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

by Charles C. Mann

In the 1970s, when I was in high school, about one out of every four people in the world was hungry—“undernourished,” to use the term preferred by the United Nations. Today, the U.N. says, the figure is one out of ten.

“apocalyptic environmentalism”—the belief that unless humankind drastically reduces consumption its growing numbers and appetite will overwhelm the planet’s ecosystems. In best-selling books and powerful speeches, Vogt argued that affluence is not our greatest achievement but our biggest problem. Our prosperity is temporary, he said, because it is based on taking more from Earth than it can give.

Borlaug, born twelve years later, has become the emblem of what has been termed “techno-optimism” or “cornucopianism”—the view that science and technology, properly applied, can help us produce our way out of our predicament. Exemplifying this idea, 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.

Wizards view the Prophets’ emphasis on cutting back as intellectually dishonest, indifferent to the poor, even racist (because most of the world’s hungry are non-Caucasian). Following Vogt, they say, is a path toward regression, narrowness, and global poverty. Prophets sneer that the Wizards’ faith in human resourcefulness is unthinking, scientifically ignorant, even driven by greed (because remaining within ecological limits will cut into corporate profits). Following Borlaug, they say, at best postpones an inevitable day of reckoning—it is a recipe for what activists have come to describe as “ecocide.”

Wizards and Prophets are less two ideal categories than two ends of a continuum. In theory, they could meet in the middle.

Most of all, the clash between Vogtians and Borlaugians is heated because it is less about facts than about values.

their arguments were founded on implicit moral and spiritual visions: concepts of the world and humankind’s place in it.

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. One views growth and development as the lot and blessing of our species; others regard stability and preservation as our future and our goal. Wizards regard Earth as a toolbox, its contents freely available for use; Prophets think of the natural world as embodying an overarching order that should not casually be disturbed.

These arguments have their roots in long-ago fights. Voltaire and Rousseau disputing whether natural law truly is a guide for humankind. Jefferson and Hamilton jousting over the ideal character of citizens. Robert Malthus scoffing at the claims of the radical philosophers William Godwin and Nicolas de Condorcet that science could overcome limits set by the physical world. T. H. Huxley, the famed defender of Darwin, and Bishop Samuel Wilberforce of Oxford, contending whether biological laws truly apply to creatures with souls. John Muir, champion of pristine wilderness, squaring off against Gifford Pinchot, evangelist for managing forests with teams of experts. The ecologist Paul Ehrlich and the economist Julian Simon betting whether ingenuity can outwit scarcity. 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.”

Dedicated to Vogt, Peterson’s Field Guide to the Birds (1934) introduced a generation of children to the environment and was long the most popular book Houghton Mifflin ever published.

To Vogt, the cause of the decline was obvious. Long Island was one of the first places in North America to undergo extensive suburbanization. The landscapes of Vogt’s childhood—landscapes that had been, he thought, little changed for centuries—were being flattened by real-estate developers.

A stream of “capitalism vs. ecology” manifestos led many in the business world to conclude that destroying the corporate world had been the aim from the beginning.

Chinese-U.S.-Israeli research team has estimated that eliminating coal pollution in northern China would raise average life expectancy there by more than five years. (By contrast, wiping out all cancer would increase U.S. or European life expectancy by three years.)

More distressing still, several thousand coal mines have caught fire in Australia, Britain, China, India, Indonesia, New Zealand, Russia, South Africa, and the United States; many have been burning for decades, some for centuries. An infamous example is the Jharia coalfield, in the northeastern Indian state of Jharkand. Covering 170 square miles, Jharia is India’s main reservoir of coking coal, the hard coal used to make steel. It has been on fire, calamitously, since 1916; entire villages have disappeared into the smoking ground.

Sweden, for example, has reduced its carbon output by two-thirds since 1970 without noticeable impact on its economic fortunes.

He would devote his life and fortune to population control. He gave money to the Planned Parenthood Foundation of America.

In a time dominated by the Cold War, Vogt’s attacks on capitalism were making him a pariah. The Conservation Foundation, which he had helped to found, had just ejected him from its advisory council and removed Road to Survival from its recommended reading list.

Inspired by The Limits to Growth approach, Song Jian, a Chinese specialist in ballistic-missile control, formed a research team in 1978 to create, in effect, a Chinese version of the Limits model. Not one member of his team had experience in demography. This didn’t stop the group from using China’s defense-industry computers to churn out population projections. Swooping curves on graphs showed China’s population reaching 4 billion in 2080, an impossible burden. Borrowing methods from Dutch computer scientists, Song’s team calculated the desired trajectory for population as if it were aiming a missile. Out came the answer, as inexorable as fan-folded paper unfurling from a dot-matrix printer: the sole route that would allow China to stave off disaster would be for all Chinese couples to have but a single child, beginning immediately. Sneering at dissenting social scientists as useless hand-wavers, Song pushed for the one-child program that was adopted by the government in 1980.

Looking back, Ehrlich told me, he wished he had “given more emphasis to consumption, and not just population”—an issue he rectified in later writings.

Since then the collapse of small farming on the East Coast has allowed millions of acres to return to nature. When New York State surveyed itself in 1875, the six counties that make up the lower Hudson Valley—Columbia, Dutchess, Greene, Orange, Putnam, and Ulster—contained 573,003 acres of timberland, covering about 21 percent of their total area. A hundred years later trees covered almost 1.8 million acres, more than three times as much.

As a whole, U.S. forests are bigger and healthier than they were in 1900, when the country had fewer than 100 million people.

The emissions difference does not necessarily mean that Delhi families cause more environmental damage than Copenhagen families. Danes eat so much meat and drive so many automobiles that in 2014 the Worldwide Fund for Nature claimed that Denmark had the fourth-biggest “ecological footprint” in the world. The main cause was the huge amounts of animal feed grown to support the Danish pork industry. To feed its meat habit, Denmark used more farmland per capita than anywhere else.

I can spend a million dollars paving over a magnificent redwood forest and that will appear in the statistics of gross domestic product as a million dollars of economic activity. But I can also spend that money buying front-row opera seats for poor schoolchildren and that, too, will appear in the gross domestic product as a million dollars of economic activity. The two activities contribute identically to the statistics, but their environmental impact is strikingly different.

The IUPN became the International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN) in 1956. Today it has a membership of 1,200 governmental and private organizations and coordinates the work of 10,000 or more pro-bono scientists. Although IUCN has global reach, it is not well known in the United States, because the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service performs many of the functions undertaken by IUCN elsewhere.

Criticisms like these began to appear soon after Borlaug won the Nobel. Between 1972 and 1979 the United Nations Research Institute for Social Development published fifteen analyses of the Green Revolution. Every single one was sharply negative. To Biplab Dasgusta, a prominent economist and Marxist politician in India, the major consequences of the Green Revolution included an “increase in the number and proportion of homeless households” and “growing concentration of land and assets in fewer hands.” The Green Revolution, observed Per Olav Reinton of Oslo’s International Peace Research Institute (PRIO), “demonstrates more clearly than most aid programs how good intentions produce misery.”