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January 22 - February 25, 2022
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.
I think of the adherents of these two perspectives as Wizards and Prophets—Wizards unveiling technological fixes, Prophets decrying the consequences of our heedlessness. Borlaug has become a model for the Wizards. Vogt was in many ways the founder of the Prophets.
Most of all, the clash between Vogtians and Borlaugians is heated because it is less about facts than about values.
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.
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.
But there’s a third sense of “human,” one captured in the phrase of “being human.” Human-ness is the quality—a mix of creativity, drive, and moral awareness—that transforms humans into persons. It is a special spark or spirit, unique among living creatures, a flame possessed in abundance by our heroes, possessed in small amounts by all. It is what makes Homo sapiens want to believe they are special, to believe they are unlike the other members of the genus Homo.
Today, almost half of all the crops consumed by humankind depend on nitrogen derived from synthetic fertilizer. Another way of putting this is to say that Haber and Bosch enabled our species to extract an additional 3 billion people’s worth of food from the same land.
From this standpoint, the answer to the question “Are we doomed to destroy ourselves?” is “Yes.” That we could be some sort of magical exception—it seems unscientific. Why should we be different? Is there any evidence that we are special?
What Vogt saw in Peru would crystallize his picture of the world and the human place in it—a vision of limitation. It would bring him to the Prophet’s essential belief: humans have no special dispensation to escape biological constraints.
Understand the rules and measure the environment, and you could comprehend the future.
Vogt and Osborn were also the first to bring to a wide public a belief that would become a foundation of environmental thought: consumption driven by capitalism and rising human numbers is the ultimate cause of most of the world’s ecological problems, and only dramatic reductions in human fertility and economic activity will prevent a worldwide calamity.
Defining a word in a new sense seems academic and abstract, but its consequences are not. Until something has a name, it can’t be discussed or acted upon with intent. “People, by naming the world, transform it,” wrote the Brazilian educator Paulo Freire. Without “the environment,” there would be no environmental movement.
To prevent “non-linear, abrupt environmental change,” they said, humankind must not transgress nine global limits. That is, people must not 1. use too much fresh water; 2. put too much nitrogen and phosphorus from fertilizer into the land; 3. overly deplete the protective ozone in the stratosphere; 4. change the acidity of the oceans too much; 5. use too much land for agriculture; 6. wipe out species too fast; 7. dump too many chemicals into ecosystems; 8. send too much soot into the air; and 9. put too much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
Instead he became, by the example of his life, the emblem of a way of thought—the Wizard’s way. His success would show, at least to Wizards, that science and technology, properly applied, could allow humankind to produce its way into a prosperous future. To the question of how to survive, his work said: be smart, make more, share with everyone else. It said: we can build a world of gleaming richness for all. And the concomitants of this world—the giant installations, the whirring machinery in the garden, the glare of artificial light in the night sky—are to be embraced, not feared.
“Man minus the machine is a slave,” proclaimed Henry Ford, touting his new tractor. “Man plus the machine is a free man.” Decades afterward, looking back on the Model F, Borlaug agreed entirely. “Relief from endless drudgery,” he said, “equated to emancipation from servitude.”
The Law of Return embodies an insight: everything affects everything else.
In the laboratory, scientists ask: Is it feasible? In the world outside the laboratory, people ask: Is it right?
Weighing the relative pluses and minuses is an exercise in morality that is outside the realm of science.
Hard-path Wizards ask: How should we get more water? Soft-path Prophets ask: Why use water to do this at all?
The belief that human life will continue, even if we ourselves die, is one of the underpinnings of society.
“Man’s command over nature has grown more rapidly than his mastery of himself,”
“Man, not nature, is the problem today.”
How many people? is an important question, but it is less important than What are those people doing?
Scientists say that because the workshop has found that A is true the world should do B. But people in the world notice that when scientists go into the workshop they strip their objects of study of everything but a few measurable quantities, and then the people object that what was stripped away was worthy, even essential.
