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

by Charles C. Mann

The genetic differences between one chimpanzee and its neighbor on a single hillside in central Africa can be greater than those of two humans in central Asia and Central America.

When a species shrinks in number, chance can alter its genetic makeup with astonishing rapidity. New mutations can arise and spread; a snippet of scrambled DNA in a single gene in a single member of the small group that populated Ice Age Europe apparently led to the blue eyes that predominate in most of Scandinavia.

It had taken Homo sapiens 2.0, aggressively modern humans, barely fifty thousand years to reach the farthest corners of the globe. Homo sapiens 2.0A—A for agriculture—took a tenth of that time to subdue the planet.

“People, by naming the world, transform it,” wrote the Brazilian educator Paulo Freire.

Borlaug, by contrast, was young, ready for adventure, and altogether genial. Except for his lack of expertise in the subject and nonexistent professional reputation, he was perfect.

In those days no paved roads crossed the mountains between Mexico City and Sonora. From the capital, drivers had to take a two-lane highway northwest three hundred miles to Guadalajara, then go six hundred miles north on a path through the brush, crossing deserts and fording rivers, carrying their own gasoline for most of the route.

In 1968, the year a U.S. aid official coined the term “Green Revolution” to describe the Rockefeller package, Borlaug gave a victory-lap speech at a wheat meeting in Australia. Twenty years before, he said, Mexican farmers had reaped about 760 pounds of wheat from every acre planted. Now the figure had risen to almost 2,500 pounds per acre—triple the harvest from the same land. The same thing was happening in India, he said. The first Green Revolution wheat had been tested there in the 1964–65 growing season. It had been so successful that the government had tested it on seven thousand acres the next year. Now it was covering almost seven million acres.

Between 1954 and 1965, eighteen scientists received Nobel Prizes for molecular biology; fifteen were funded by Weaver at Rockefeller.

In ancient times, life was typically viewed as a principle or essence: qi in China, ase in Nigeria, mana in Polynesia, manitou in the Algonkian cultures of North America, pneuma to the Greeks, the Force in a galaxy far, far away.

the Haber-Bosch process, as it is called, was arguably the most consequential technological development of the twentieth century, and one of the more important human discoveries of any time.

Vaclav Smil has calculated that fertilizer from the Haber-Bosch process was responsible for “the prevailing diets of nearly 45% of the world’s population.” Roughly speaking, this is equivalent to feeding about 3.25 billion people. More than 3 billion men, women, and children—an incomprehensibly vast cloud of dreams, fears, and explorations—owe their existence to two early-twentieth-century German chemists.

This symbiosis was fantastically improbable. In 3.5 billion years of history and trillions of trillions of interactions between protozoa and cyanobacteria it seems to have happened exactly once. But this single incident had huge effects—it is responsible for the existence of plants. Over the eons the cyanobacterium shed many of its original characteristics, and became a chloroplast: the free-floating body in plant cells in which photosynthesis occurs. Plant cells today can have hundreds of chloroplasts, each a descendant of that long-ago cyanobacterium.

Tomatoes are essentially little balls of flavored water.

But Palestine: Land of Promise drew widespread support for them in Western nations—the book supposedly lay open on President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s desk when he died, in the spring of 1945. Nonetheless, Britain rejected the Lowdermilk plan as too costly and impossible to administer. After becoming a nation, Israel built it.

In 1956 Israel committed to building a Lowdermilk-style, north-to-south project: the National Water Carrier. The National Water Carrier was and is a Wizardly demonstration of technological prowess. Thousands of workers carved an underground pumping station 250 feet long and 60 feet high at the edge of the Sea of Galilee.

Today, about 85 percent of Israel’s wastewater—more than 100 million gallons a year—is used for irrigation, according to Seth M. Siegel, the author of Let There Be Water (2015), a study of Israeli water use that I am following here.

Agreeing, Israel built five huge desalination plants on the Mediterranean between 2005 and 2015. They produced so much drinking water—about 80 percent of the nation’s needs—that Israel has discussed replumbing the National Water Carrier to send any surplus to the Sea of Galilee. Meanwhile, Jordan, Israel, and the Palestinians announced in 2013 a vast project to link the Red Sea to the Dead Sea.

A century later, Thomas Jefferson had a magnificent home (Monticello), the nation’s finest wine collection, and one of the world’s great private libraries, which would become the foundation for the Library of Congress. But Monticello was so frigid in winter (12°F indoors!) that Jefferson’s ink froze in his inkwell, preventing him from writing to complain about the cold.

Solar research had been the product of anxiety about fossil fuels. When the anxiety faded, so did the interest.

Today most historians and economists instead view the oil shock as a product of mistaken government policies. Arab petro-states could not target individual nations, the energy analyst Michael Lynch told me, because national oil companies sell oil and gas to what is, in effect, a single worldwide pool controlled by middlemen. Any embargo thus could only raise prices equally across the planet, rather than striking at a single nation. Or, rather, the Arabs couldn’t have targeted a single nation if President Richard Nixon had not imposed price caps on U.S. oil and gas two years before as an inflation-fighting measure. The embargo cut global oil output by about a quarter, pushing up petroleum prices worldwide. Middlemen could take advantage of the higher prices only if they sold their oil to nations other than the United States, with its price caps. Doing just that transformed a modest global shortfall into a U.S.-specific oil drought.

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.

Having won a cozy academic sinecure in Stockholm, he had lost interest in slaving over test tubes in experiments. Instead he had taken to lofty speculation about other people’s data. In this way he came up with new theories of the formation of the solar system, the age of the universe, and the inner mechanics of the sun. All of these were later proven wrong by people who actually did experiments.

Katrina created about 35 million cubic yards of debris in southern Louisiana—an estimate that does not include, among other things, the area’s 250,000 destroyed automobiles.

Cities have adapted to rising waters in days gone by. Chicago, founded almost at the water level of Lake Michigan and the Chicago River, discovered that its land was too flat, low, and wet to install a sewer system. Beginning in 1856, the city installed six-foot sewage pipes in the middle of its streets, then raised the buildings around them. Some structures were jacked up as much as ten feet. Eventually the entire city was lifted into the air.

As it turned out, both Muir’s rapture over wild beauty and Pinchot’s thoughts of stewardship had a dark side: most of these “untouched” American landscapes in fact were inhabited by indigenous peoples. Yellowstone and Yosemite were turned into parks by expelling people who had been there for centuries.

The results of the campaigns were ghastly. Millions of women were sterilized, often coercively, sometimes illegally, frequently in unsafe conditions, in Mexico, Bolivia, Peru, Indonesia, Bangladesh, and, especially, India. 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. Teachers could expel students from school if their parents weren’t sterilized. More than 8 million men and women were sterilized in 1975 alone.

“The pattern of independent multiple discoveries in science is in principle the dominant pattern,” wrote the sociologist Robert K. Merton,