The Wizard and the Prophet: Two Remarkable Scientists and Their Dueling Visions to Shape Tomorrow’s World by Charles C. Mann. 

3/5 rating. 474 pages.

Book #44 of 2020. Read July 3, 2020.

This book was an interesting look about the current schism in environmental thinking through two different scientist’s lives and work. Some of this book was incredibly interesting, unfortunately, other parts were kind of boring and this being over 450 pages long, it made it just a 3.

These two different scientists are Norman Borlaug (the Wizard) and William Vogt (the Prophet). Borlaug was the Nobel prize-winning scientist who began the Green Revolution in Mexico by working tirelessly for years to develop better strands of wheat that were shorter, disease-resistant, and improved yields. He represents the environmentalists that believe that we can deal with the current food, water, energy, and climate change concerns with technological fixes.

Vogt was a scientist who was an ardent environmentalist and conservationist. His thinking was that

“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.”

and

“respecting the rules of nature is indispensable to having a good society and living a good life.”

This battle between technology and conservation has been somewhat toxic to this ever important discussion over our future as humans. This false dichotomy that we can only approach these issues by pure technology or by pure conservation is really not the right way to look for solutions. The real answer will probably be something in between, including ideas from both the Borlaug and Vogt camps. We need to be better stewards of our earth and resources, but we also by this point down our path of destruction of the earth will likely need help to meet the needs of our and future generations without causing any more damage to the earth.

If you are interested in an in-depth look at the current environmental climate – including food, water, energy, and climate change – this is a good, though long book, to do so.

Quotes:

“Later, though, it seemed to me that what was important was less the new knowledge than what it had enabled. In the 1970’s, when I was in high school, about one out of every four people in the world was hungry – ‘undernourished,’ to use the term preferred by the United Nations. Today, the U.N. says, the figure is one out of ten. In those four decades, the global average life span has risen by more than eleven years, with most of the increase occurring in poor places.”

“Can we provide these things without wrecking much else?”

“If present trends continue, most agronomists believe, harvests will have to rise 50 percent or more by 2050.”

“How can we best fit into the world, and not overstep our bounds?”

“‘Government and business must work together constantly to achieve more and more jobs and more and more production,’ proclaimed President Harry S. Truman.”

“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.”

“‘Our forefathers,’ [Vogt] 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.’”

“Environmentalism is an argument that respecting the rules of nature is indispensable to having a good society and living a good life.”

“A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community.”

“Consume less! Eliminate toxins! Turn down the thermostat! Eat lower on the food chain! Reduce and recycle waste! Protect biodiversity! Live close to the land! Protect local communities! Small is beautiful! All have their root in Vogt’s call to live lightly on the soil and work with nature, instead of overwhelming it.”

“[Borlaug’s] 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.”

“Stakman did not view science as a disinterested quest for knowledge. It was a tool – maybe the tool – for human betterment.”

“To Vogt, the basic problem was land degradation, and the primary cure was to ease the burden on the land. By contrast, the scientists believed that Mexico’s issues were caused, at bottom, by lack of knowledge and tools. The difference between these two approaches is profound, and at the heart of the split between Wizards and Prophets.”

“I don’t know what we can do to help but we’ve got to do something.”

“Then what is life?”

“[F]ertilizer from the Haber-Bosch process was responsible for ‘the prevailing diets of nearly 45% of the worlds population.’”

“Hard on the heels of the gains were the losses. About 40 percent of the fertilizer applied in the last sixty years wasn’t assimilated by plants; instead, it washed away into rivers or seeped into the air in the form of nitrous oxide. Fertilizer flushed into rivers, lakes, and oceans is still fertilizer: it boosts the growth of algae, weeds, and other aquatic organisms. When these die, they rain to the ocean floor, where they are consumed by microbes. So rapidly do the microbes grow on the increased food supply that their respiration drains the oxygen from the lower depths, killing off most life.”

“To grow the best, most nutritious crops, farmers needed (to put it in modern terms) to view their land not as a store of chemicals to be managed efficiently but as a complexly interacting living system to be cherished and maintained.”

“Industrial and organic boosters both agreed that soil needed to furnish nutrients to plants, especially nitrogen. The difference was that the Liebigs believed that synthetic fertilizer could deliver them – a nitrogen atom from a factory, they said, was identical to a nitrogen atom from the rear end of a cow – and the Howards believed that they were better provided via the Law of Return as part of a natural system. At the beginning it might have been possible to reconcile the two points of view. One can imagine industrial advocates considering humus, humus advocates willing to use chemicals as a supplement to good soil practice. But that didn’t happen. Hurling insults, the two sides moved ever further apart.”

“Between 1961 and 2003, Asian irrigation more than doubled, from 182 million acres to 407 million acres; fertilizer use went up by a factor of twenty, from 4.2 to 85 million tons. The consequences were drained aquifers, fertilizer runoff, aquatic dead zones, waterlogged soils, social upheaval – and a near tripling of rice production in Asia.”

“At the beginning of the twentieth century, according to Smil, the environmental researcher, barely 10 percent of the world’s grain harvest went to animals, mostly horses, mules, and oxen used as farm labor. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, the figure had risen considerably, though by exactly how much is difficult to calculate: perhaps 40 percent, Smil estimates, the great majority of it destined for dairy and meat animals.”

“Between 1961 and 2014, the world’s meat production more than quadrupled.”

“On a global level, a quarter or more of the food produced for human consumption is lost or squandered – left in the field, ruined by poor storage, wrecked in packaging, spoiled in transport, rejected in markets, or simply thrown away by consumers. The exact amount depends on the definition of ‘waste,’ which varies dramatically in different studies, and how it is measured, which also varies. In wealthy places, most of the waste comes from people not eating food they have bought. By contrast, the losses in poor nations are concentrated in field, storage, and transport. Cutting waste obviously would reduce the need to increase harvests. Unfortunately, it will not be easy. In poor nations it would require significant improvements to agricultural infrastructure – costly investments that are difficult for cash-strapped nations to make. Reducing losses in rich nations would involve changing the behavior of huge numbers of busy people, an equally challenging endeavor. Both should be attempted, but progress is likely to be slow and modest.”

“‘I’ve never got a subsidy check in forty years of doing this,’ he said to me. As he pointed out, many of the supports were intended to promote the acquisition of machinery, rather than labor. He might get a special low-interest loan to buy a combine, but not to hire a human being.”

“But most freshwater is actually used by agriculture – almost 70 percent, according to the U.N. Food and Agricultural Organization. Just 12 percent goes to direct human consumption: drinking, cooking, washing, and so on. (Industry takes the rest.)”

“Is this the best that mankind can do? Is this our end after 7,000 years of civilization?”

“In arid areas like the U.S. Southwest, middle-class households use as much as three-quarters of their water on the lawn.”

“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 landscapes of the lawn with area-specific plantings that embody the essential qualities of a place.”

“It is, Brooks has said, ‘a human vision toward a sustainable future.’ 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.”

“Already farms use four-fifths of [California’s] water.”

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

“If the physical properties of carbon dioxide and water vapor didn’t intersect in this way – if carbon dioxide didn’t happen to absorb the infrared radiation that water vapor lets through – then burning fossil fuels would be of little interest to climate researchers.” 

“In its frantic quest to industrialize, China burns almost as much coal as the rest of the world put together.”

“Even in the United States, which uses less coal than other big nations, coal pollution leads to as many as 25,000 deaths per year.”

“Coal provides less than a fifth of U.S. energy, but again almost all of it is for industry.”

“Most of these people use kerosene for lighting and burn wood or dung to cook food. Different groups have tried to estimate the fatalities from the fumes: between 500,000 and 1.3 million Indians a year, depending on the assumptions of the researchers.”

“Adding these together, a research team at the Paul Scherrer Institute, Switzerland’s biggest research center, reckoned in 2016 that nukes thus far have caused fewer deaths than any other power source except hydroelectric dams (wind power was pretty close).”

“In 2014 German researchers dug up jatropha trees from Luxor, Egypt, and measured their carbon content. They determined that an acre of desert jatropha warehouses the carbon from 209.5 tons of carbon dioxide every year. On average, each U.S. citizen emits 18.7 tons of carbon dioxide per year; each German, 8.9; each Indian, 1.7. If jatropha carbon-storage values are typical, walking through Sawadogo’s fifty-acre tree farm was like pushing through a crowd of 560 Americans, 1,175 Germans, or 6,160 Indians.”

“Mountain parks and reservations are useful not only as fountains of timber and irrigating rivers, but as fountains of life.” – John Muir

“How many people? is an important question, but it is less important than What are those people doing?“

“Given the statements below, there is little reason to suppose – from what we know today – that ingesting GMO’s poses any unusual risks to human health.”

IG Link.