capacity for hard technical work. The land, on the periphery of Mexico City, is badly damaged; Borlaug has been assigned the task of coaxing something to grow on it. To most of the people whom Borlaug is likely to know, the task and place seem remote and inconsequential. Borlaug, the Wizard, will change that view.

  It is April 1946, the perfervid months after the end of the Second World War. Most people in North America and Europe are wholly caught up in the shocking changes that follow the conflict—the onset of the atomic age, the beginning of the Cold War, the disintegration of colonial empires. Borlaug, the hardworking man, is not. Newspapers and radios are not readily available where he works. He spends his days staring at dying plants. Years later, some people will say that the work he began there was more important than any of the occurrences in the newspapers.

  Now on this land appears a second man. This second man, the Prophet of my title, is twelve years older, light-haired and blue-eyed. He walks with a pronounced limp, the legacy of polio. His name is William Vogt. He, too, is discovering the extent of his ambitions—maybe it would be better to say that he is at last admitting them.

  Borlaug’s project is housed at a university in Chapingo, a settlement east of Mexico City. Built in a former hacienda, the university has been transformed from a private rural backwater into a crowded expression of the contemporary state, desperately sought after and grossly underfunded in the modern mode. Among its glories is a set of huge, brilliantly colored murals by the celebrated Mexican painter Diego Rivera. Vogt is on his honeymoon; he and his wife visit the murals. But Vogt is also traveling in his official capacity, as the head of the Conservation Division of the Pan American Union. He is deeply interested in agriculture and its effects on the landscape.

  At this time, Borlaug and three Mexican assistants are the only people working on the land. Vogt spends a big chunk of his daylong visit there. Inquisitive and gregarious, he surely walks to the sweating people in their dusty khakis and boots and asks what they are doing with this 160 acres of starveling wheat and maize at the edge of campus.*1 Vogt has no idea that this plain-faced man, lean and taciturn, will become an enduring international symbol of technical prowess and a way of thinking that Vogt will come to regard as dangerous to human survival. Borlaug does not guess that the visitor, this limping man with his wife in tow, will spark a movement that Borlaug will come to regard as blinkered, when not duplicitous, effectively an enemy to human well-being. From the evidence left behind, Vogt doesn’t say much during his visit. One imagines him watching and listening as Borlaug explains his ideas.

  This is the beginning, these two men looking over the parcel of damaged land near the city. All the rest of their lives begin at this place, in what they see and how they choose to think about it. Things skirl out from Chapingo, they sprawl across the world and pass decades into the past and future, they involve millions upon millions of people who have never heard the names of Borlaug or Vogt. But always it opens here: two men, a parcel of bad soil, the nearby city.

  Before the Spanish conquest, Chapingo, and Mexico City were on opposite sides of a lake that was more than thirty miles wide, rich with fish, and lined with prosperous villages. On the fringes of this great lake were hundreds of small artificial islands called chinampas. Made by piling up lake muck, chinampas were used as farms. Yielding multiple harvests in a year, they were among the most productive farms in the world. All this is gone. Persistent mismanagement has over the generations drained the lake and wiped out the chinampas and turned the good soil into something that is cracked and lifeless.

  Vogt and Borlaug have the same mission: to use the discoveries of modern science to spare Mexico from a future of poverty and environmental degradation. But prospects are unlikely, in Mexico in 1946, for this to happen; indeed, Vogt and Borlaug believe that the situation grows direr by the day.

  Not much later both men will realize that the challenges they see before Mexico actually confront all of humankind. Vogt and Borlaug are among the few who have some glimpse then of the magnitude of the tests that face our species today, as we move ever closer to 2050, when the world will hold 10 billion souls. But their understanding of how to resolve them differs, as do their views on their causes.

  Vogt sees the city reaching across the dry lake bed to engulf the last fields and streams and says: Hold it back! We cannot let our species overwhelm the natural systems on which we all depend! Borlaug sees the pitiful scrim of wheat and maize on the tract of land and says: How can we give people a better chance to thrive? Vogt wants to protect the land; Borlaug wants to equip its occupants.

  Which is correct? To Vogt, the fields of maize and wheat throughout the dry hills of central Mexico are a plague that will lead in the end to destruction. He calls for more sustainable, land-sparing agriculture, to keep people from trying to use this fragile, depleted soil. One can imagine his reaction to learning that Borlaug hopes to develop new strains of maize and wheat that will better allow humans to exploit that land. It is, from Vogt’s perspective, like trying to fight arson with gasoline.

  Later critics will call Vogt and people like him names like “tree-hugger” and say they are apostles of a new religion, an irrational cult that fetishizes Nature. In Vogt’s assessment he is simply speaking from the tradition of ecology (or what he understands to be ecology)—a holistic view that seeks to place humanity within a framework of overarching natural law. It asks: How can we best fit into the world, and not overstep our bounds? Even to ask such a question calls for a reordering of society.

  Borlaug, by contrast, speaks from the point of view of genetics—an effort that seeks to break organisms into their smallest components so that they can be harnessed for human benefit. Of Vogt’s natural bounds, it asks, How
can we leapfrog them altogether? Critics will call this “techno-optimism,” an advocacy of “salvation by technical advance,” and accuse its Wizard advocates of being apologists for economic systems that are fundamentally at odds with the ability to sustain life on Earth. Nature knows best! Anything else is hubris and folly.

  One wants the two men to have a ringing debate, like Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas. That doesn’t happen. Instead, a few months after his trip to Mexico, Vogt tries to get Borlaug shut down.

  Largely as a result of Vogt’s advocacy, the Mexican government has adopted new soil and water conservation laws. But there is more to be done, he thinks, and his money is running out. Vogt works for the Pan American Union, but his work in Mexico is supported by several small, poorly funded conservation groups, including the New York Zoological Society, the International Committee for Bird Preservation, and the American Wildlife Institute. Saving the world, he thinks, will require deeper pockets.

  Borlaug, by contrast, is supported by the Rockefeller Foundation, based in New York City, long the world’s biggest private charity. The Rockefeller Foundation in 1946 is like the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation today—an international symbol of largesse. Vogt seems to spend his life scrambling after pennies to fund his world-important tasks. How it must have haunted him to see Borlaug treading into his terrain, concerned about the right problem, backed by powerful money—and proceeding, in Vogt’s opinion, in exactly the wrong way!

  Even as Vogt and his wife spend a month in Guatemala and then travel to El Salvador and Venezuela, he drafts and redrafts a letter to the Rockefeller Foundation. It finally goes out on August 2, 1946. It bears the signature of L. S. Rowe, director general of the Pan American Union, but Vogt has written every word. The letter has a delicate task: to say, tactfully but clearly, that Rockefeller (1) is doing everything wrong and (2) should put Vogt in charge of doing it right. Graciously it salutes the foundation’s history of fighting disease, then turns in a different direction. “Millions of dollars, from [the foundation], are being used to reduce mortality rates—in other words, to increase populations. Little thought is being given to the feeding of those populations.” In Mexico, Rockefeller is backing efforts to grow more wheat and maize. But, the letter says, boosting agriculture and industry is not the answer, because the resources necessary for both “are being wiped out through destruction of watersheds, raw materials, and purchasing power.” Simply giving people better tools, Vogt believes, will only help people hit limits faster. If just ten fish remain in a pond, the solution to running out of fish is not more efficient nets.