More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
April 19 - May 2, 2025
A couple of billion jobs. A couple of billion homes. A couple of billion cars. Billions and billions of occasional treats. Can we provide these things? That is only part of the question. The full question is: Can we provide these things without wrecking much else?
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.
Only by getting richer, smarter, and more knowledgeable can humankind create the science that will resolve our environmental dilemmas. Innovate! Innovate! was Borlaug’s cry. Only in that way can everyone win!
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.
Before the Spanish conquest, Chapingo, and Mexico City were on opposite sides of a lake that was more than thirty miles wide, rich with fish, and lined with prosperous villages.
Vogt wants to protect the land; Borlaug wants to equip its occupants.
Before agriculture, the Middle West, Ukraine, and the lower Yangzi Valley had been sparsely populated domains of insects and grass; they became breadbaskets, as people scythed away suites of species that used soil and water we wanted to control and replaced them with maize, wheat, and rice.
For Homo sapiens, agriculture transformed the planet into something like a petri dish.
To avoid destroying itself, the human race would have to do something deeply unnatural, something no other species has ever done or could ever do: constrain its own growth (at least in some ways). Brown tree snakes in Guam, water hyacinth in African rivers, rabbits in Australia, Burmese pythons in Florida—all these successful species have overrun their environments, heedlessly wiping out other creatures. Not one has voluntarily turned back.
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.
Like Vogt, she ended up liking the harsh plenitude of North Chincha. “You seem to get close to the secret places of the universe in such a spot,” she wrote.
Indeed, some thinkers feared that untrammeled growth would lead to despotism by concentrating wealth; others argued that continued economic expansion was impossible in developed, mature economies like those in Europe and North America. During the Depression, many U.S. New Deal programs actually were anti-productivity; in the hope of driving up farm incomes by artificially creating shortages, farmers were paid to plow under millions of acres of cotton fields and slaughter huge numbers of pigs.
Humanity, Malthus thought, will always be one breath from calamity. Permanent victory over deprivation is impossible; prosperity, fleeting, is doomed to vanish.
Overstating the impact of Darwin, Wallace, and Malthus is not easy. Their ideas passed rapidly beyond economics and biology to become models for society. Some thinkers viewed evolution as a process of competition leading to progress, and viewed it as justifying an unfettered market. Others saw the races of humanity fighting for resources, and sought victory for their group; foreign peoples, spilling over their borders, had to be choked back.
More striking still, many of the racial alarmists were also leaders in the nation’s new conservation movement. The blue-blooded toffs who feared that the noble and superior white race was menaced by unwashed rabble also saw wild landscapes as noble and superior wildernesses menaced by the same rabble.
Vogt, Leopold, Murphy, and their associates were not truly in this elitist company; in fact, they helped begin the transformation in which environmental issues switched from being a cause of the right to one of the left. Nonetheless, they shared much of the racial alarmists’ intellectual framework and often dismissed nonwhites in terms that read uncomfortably today.
Road was condemned by Roman Catholics, because it advocated birth control; by conservatives, because it supported state regulation; and by business interests, because it attacked capitalism (the Reader’s Digest condensation excised Vogt’s critiques of the free market). But the greatest ire came from the left.
They were the first to portray our ecological worries as a single Earth-sized problem for which the human species is to blame. And by stating that the problem is one interconnected, worldwide issue, rather than something local or national, they implicitly argued that ecological issues could only be solved by a unified global effort, administered by global experts—by people, that is, like Vogt and Osborn.
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.
The utter disbelief in the ability of humans to innovate - not just consume and destroy, but to create superabundance
Vogt described all of U.S. history as little more than a “march of destruction,” in which colonists “chopped, burned, drained, plowed, and shot” their way from the Atlantic to the Pacific. “Our forefathers,” he thundered, were “one of the most destructive groups of human beings that have ever raped the earth. They moved into one of the richest treasure houses ever opened to man, and in a few decades turned millions of acres of it into a shambles.”
In Road to Survival, “environment” meant not the external natural factors that affected humans but the external natural factors that were affected by humans.
There are two ideas at the base of today’s globe-spanning environmental movement. One is that Homo sapiens, like every other species, is bound by biological laws. The second is that one of these laws is that no species can long exceed the environment’s carrying capacity.
Environments have limits that cannot be ignored or overcome. The walls of the petri dish are real and cannot be surpassed.
Stay within the limits, and people can develop freely. Go beyond the boundaries—exceed carrying capacity—and trouble will ensue.
But it is important to note that others believe that the goal of living well on the planet can be met in different, even opposing ways.
Much as Alexander Hamilton opposed Jefferson’s beliefs as unsound, these people see the best way to live with nature as gathering into big cities (which are said to use less resources than spread-out local communities), increasing productivity (because fewer people directly work the land, maximizing output per person), and growing more prosperous (because affluence makes societies better able to clean up environmental mishaps).
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.
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.
Purchased from a Sears, Roebuck catalogue, Modern Home No. 209 (price: $981.00) was built in a boxy, self-contained style—the “foursquare,” to architectural historians—intended to signify solid American values. There was no insulation or plumbing, but it kept out the wind.
Sometimes on still winter nights Norm boy and his sisters would sit outside, wrapped in blankets, waiting to hear the Milwaukee train as it pulled into Cresco. “It was the one time we sensed we were part of a wider sphere,” he said. “Those sound waves were our sole connection to the world.”
The toil never ended but complaint was rare. The Borlaugs were subsistence farmers, and if they wanted to eat there was no alternative.
On small farms like Henry Borlaug’s, as much as half of the land was devoted to providing feed for the animals used to cultivate the rest.
“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.”
More shocking still was seeing the effects of the Great Depression. Saude had been insulated from the disaster because most of its people were subsistence farmers with little connection to the cash economy.
Red, blue, yellow, orange, black, pink, purple, creamy-white, and multicolored—the jumble of colors of Mexican maize reflects the nation’s jumble of cultures and environmental zones. The small, varied plots in Mexico were like the anti-matter version of the huge, uniform maize fields in the U.S. Midwest.
Hunger, the incapacity of the hungry, the resulting general want, the pressures of expanding and demanding population, and the reckless instability of people who have nothing to lose and perhaps something to gain by embracing new political ideologies designed not to create individual freedom but to destroy it….Whether
Except for his lack of expertise in the subject and nonexistent professional reputation, he was perfect.
The downtown office was staffed by a single receptionist who controlled the project’s most valuable physical asset: a telephone line capable of reaching the United States. The Chapingo testing ground not only didn’t have a greenhouse or laboratory, it didn’t have fields.
In the Bajío he first encountered destitution on a geographic scale. Women walked for miles to carry water from contaminated wells. Men scratched at the earth with wooden hoes and slashed at weeds with sickles as ancient as time. Plumbing was a distant dream. Children died from diseases that were treatable nuisances in richer places. Again and again, he encountered people who had been so badly abused by authority that they clung to beliefs Borlaug found irrational.
By contrast, Borlaug saw the farmers as the central characters. Their suffering was caused not by overshooting the capacity of the land but by their lack of tools and knowledge.
In the ass-end of nowhere Borlaug and his Mexican team had created something new to the world: an all-purpose wheat. Short, fecund, and disease-resistant, it could be sown in soil rich or poor anywhere in Mexico and produce well.
The future of the world depends on science, he said, and on politicians guided by scientists. This vision of a scientific elite was like Vogt’s vision, in its way, except that Borlaug was possessed by the hope of more, rather than a call for less.
To the end of his life, he kept his head down and worked ferociously hard. He always believed that hard rational work would lead him to the goal in the end. It was impossible for him to understand that there were people who didn’t want to go there.
The true problem was not that humankind risked surpassing natural limits, but that our species didn’t know how to tap more than a fraction of the energy provided by nature.
Today the Haber-Bosch process is responsible for almost all of the world’s synthetic fertilizer. A little more than 1 percent of the world’s industrial energy is devoted to it, as the futurist Ramez Naam has noted. Remarkable fact: “That 1 percent,” Naam says, “roughly doubles the amount of food the world can grow.”
The total cost of unwanted nitrogen has been estimated at hundreds of billions of dollars a year. Were it not for climate change, suggests the science writer Oliver Morton, the spread of nitrogen’s empire would be our biggest ecological worry.*2
The counterforce saw each achievement touted by the modernizers as a deficit, every new landmark as a ruin.
Millions upon millions of families had more food, better clothing, money for school. Seoul and Shanghai, Jaipur and Jakarta; shining skyscrapers, pricey hotels, traffic-choked streets ablaze with neon—all are built atop a foundation of laboratory-bred rice.
