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

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.

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.

food and water can be thought of as a flow—or, more precisely, a critical-zone flow, a current with a volume that must be maintained. By contrast, fossil fuels are like a stock, a fixed amount of a good. Few dispute that the flow of food and water could be interrupted, with terrible effects. But people have disagreed for a century and a half—since the days of Pithole—about whether the world has an adequate stock of fossil fuels.

The conflict between these visions is not between good and evil, but between different ideas of the good life, between ethical orders that give priority to personal liberty and those that give priority to what might be called connection.

responses to my questions fell into two broad categories, each associated (at least in my mind) with one of two people, Americans who lived in the twentieth century.

But there was a lacuna in Nehru’s concept of science: he saw it exclusively in terms of laboratory science, not field science; physics and molecular biology, not ecology, botany, or agronomy. He understood that India’s farmers were poor in part because they were unproductive—they harvested much less grain per acre than farmers elsewhere in the world. But unlike Borlaug, Nehru and his ministers believed that the poor harvests were due not to lack of technology—artificial fertilizer, irrigated water, and high-yield seeds—but to social factors like inefficient management, misallocation of land, lack of education, rigid application of the caste system, and financial speculation (large property owners were supposedly hoarding their wheat and rice until they could get better prices). This was not crazy: more than one out of five families in rural India owned no land at all, and about two out of five owned less than 2.5 acres, not enough land to feed themselves. Meanwhile, a tiny proportion of absentee landowners controlled huge swathes of terrain. The solution to rural poverty, Nehru therefore believed, was less new technology than new policies: give land from big landowners to ordinary farmers, free the latter from the burdens of caste, and then gather the liberated smallholders into more-efficient, technician-advised cooperatives. This set of ideas had the side benefit of fitting nicely into Nehru’s industrial policy: enacting them would cost next to nothing, reserving more money for building factories.

Brand cites the example of France, which constructed “fifty-six reactors providing nearly all of the nation’s electricity in just twelve years.” Nuclear power provides about 77 percent of French electricity, a far greater proportion than in any other nation. Today, according to World Bank figures, France emits 5.2 tons of carbon dioxide per capita. The corresponding figure for the United States is 17. France shut down its last coal-fired power plant in 2004. It is the world’s biggest electricity exporter; meanwhile, French household electricity costs are among the lowest in Europe.

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.

The Wizard and the Prophet is a book about the way knowledgeable people might think about the choices to come, rather than what will happen in this or that scenario. It is a book about the future that makes no predictions.

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.

Nature’s success stories, they are like Gause’s protozoans; the world is their petri dish. Their populations grow at a terrific rate; they take over large areas, engulfing their environment as if no force opposed them. Then they hit a barrier. They drown in their own wastes. They starve from lack of food. Something figures out how to eat them.

When I last spoke to Borlaug, a few years before he passed away, I asked him about the past criticisms. Critics, he said, never wanted to answer the counterfactual question: Where would the world be today if we had the same growth in population and affluence but none of the yield increases of the Green Revolution? Overuse of fertilizer, water-logging soils, loading up land with toxic salts from badly run irrigation schemes—these were real issues, he said. But wouldn't you rather have these for problems than the kind of hunger we had in 1968? He asked me if I had ever been to a place where most of the people weren't getting enough to eat. "Not just poor, but actually hungry all the time," he said. I told him that I hadn't been to such a place. "That's the point," he said. "When I was getting started, you couldn't avoid them.

Look, the basic facts are obvious," he said. "You can't keep growing forever on a finite planet---there are limits." But the exact relations among economic growth, environmental destruction, and planetary limits no longer seemed so obvious to me.

inescapable interest to a visually oriented species like Homo sapiens. Clothing is ornament and symbol; it separates human beings from their earlier, unself-conscious state. (Animals run, swim, and fly without clothing, but only people can be naked.)

puts the final seal on the replacement of the authentic, billion-year-old natural world by a new, artificial world whose every surface bears the greasy human fingerprint.

You must have an education! he told the boy. Your knowledge is the only protection you have in this world! Fill your head now to fill your belly later!

Man minus the machine is a slave,” proclaimed Henry Ford, touting his new tractor. “Man plus the machine is a free man.

what was left out was the color of the bran, the texture of the grain, the pleasure of having several different types of flour, or, more important still, the relationship of the farmers to their land, and to each other, and the structure of power in a community or a nation. And then there was the omnipresence of greed. Borlaug was like a physicist who figures out how something should work on an idealized frictionless plane and then is startled when it doesn’t function in the same way in the real world of hills and valleys.

what social scientists call governmentality and what everybody else calls corruption, inefficiency, incompetence, and indifference.

In 2017 scientists from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute tried to measure the methane seeping up from Norway’s Arctic coast, where the oceans are warmer than they used to be. They discovered that the warming that was pushing up the methane was also pumping nutrients from the seafloor to the surface. The nutrients were feeding huge blooms of phytoplankton. To the scientists’ astonishment, the plankton took in so much carbon dioxide via photosynthesis that they more than canceled out the effects of the methane. This is a small example of a general problem: our continuing ignorance about the impacts of life.

Margulis would be the first to agree that removing the shackles from women and slaves has begun to unleash the suppressed talents of two-thirds of the human race. Drastically reducing violence has prevented the waste of countless lives and a staggering amount of resources. Is it really impossible to believe that we wouldn’t use those talents and those resources to draw back before the abyss?

Preventing Homo sapiens from destroying itself à la Gause would require a still greater transformation, to Margulis’s way of thinking, because we would be pushing against Nature itself. Success would be unprecedented, biologically speaking. It would be a reverse Copernican Revolution, showing that humankind is exempt from natural processes that govern all other species. But might we be able to do exactly that? Might Margulis have got this one wrong? Might we indeed be special?

Multiple causes for this turnaround have been suggested. But Goldstein, a leading scholar in this field, argues that the most important is the emergence of multinational institutions like the United Nations, which owe their origins to peace activists from the last century.

As many as one out of every ten people met a violent death in the first millennium A.D., the archaeologist Ian Morris has estimated. Ever since, violence has declined—gradually, then suddenly. In the decades after the Second World War, rates of violent death plunged to the lowest levels ever seen.

But a central element was the power of ideas—the voices and actions of suffragists, who through decades of ridicule and harassment pressed their case. In recent years something similar may have occurred with gay rights: first a few lonely advocates, censured and mocked; then victories in the social and legal sphere; finally, perhaps, a slow movement to equality.

Historians provide many reasons for this extraordinary transition, high among them the fierce opposition of slaves themselves. But another important cause is that abolitionists convinced people around the world that slavery was a moral disaster. An institution fundamental to human society for millennia was made over by ideas and a call to action, loudly repeated.

Incredibly, the turn against slavery was as universal as slavery itself. Great Britain, leader of the global slave trade, banned its market in human beings in 1807 after a tireless campaign by abolitionists. Two laws enacted in 1833 and 1838 freed all British slaves. Denmark, Sweden, the Netherlands, France, Spain, and Portugal soon outlawed their slave trades, too, and after that slavery itself. Like stars winking out at the approach of dawn, cultures across the globe removed themselves from the previously universal exchange of human cargo.