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Started reading
October 10, 2019
William Vogt and Norman Borlaug.
Vogt, born in 1902, laid out the basic ideas for the modern environmental movement.
Borlaug, born twelve years later, has become the emblem of what has been termed “techno-optimism”
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.
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.”
Wizards and Prophets are less two ideal categories than two ends of a continuum.
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.
These arguments have their roots in long-ago fights. Voltaire and Rousseau disputing whether natural law truly is a guide for humankind.
T. H. Huxley, the famed defender of Darwin, and Bishop Samuel Wilberforce of Oxford, contending whether biological laws truly apply to creatures with souls.
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.”
were debates about the nature of our species.
Borlaug was released from what he saw as endless toil by the great good fortune of having Henry Ford invent a tractor
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.”
The other three elements (food, freshwater, energy supply) reflect human needs, whereas climate change is an unwanted consequence of satisfying those needs.
Borlaug’s project is housed at a university in Chapingo, a settlement east of Mexico City.
Vogt is also traveling in his official capacity, as the head of the Conservation Division of the Pan American Union.
This is the beginning, these two men looking over the parcel of damaged land near the 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.
Persistent mismanagement has over the generations drained the lake and wiped out the chinampas
Vogt wants to protect the land; Borlaug wants to equip its occupants.
In Vogt’s assessment he is simply speaking from the tradition of ecology
Borlaug, by contrast, speaks from the point of view of genetics—an
Borlaug, by contrast, is supported by the Rockefeller Foundation,
Vogt seems to spend his life scrambling after pennies
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.
Lynn Margulis
she couldn’t help regarding conservationists’ fixation on birds, mammals, and plants as evidence of their ignorance about the greatest source of evolutionary creativity: the microworld of bacteria, fungi, and protists.
Microorganisms can do things undreamed of by clumsy mammals like us;
Homo sapiens, she once told me, is an unusually successful species. And it is the fate of every successful species to wipe itself out—that is the way things work in biology.
one of her scientific heroes, the Russian microbiologist Georgii Gause.
The Struggle for Existence, published in 1934.
scientists often refer to Gause’s curve as an “S-shaped curve.”
One of Gause’s diagrams of his S-shaped curve,
Zebra mussels were shooting up the S-shaped curve.
In 2011, two decades after the mussel was first sighted in the Hudson, its survival rates were “1%
Of Lice and Men
Mark Stoneking in 1999,
the body louse seemed to have separated from the head louse about 107,000 years ago. This meant, Stoneking hypothesized, that clothing also dated from about 107,000 years ago.
a host of innovations were occurring around that time.
300,000 or so years ago,
Homo sapiens (us), Homo neanderthalensis (Neanderthals), Homo denisova (Denisovans), Homo naledi, Homo heidelbergensis, Homo floresiensis (nicknamed “hobbits,” because of their small stature). All were human.
attributes built up in us, until perhaps fifty thousand years ago something resembling modern humankind—“behaviorally modern” humans, in the jargon—was loose in the world.
the human army, was an army of similars, its soldiers remarkable in their genetic uniformity.
Mt Toba supervolcano 75,000 years ago me account for such a genetic bottleneck.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toba_catastrophe_theory
bacteria in people’s intestines are twenty times more diverse than their hosts.
compared to bacteria, humans are genetically similar
apes are far on the low end of mammal diversity, and humans are less diverse than almost all other apes.
Genetic uniformity is usually a legacy of small population size—the
at some point our numbers must have fallen dramatically, perhaps to a breeding population of as few as ten thousand people—the
Mt Toba supervolcano 75,000 years ago me account for such a genetic bottleneck.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toba_catastrophe_theory
about seventy thousand years ago, perhaps a bit less, our species took a fateful step.
Mt Toba supervolcano 75,000 years ago me account for such a genetic bottleneck.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toba_catastrophe_theory
Our species first clearly appears in the archaeological record about 300,000 years ago
