The Wizard and the Prophet: Two Remarkable Scientists and Their Dueling Visions to Shape Tomorrow's World

by Charles C. Mann

To avoid destroying itself, the human race would have to do something deeply unnatural, something no other species has ever done or could ever do: constrain its own growth (at least in some ways).

A thin but immeasurably rich skin on Earth, the soil was quite literally the foundation of the human enterprise.

Between 1961 and 2003, Asian irrigation more than doubled, from 182 million acres to 407 million acres; fertilizer use went up by a factor of twenty, from 4.2 to 85 million tons. The consequences were drained aquifers, fertilizer runoff, aquatic dead zones, waterlogged soils, social upheaval—and a near tripling of rice production in Asia.

Nitrogen-fixing maize, wheat that can grow in saltwater, enhanced soil microbial ecosystems—the list of possibilities is as long as imagination allows.*10 The odds that any one of them will succeed may be small. But the odds that all of them will fail are equally small.

The action by which middle-class people refuse to take risks on behalf of rich companies becomes a way of blocking aspirations of the distant poor. Weighing the relative pluses and minuses is an exercise in morality that is outside the realm of science.

Wizards, Borlaug loudly among them, have repeatedly claimed that GMOs are essential to feeding tomorrow’s world, which they identify with large-scale industrial agriculture. Prophets, who believe that large-scale industrial agriculture endangers tomorrow’s world, naturally resist any innovation that is said to be central to perpetuating it.

So much of India’s urban water supply is contaminated that the lost productivity from the resultant disease costs fully 5 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product.

By the 1970s photovoltaics were cheaper, but the industry had acquired only one major new user: the petroleum industry. Some 70 percent of the solar modules sold in the United States were bought to run offshore drilling platforms.

For better or worse, a fifth of an Alaska Air would not be expensive. One well-known estimate from 2012 suggested that fourteen big cargo aircraft—Boeing 747s, for example—could pull a Pinatubo for a little more than $1 billion a year. But commercial jets are not designed to fly into the stratosphere (the higher one places the sulfur, the longer it will stay aloft). Specially designed planes could be more effective and cost only $2 to $3 billion a year to operate. Either way, it is financially feasible. The cost for a decade of counteracting most of the impact of carbon dioxide, the Harvard physicist David Keith has written, “could be less than the $6 billion the Italian government is spending on dikes and movable barriers to protect a single city, Venice, from climate-change-related sea level rise.”

Tinkering with the atmosphere, in the phrase of the writer Eli Kintisch, may be a bad idea whose time has come.

Worse, geoengineering forever desacralizes Nature; it puts the final seal on the replacement of the authentic, billion-year-old natural world by a new, artificial world whose every surface bears the greasy human fingerprint.

In the 1970s and 1980s the Indian government, then led by Indira Gandhi and her son Sanjay, embraced policies that in many states required sterilization for men and women to obtain water, electricity, ration cards, medical care, and pay raises.

Increased harvests made prices fall. Big estate-holders could more than make up for the decline with volume; smallholders were immiserated.

Overuse of fertilizer, water-logging soils, loading up land with toxic salts from badly run irrigation schemes—these were real issues, he said. But wouldn’t you rather have these for problems than the kind of hunger we had in 1968?