The world is doomed—except when it’s not. In fact, the world is roaring on toward brightness, getting better and better—except when it’s not.
In other words, we really do intuit one sure truth: We are careening toward disaster. And yet, we really do intuit another sure truth: Things are better than they’ve ever been. On one side we find the angry sibyls, howling of our fall into abyss unless we live small. On the other side we see the happy crystal-gazers, nattering of our rise to the heavens if only we reach for the stars.
The science writer and historian Charles C. Mann calls them prophets and wizards, and in his latest book, he looks at a pair of them from the 20th-century—a pair who symbolize the enduring modern tension between the convincing rightness of the Chicken Littles and the obvious correctness of the Pollyannas. His happy Pollyanna is Norman Borlaug, the Iowa farm boy who jumpstarted the Green Revolution that transformed agriculture across the globe. His sad Chicken Little is William Vogt, the author of the influential 1948 environmentalist tract The Road to Survival. Together, they form The Wizard and the Prophet of Mann’s title—the figures on either edge of the curious chasm, progress and decline, that slashes through the middle of the modern worldview.
The excellence of The Wizard and the Prophet shows most of all in Charles Mann’s sense of detail and story. He wants us to like both these men, to appreciate their strange biographies, regardless of whether we feel personally drawn to one side or the other of the perennial debate that they represent. The weakness of The Wizard and the Prophet . . . well, interestingly, that derives from the same source. Mann wants us to like both these men, and despite his gift for incisive phrasings, he cannot bring himself to use much sharp criticism on his central figures.
After a pair of opening chapters of biography for Borlaug and Vogt, The Wizard and the Prophet examines the consequences of their work in four fields: food growth, water distribution, energy production, and global climate. (The attempt to match these to the four classical elements—earth, water, fire, and air—gives the book a more confusing architecture than it needs.) Mann conducted a considerable amount of archival research and interviewed scientists and activists everywhere from Iowa to India. He’s a little over-concerned to let the reader know about his travel adventures, but it’s a forgivable fault in his scene-setting.
Through it all, Vogt and Borlaug genuinely emerge as the archetypes of their differing kinds. Vogt was, for example, the talented amateur. A young birdwatcher of some renown and boundless energy—he almost singlehandedly forced into print Roger Tory Peterson’s subsequently famous bird guide—he worked for a while as director of the Jones Beach State Bird Sanctuary in New York. It was there that he noticed the baleful effect of the attempt to eliminate mosquitoes: the draining of marshland and spread of chemicals lessened the mosquito population while also lessening the bird population that was the reason for the sanctuary.
Rising to become an editor for the Audubon Society magazine, Vogt wrote a pamphlet called Thirst on the Land that stressed the cyclical nature of ecosystems in cleaning water and recycling nitrogen: work that human replacements don’t do anywhere near as well. Mann insists we owe to that text the idea that “the environment” is itself a being, an entity that needs to be given primacy in our deliberations about the world.
Vogt was not a man who played well with others—has there ever been a prophet who did?—and the Audubon Society soon fired him. He managed to land a gig from a commercial company worried about its guano supplies on a Peruvian island, and after studying the problem he told the company that nothing would “augment the increment of excrement” from the birds. Conservation alone—”the balance between species continually sought by nature”—would allow guano mining to continue.
After the Second World War, he worked as conservation director of the Pan American Union, where he wrote The Road to Survival, which Mann calls, in one of his nice phrases, “the first modern we’re-all-going-to-hell” book. Preaching population control, he eventually became national director of Planned Parenthood. Squabbles with Margaret Sanger drove him out of that job, as squabbles had driven him out of so many jobs. Vogt killed himself in 1968 at age 62, convinced he had failed to persuade anyone—although only a few years later, America would see such gains for his worldview as the bestselling status of Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb and the rise of Earth Day.
Meanwhile, Norman Borlaug had an even less prepossessing start. Born in 1914, he studied forestry at the University of Minnesota in the 1930s. A doctorate in plant pathology got him a stint at a Rockefeller Foundation program in Mexico that sought some marginal increases in wheat yields.
Borlaug…