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

by Charles C. Mann

Between 1961 and 2014, the world’s meat production more than quadrupled. Simply reproducing that jump could easily require doubling the world’s grain harvest.

Remarkably, C4 photosynthesis has arisen independently more than sixty times. Maize, tumbleweed, crabgrass, sugarcane, and Bermuda grass—all these very different plants evolved C4 photosynthesis on their own.

In the botanical equivalent of a moonshot, an international consortium of almost a hundred agricultural scientists is working to convert rice into a C4 plant—a rice that could grow faster, require less water and fertilizer, withstand higher temperatures, and produce more grain.

Rather than companies tinkering with individual genes to sell branded goop, the consortium is trying to refashion the most fundamental process of life—with the intent of giving away the result.

The odds that any one of them will succeed may be small. But the odds that all of them will fail are equally small.

In the laboratory, scientists ask: Is it feasible? In the world outside the laboratory, people ask: Is it right?

They were being used purely as a means to somebody else’s end—something that philosophers have regarded as unethical since the days of Kant.

The conundrum is that poor nations are less likely to accept an innovation if it is rejected by their richer neighbors—it can become stigmatized.

The action by which middle-class people refuse to take risks on behalf of rich companies becomes a way of blocking aspirations of the distant poor.

GMOs became a focus for a larger disquiet, a synecdoche for a larger anxiety about being an insignificant part of a vast economic complex that did not have the citizen’s best interests at heart.

They didn’t want something as intimate as breakfast to be out of any possibility of control. To be so far removed from any identifiable human touch.

But at the same time (as Nichols was quick to point out), his food was more expensive than supermarket food from industrial farms. Like a custom-furniture maker, he was making beautiful things for a restricted clientele. Nothing wrong with that, Wizards say. But don’t imagine that this kind of operation can play a big role in feeding the world of 10 billion.

At a time when we should be thinking about doubling global harvests, it’s a mistake to focus on boutique farms, no matter how charming. That’s the line, anyway.

To Borlaugians, farming is a species of useful drudgery that should be eased and reduced as much as possible to maximize individual liberty.

(Bertolt Brecht, succinctly, in The Threepenny Opera: “First comes food, then comes right from wrong.”)

Because the rules that encourage large-scale, industrial production for export remain in effect, farmers like Lloyd Nichols are swimming against the tide.

Tomatoes are essentially little balls of flavored water.

Peter asked if I had seen the movie Chinatown. That stuff about people killing for water in California? It’s all true.

In the next forty years the Central Valley Project captured and channeled two-thirds of the runoff in the state.

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.

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.

Journalists sometimes describe unsexy subjects as MEGO: My Eyes Glaze Over. Alas, water quality is the essence of MEGO. Nonetheless, the stakes—human and environmental—are high. Today, according to the International Water Management Institute, a Sri Lanka–based cousin to IRRI and CIMMYT, one person out of every three on the planet lacks reliable access to freshwater, whether because the water is unsafe, unaffordable, or unavailable.

Instead Lowdermilk found an almost treeless waste: exhausted soil, untended ruins, scattered and scrubby vegetation, impoverished goatherds in “poverty, ignorance, and squalor,” “the Hanging Gardens of Babylon now heaps and piles in a salty desolation.” The Fertile Crescent was no longer fertile; the land of milk and honey had neither. Where once the mighty forests of Lebanon had provided wood for ships and cities across the Holy Land, only three small cedar groves remained, the largest with about four hundred trees.

Today, about 85 percent of Israel’s wastewater—more than 100 million gallons a year—is used for irrigation,

Enabled by the development of cheap cement and cheap fossil fuels, the hard path has produced drinking and irrigation water for huge numbers of people. Like the invention of synthetic fertilizer, the reshaping of water systems has profoundly affected the contours of everyday life, allowing the inhabitants of today’s megacities to live at a level of cleanliness, health, and comfort that would astonish our ancestors.

The soft path, by contrast, is something new. Decentralization, efficiency, and education are its hallmarks.

Replacing the lawn is an exemplary soft-path solution: hyper-efficient, locally oriented, bottom-up, low-tech. In saving water, it seeks to transform the featureless, universal landscape of the lawn with area-specific plantings that embody the essential qualities of a place.

At one level, it is about reforming institutions; at another, about changing habits. Ultimately, though, it is a vision of the human place in nature.

Hard-path supporters see technology placing humanity in charge: we can move H2O molecules wherever we want to satisfy our wishes. Soft-path people think this level of control is illusory—cooperation and adjustment, not command and control, is the way to live.

As a practical matter, saving water cuts into the justification for providing more, and vice versa. Implementing both paths at once requires attention and funding that are hard to come by in a world of clamoring needs.

Urban planning is easier in a dictatorship than in a democracy.

Few of the inhabitants seemed to have electricity; only a handful of lights were visible in the darkness. Fifteen years later I returned to the same spot and saw a city almost twice the size of Chicago. Its light covered the stars.

In 1950 fewer than one out of three of the world’s people lived in cities. By 2050, according to United Nations projections, the figure will be almost two out of three.

For the most part, farmers have kept up with the increase in urban numbers, growing more food and distributing it in the newly expanding cities. Water has a poorer record.

Again and again, the biggest obstacle has been what social scientists call governmentality and what everybody else calls corruption, inefficiency, incompetence, and indifference.

So much of India’s urban water supply is contaminated that the lost productivity from the resultant disease costs fully 5 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product.

The Mountain Aquifer that straddles the border between Israel and the Palestinian territories is the most important source of groundwater for cities in both nations. In an atypical act of collaboration, both societies are polluting it.

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.”

He said, “They don’t have enough to operate the system properly, so the existing system rations water, and of course it’s the elite that gets to the front of the queue.”

In a few hours of wandering around Towel Factory Square I found half a dozen men and women who were paying a quarter or more of their income just for water. Economics 101 does not readily apply to neighborhoods like these.

More than half of California farms use flood irrigation—covering their fields a few inches deep in water—as did the farmers of the ancient Fertile Crescent.

Most of the almonds in the United States, for example, are grown by about four hundred large operations in the San Joaquin Valley, which use about 10 percent of the state’s water supply.

Meanwhile, more water is used to grow alfalfa than is consumed by all the households in California.

One values a kind of liberty; the other, a kind of community. One sees nature instrumentally, as a set of raw materials freely available for use; the other believes each ecosystem has an inner integrity and meaning that should be preserved, even if it constrains human actions.

First the derricks, then the bars and brothels. After that, the wasteland. In 1859 the first successful oil well in the United States was drilled in Titusville, Pennsylvania.

They dammed the stream, piled barrels onto rafts, and then broke the dam, letting the rafts surf downstream on the wave. Vessels capsized so often that people made a profitable business of skimming crude from the riverbank.

It had no legal existence or official name or town charter or anything but petroleum, so much petroleum that it seeped to the surface and covered every horizontal surface in a foot-thick impasto of oily mud mixed with snow and excrement (the city had no sewers). Most people called the new settlement Pithole.

Hooker and john alike were sure they were at the beginning of something that would last forever and change the world.

Walking through the city’s ruins, I found it hard not to wonder whether our industrial era was not simply Pithole writ large: an evanescent surge of wealth, much of it squandered, doomed to end when the world’s fuel supply was consumed.

Pithole’s citizens, wannabe wildcatters all, had been certain they were creating a prosperous, long-lasting tomorrow. Centuries from now, will our descendants look back in scorn at our equally feckless view of the future?