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

by Charles C. Mann

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. Living creatures and non-living things are both made of matter, long-ago thinkers said. But the former eat, reproduce, act with intent, and do a hundred other things that seem beyond the capacities of the non-living. It was easy for the ancients to explain the gulf between life and non-life by imagining that a special kind of immaterial energy flows through and sustains living tissues. Without this essence, a live body would be a mere mechanism, not an organism.

Not until years after Vogt left Peru did researchers learn the answer: nitrogen is critical to photosynthesis.

Photosynthesis is hard to describe without sounding like a hand-waving mystic. By blending water from below with sunlight and carbon dioxide from above, photosynthesis links Earth to the sky. The crops in every farmer’s field are air and sunlight in cold storage. So are the trees around the field and the algae in nearby ponds. Every dot of green on the landscape is a ceaselessly active photosynthetic factory. If this furious microscopic churning stopped, Oliver Morton, the science writer, has remarked, “so would everything else that you care about.” The planet would survive. But it would no longer be green.

Logically speaking, only two paths to increasing harvests exist. One is to lift actual yields—the yields produced by farmers, some of whom are better at their work than others. If they are provided better equipment, materials, and technical advice, farmers can bring their harvests closer to the theoretical maximum. The other is to increase the potential yield—the theoretical maximum—which should bring up the actual yield with it.*7

It was easy to mock Rifkin. A social activist since the Vietnam War, he liked to attack “the Boys”—Isaac Newton, Karl Marx, Adam Smith, Francis Bacon, René Descartes, and Charles Darwin, among others—who had, to Rifkin’s way of thinking, created a worldview that valued efficiency rather than empathy and the spirit.

Which of the two farms is more productive? Wizards and Prophets would disagree about the answer, because they disagree about the question. To Wizards, the question means: Which farm creates more calories—more usable energy, in Weaver’s terms—per acre? Scores of research teams have tried to appraise the relative contributions of organic and conventional agriculture. These inquiries in turn have been gathered together and assessed, a procedure that is also fraught with difficulty (researchers use different definitions of “organic,” compare different kinds of farms, and include different costs in their analyses). Nonetheless, every attempt to sum up the data that I know of has shown that in side-by-side comparisons, Howard-style farms grow less food per acre overall than Liebig-style farms—sometimes a little bit less, sometimes quite a lot. The implications for the world of 2050 are obvious, Wizards say. If farmers must grow twice as much food to feed the 10 billion, following An Agricultural Testament ties their hands. Prophets smite their brows in exasperation at this logic. To their minds, evaluating farming systems wholly in terms of calories produced—in terms of usable energy—is a perfect example of the flaws of reductive thinking. It does not include the costs of overfertilization, habitat loss, watershed degradation, soil erosion and compaction, and pesticide and antibiotic overuse; it doesn’t account for the destruction of rural communities; it doesn’t consider whethe...

Peter told me all of this as we drove through the valley in blazing heat. I asked what California did with all the millions upon millions of gallons of water that it shuffled around. He pointed outside. We were passing through a land of rice paddies. From one end of the horizon to the other were shallow rectangular pools with brilliant green strands of rice waving above. As I remember it, I could almost see the water steaming off the surface and flooding the sky. I was startled. They spent all that money to send all this water here from hundreds of miles away and then they just let it evaporate? He nodded. Is that crazy? Not if you’re a rice farmer, he said.

How could people run short of something so abundant? The reason is that 97.5 percent of the world’s water is saltwater—undrinkable, corrosive, even toxic. More than two-thirds of the remainder is locked into polar ice caps and glaciers, the great majority of it in Antarctica. The rest—all of the planet’s lakes, rivers, swamps, and groundwater—is less than 1 percent of the total. That is the theoretically available freshwater supply. Put together, it would form a sphere about 170 miles in diameter. In fact, though, this is a wild overestimate, because more than nine-tenths of that water is groundwater, and most groundwater is unusable or inaccessible.

Groundwater flows take longer to destroy than rivers but are just as vulnerable. Most important groundwater sources are aquifers: underground layers of permeable, water-holding rock.

Coastal aquifers are imperiled from Maine to Florida; on the Arabian coast; in the suburbs of Jakarta (metropolitan population, more than 10 million); throughout the Mediterranean; and in a host of other places.

He learned Chinese and took a two-thousand-mile solo trip up the Yellow River. Along the way inspiration filled him and he understood the path of history and the rise and fall of civilizations.

Erosion was the key, and its cause was water. To grow food, societies needed to harness rainfall or deploy irrigation. But they failed in both. Rainfall rushed down slopes and carried topsoil into rivers and flushed it into the sea. Or water evaporated in irrigation channels and left behind salts that poisoned the land. Or water wasn’t saved when rain fell and the fields withered.

Maintaining the network required scraping out the silt. “A standing army of slaves for this task was required to toil without ceasing on this endless removal of silt from the canals,” Lowdermilk explained. These were the Israelites of the Old Testament. Roman and then Byzantine invaders took over but continued to dredge the canals. Then came Arab nomads with their new religion of Islam. “Despising the tilling of the soil and hating trees, the nomads sought to live off herds and off the plunder of settled areas.” As the water infrastructure fell into disuse, levees eroded; floods washed away topsoil. The canals dried up and left salt in the soils that glittered at night. Goats ate what was left. Nobody tried to restore the land—inactivity Lowdermilk attributed to “Moslem fanaticism, with its fatalistic belief that what happens is the ‘will of Allah.’ ”

The same biblical peoples who had created the great city of Babylon set in motion its destruction. Islam and goats had little impact. And the failure to restore the land was due not to nomadic peoples but to the wholly sedentary Ottoman Empire, based in faraway Istanbul, which ruled the area from the fifteenth century until the end of the First World War. In its bureaucratic way, the empire extracted wealth from the area while refusing to invest in it. Still, Lowdermilk got one big thing right: the Fertile Crescent had become a desert and a major cause was human incompetence with water.

the product of photosynthesis, which is to say that they were organic batteries, storing energy from the sun.

big, Wizard-style utilities have been so economically advantageous that until recently the other view has never had a chance. With few exceptions, distributed sun and wind power gains viability only in situations where people consider the by-products of massive energy consumption.

More than 80 percent of the world’s energy now comes from fossil fuels, and every bit of it is mined from the earth.*1 That is another way of saying that all the fossil fuels humankind will ever have are already here, waiting to be extracted from the ground—in contrast to food, which is grown every season from the soil, and freshwater, which is drawn in constant but limited amounts from rivers, lakes, and aquifers.

The initial oil concession with Iran, negotiated in 1901, had been on terms so favorable to London that the Iranians showed signs of seller’s remorse. To forestall protests, Britain temporarily seized control of the Iranian government. An attempt in 1919 to make the arrangement permanent led to uprisings. Two years later Britain coordinated a coup d’état that led to the installation of a new shah. He swore publicly to protect Iran from foreign influence while privately assuring the same foreigners he would never interrupt the flow of oil.

Feeling defensive, I asked if she thought the kind of climate change Al Gore was describing wouldn’t be a catastrophe. Sad, sure, she said, in my recollection. But a catastrophe—no. She paused. Oxygen, she said. Now, that was a catastrophe. The oxygen she was referring to was the Great Oxidation Event, which occurred after cyanobacteria evolved photosynthesis. Photosynthetic creatures spread through the oceans, excreting oxygen all the while. The flood of oxygen permanently changed the surface of the earth, the composition of the oceans, and the functioning of the atmosphere. Most scientists believe it made the vast majority of the world’s land and sea uninhabitable for the vast majority of the planet’s living creatures. Margulis called the resultant slaughter an “oxygen holocaust.” Over time, minerals absorbed much of the gas, stabilizing it at about 21 percent of the atmosphere—a good thing, because if the level had risen much more our air would have had so much oxygen that a single spark could have set the planet afire.

To Margulis, the Great Oxidation Event had lessons for today. The first was that people who thought that living creatures couldn’t affect the climate had no idea of the power of life. The second was that the onset of climate change meant that Homo sapiens was getting into the biological big leagues—we were tiptoeing into the terrain of bacteria, algae, and other truly important creatures. The third was that species, like sullen teenagers, don’t pick up after themselves. Cyanobacteria sprayed their oxygen garbage all over Earth without concern for the consequences—littering on an epic scale. People were doing the same with carbon dioxide.

Rather than concluding from this history that, as Allitt put it, “environmental problems, though very real, were manageable,” each side stored up bitterness, like batteries taking on charge. The process that had led, often disagreeably, to successful environmental action in the 1970s brought on political stasis by the 1990s. Environmental issues became ways for politicians to flag their clan identity to supporters—less statements about practical problems with solutions that people could debate than symbols of identity. They signaled membership in a cause: taking back the country, either from tyrannical liberal elitism or right-wing greed.

An Associated Press reporter, remembering Vogt’s name, telephoned him. Vogt didn’t back down. Maybe he was pleased to have someone seeking his opinion. He said he wouldn’t vote for Kennedy. “The last thing this country needs is more people,” he told the reporter. “And the next to last, in my opinion, is a president of the United States who sets such a bad example.” The comments were swiftly disavowed by Planned Parenthood. A month later, Kennedy was assassinated in Los Angeles. A month after that, on July 11, 1968, Vogt killed himself in his apartment. He left a note whose contents were never released.

Published in May 1968, The Population Bomb attracted little initial notice. No major newspaper reviewed it for five months. The New York Times gave it a one-paragraph notice almost a year after its release. In February 1970, twenty months after publication, Ehrlich was invited onto The Tonight Show, a late-night talk show, then enormously popular. The invitation was a fluke; Johnny Carson, the comedian-host, was leery of serious guests like university professors because he feared they would be pompous, dull, and opaque. Ehrlich proved to be affable, witty, and blunt. Thousands of letters poured in after his appearance, astonishing the network. The Population Bomb shot up the best-seller list. Carson invited Ehrlich back in April, a week before the first Earth Day. For more than an hour he spoke about population and ecology to an audience of tens of millions. It was the moment that Vogt had dreamed of for decades.

Suddenly Vogt’s ideas were everywhere. As Ehrlich put it, “No effort to expand the carrying capacity of the Earth can keep pace with unbridled population growth.” Others—many others—echoed his words. If humankind continued to exceed its limits, the biophysicist John Platt warned in 1969, “we are in the gravest danger of destroying our society, our world, and ourselves in any number of different ways well before the end of this century.” On the first Earth Day, in 1970, eighty-two-year-old Hugh Moore distributed hundreds of thousands of handbills about population and free audio tapes featuring Ehrlich. For the occasion he unveiled a new slogan: “People pollute.” Its implication was clear: more people = more pollution.

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. (“At long last,” World Bank head Robert McNamara remarked, “India is moving to effectively address its population problem.”) All the while, the same programs were pushing birth control with equal vigor. In Egypt, Tunisia, Pakistan, South Korea, and Taiwan, health workers’ salaries were, in a system that invited abuse, dictated by the number of IUDs they inserted into women. In the Philippines, condoms and birth-control pills were literally pitched out of helicopters hovering over remote villages.

Our record of success is not that long. In any case, past successes are no guarantee of the future. But it is terrible to suppose that we could get so many other things right and get this one wrong. To have the imagination to see our potential end, but not have the cultural resources to avoid it. To send humankind to the moon but fail to pay attention to Earth. To have the potential but to be unable to use it—to be, in the end, no different from the protozoa in the petri dish. It would be evidence that Lynn Margulis’s most dismissive beliefs had been right after all. For all our speed and voraciousness, our changeable sparkle and flash, we would be, at last count, not an especially interesting species.

In 2007 the activist-journalist Naomi Klein published The Shock Doctrine, which argued that right-wing elites were using—or even manufacturing—economic crises as a pretext to force societies to adopt corporations’ preferred policies (slashing social-welfare programs, reducing taxes, cutting regulations, and so on). The policies were presented as solutions to the crisis but in fact were designed to enrich the already-wealthy people who proposed them.

Some global-warming opponents see climate change in the same way—as an overstated or even fictitious “crisis” that left-wingers like Klein use as an excuse to force other people to do what they want (reducing consumption, overturning capitalism). When activists retort (accurately) that the great majority of researchers agree with them—well, that proves the researchers, too, are in on the plot.