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Vogt, born in 1902, laid out the basic ideas for the modern environmental movement. In particular, he founded what the Hampshire College demographer Betsy Hartmann has called “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. If we continue, the
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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. To Borlaug, affluence was not the problem but the solution. Only by getting
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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.
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.
Plato’s four elements: earth, water, fire, and air. Earth represents agriculture, how we will feed the world. Water is drinking water, as vital as food. Fire is our energy supply. Air is climate change, a by-product, potentially catastrophic, of our hunger for energy.
Earth: If present trends continue, most agronomists believe, harvests will have to rise 50 percent or more by 2050. Different models with different assumptions make different projections, but all view the rise in demand as due both to the increase in human numbers and the increase in human affluence. With few exceptions, people who became wealthier have wanted to consume more meat. To grow more meat, farmers will need to grow more grain—much more. Wizards and Prophets have radically different ways of approaching these demands.
Water: Although most of Earth is covered by water, less than 1 percent of it is accessible freshwater. And the demand for that water is constantly increasing. The increase is a corollary of the rising demand for food—almost three-quarters of global water use goes to agriculture. Many water researchers believe that as many as 4.5 billion people could be short of water by as early as 2025. As...
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Fire: Predicting how much energy tomorrow’s world will need depends on assumptions about, for instance, how many of the roughly 1.2 billion people who do not have electricity will actually get it, and how that electricity will be provided (solar power, nuclear power, natural gas, wind, coal). Still, the main thrust of every attempt to estimate future requirements that I am aware of is that the human enterprise will require...
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Air: In this list, climate change is odd man out. The other three elements (food, freshwater, energy supply) reflect human needs, whereas climate change is an unwanted consequence of satisfying those needs. The first three are about providing benefits to humankind: food on the table, water from the tap, heat and air-conditioning in the home. With climate change, the benefit is invisible: avoiding problems in the future. Societies put their members through wrenching changes and then, w...
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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.
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.
“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.”
A prerequisite for a successful scientific career is an enthusiastic willingness to pore through the minutiae of subjects that 99.9 percent of Earth’s population find screamingly dull.
Tomatoes are essentially little balls of flavored water.
Water is politics, water’s religion, Water is just about anyone’s pigeon…. Water is tragical, water is comical, Water is far from the pure economical.
doggerel poem by the economist Kenneth Boulding
Many of the world’s water problems arise because the sacred aura around water induces governments to treat it “as common property—it’s free to use, no matter what you do with it and how much you use.” In consequence, huge quantities are wasted.
Tomorrow’s leaders, whether Wizards or Prophets, would face a dance of impossibilities: the extraordinary cost and effort of rapidly replacing the world’s energy infrastructure versus the extraordinary cost and effort of moving cities versus the extraordinary cost and effort of continuing on the same path.
