Overview:
A growing population requires more resources. The problem is obtaining the resources, without destroying everything else. With a higher population, there is increased competition for resources within the ecosystem. Species that exhaust their resources, fall to catastrophe. Humans are part of an ecosystem, with natural cycles that need to be maintained. William Vogt and Norman Borlaug provided two different ways on how to use the environment, and resources. Vogt represents the Prophets, who see resources as finite which constrains humans. Borlaug represents the Wizards who see environmental opportunities through innovation to better manage the environment.

Prophets focus on the resource constraints, asking for humans to use less resources to prevent exhausting them. Wizards focus on resolving environmental problems with technical solutions. Prophets seek small-scale production operations, while Wizards seek large-scale production methods to meet human needs. The different views generate different policies on how to obtain food, water, energy, and clean up the pollution. The paths conflict with each other, but there are options which incorporate those different visions.

Wizards and prophets have animosity towards each other. Wizards do not support a retrogression of society that would follow Prophets plans. Prophets do not support the ecocide that would follow Wizards plans.

How Do The Prophets Think About The Environment?
Agriculture got a boost from guano banks, as they contained nutrients that facilitate crop growth. Early in the 20th century, guano-birds declined. The policy was introduced was to make the surrounding areas as a sanctuary, to protect the bird’s feed. It worked temporary, but the decline in birds continued. A problem Vogt was assigned to resolve.

Vogt represents the Prophets, proclaiming environmental disaster without a reduction in consumption. To not overwhelmed the ecosystems. Prosperity has the problem of extracting more from the planet than it can give. Using less resources is their solution, to eating lower down the food chain. Eating less meat, means more space for food available for human consumption. Putting less pressure on the ecosystem.

A Malthus logic, that while human population grows geometrically, food supply grows arithmetically. The population will outgrow its ability to supply enough food, causing a catastrophe. Malthus saw checks on the population, but many of the checks are not popular. Without voluntary checks to population growth, there will be violent reprisals.

No species can overcome the ecological carrying capacity. The problem with carrying capacity, is that it is hard to measure. Carrying capacity came from shipping, which placed a limit on the cargo weight that a ship could transport. A global carrying capacity is more complicated, in which the carrying capacity is potentially not static. Hard to tell whether the carrying capacity is an ecological limit, or could be influenced by people.

The Prophets have an elitist tendency, and eugenics. Excerpt governance of resource is no different to them then cleaning up the human gene pool.

How Do The Wizards Think About The Environment?
Borlaug grew up on a farm, that became much more productive due to mechanization. A tractor was more efficient than draft animals who needed more maintenance. The changes allowed Henry Borlaug to go to school rather than work on the farm.

On a work assignment, Borlaug was able to crossbreed various seeds to make them rust-resistant and more productive. Crossbreeding is always a temporary solution, because agricultural diseases mutate and overcome the resistant seeds.

Borlaug represents the wizards, proclaiming that science and technology can overcome environmental dilemmas. More prosperity comes from knowledge on how to develop high-yield crops. Innovations have enabled higher-yielding crop, to produce more food using less space.

How Do We Get Enough Food?
Plants need nutrients in the soil to grow, especially nitrogen. Within the soil, nitrogen is made by microorganisms breaking down organic matter. Fertilizer generally adds nitrogen into the soil. There is even a process to develop artificial nitrogen, chemical fertilizers. Even a little bit of nitrogen can drastically increase agricultural outcome. The problem with intensive fertilization are the pollution consequences on the land and water.

Animal feed can take the form of grazing or scraps, but industrial farms requires many pounds of feed to produce the meat.

Wizards claims that the more productive the farms the better. What matters to them is useable energy per acre. Prophets see the ecological consequences of production such as soil erosion, habitat loss, watershed degradation, pesticide, and other risks.

How Do We Get Enough Water?
Much of water is undrinkable. A Wizard solution is to desalinate seawater. But desalination has consequences for marine life, and produces pollution. Prophets want operations for water capture, recycling, and better management.

How Do We Get Enough Energy?
Human society has become dependent on an energy supply. Civilization comes to a crash without an energy supply. Various regions prospered when they discovered supplies of energy, such Pithole city, but then quickly collapsed when the energy has run out.

Initially, wood was used as a fuel source. Even grass and dung. Regions that had run out of forest, used coal. Regions with easy access to coal made a quicker transition. The British used coal since the 13th century, which caused a lot of pollution. The British did not have much access to other fuel sources. Many have switched to oil when it became available, because oil is far more efficient than coal, as oil is more energy dense.

Food and water are a flow, a volume to be maintained. Fossil fuels are a stock, a fixed amount. Flow resources could be interrupted. While stock resources continuously declines. Many nations feared running out of their stock of energy resources, causing them to go to war to obtain supplies. But, new supplies of fuel are being found continuously. With more fuel being found, the problem is abundance.

Petroleum is not a uniform substance, but composed of various compounds. There can be various rocks that prevent petroleum from seeping to the surface. The amount of fuel that can be extracted depends on the processes used. Especially if the price justifies the costs of extraction. The amount of petroleum depends of technological developments.

Sunlight might be plentiful and free, but it is not a reliable energy source. Those energy supplies are only useful on sunny days. Windfarms are only useful during windy days. The equipment itself is costly.


How Do We Deal With Pollution?
Geological processes are unfathomable on the human scale. There is a responsibility to consider the people of the future. A hypothetical future people, with indeterminant values and wants.

There are far more damaging pollutants than carbon dioxide, such as methane. Although methane stays in the atmosphere for a decade or two, carbon dioxide lasts in the atmosphere for centuries or millennia.

Pollution has an aspect of property rights. Pollution is no different than taking over someone else’s resources.

Renewable energy supplies are not yet economical reliable. Another alternative is nuclear power. Nuclear power plants are expensive to build but cheap to maintain. Nuclear power does produce high-level waste.

Wealthy counties develop a tendency for environmental responsibility. To make their energy use more efficient and less environmentally damaging. The problem is that wealthy countries do not actually reduce the energy use, just export the environmental destruction to other regions.

Claiming something as eco-friendly depends on the weights assigned to pollution or land use. Spending money increases statistics about economic activity, but they have different outcomes. What matters is not just how many people, but what they are doing.

Caveats?
The book provides detailed explanations on the claims made by the various perspectives. Sometimes getting lost in the scientific details, which can make it more difficult to understand the implications of the details. Which can make the book more difficult to read. ( )

Long, detailed, fascinating, and provocative. Enjoyed it tremendously, but it also didn't make me feel any better about the state of the world or whether we as a species can actually tackle large problems together. ( )

Fine book by a great science writer. Loved it. ( )

This is a book about the "fathers" of the environmental movement and the Green Revolution—respectively William Vogt and Norman Borlaug. It is written by Charles Mann, also the author of "1491" and "1493," about the pre- and post-Colonial Americas.

Some of you may already find the premise questionable: a book written by a white man about two white men that "shaped" the 20th century relationship regarding human relationship with land. Yes, the book does fall into this common category of patriarchal history.

Mann is an entertaining writer. He often goes off on tangents leaving the reader wondering, "and how will this relate?" And, inevitably, it does (especially with a book so broad is scope).

In some ways, I was born into the debate for which Mann has created archetypes. The archetypes are pretty catchy—if you have to choose between "wizard," or "prophet," well, they both sound pretty cool!

I'm now in the middle of David Graeber and David Wengrow's "The Dawn of Everything," a sweeping history that took more than ten years to write.They ask a lot of questions about the assumptions behind the way that we speak about the role of agriculture in the arc of human history (and pre-history). I can't help but wonder if "The Wizard and the Prophet" will be disrupted by this new line of inquiry. In some ways, they are only tangentially related, in that Mann is mostly concerned with the 20th century, when Graeber and Wengrow are righting about ten millennia back. That said, Mann's background is in pre-history, and there are a number of hints to that domain within the text.

Another way that "The Dawn of Everything" pokes holes in the premise of "The Wizard and the Prophet" is by making fun of the Great Man archetype of historiography. It may be entertaining to write as though we can pinpoint an individual person that shaped history, but is this how things actually work? Well, not really. "Influential" could be said to be more a product of their contexts than nodal agents.

Meta-analysis aside, if you're interested in one origin story between the face-off between techno-utopians and deep greens, this is one way to sum things up. Increasingly though, it seems to me that this dichotomy is falling away. For example, people such as sci-fi author Kim Stanley Robinson have pointed out that we're already in the midst geo-engineering the planet, so it's not as though geo-engineering is off the table anymore (by definition, anthropogenic climate change is a form of geo-engineering). ( )

Early on the book the author, Charles Mann, offers an example of how a scientist "works".
Perhaps you don't know - I didn't before reading this book -, that there are actually two different human lice species: one, adapted to live in our head; the other, adapted to live in our clothes. This is unremarkable, unless you are a scientist. If you are a scientist you would find this remarkable for two reasons: first reason, as humans "evolved" hair before clothes it follows that the lice species that thrives in our clothes is an evolution, an adaptation, of the one that thrives in our head. Second reason, if we can find one out when the body lice diverged from the head lice, and it is possible to know, then we could also know when humans started to wear clothing: 107.000 years ago (the scientist name is Max Stoneking).
This book is full of this kind of facts because it is an inquiry of scientific thought. More precisely, two ways of thinking: Prophets, who argue that our success in science and technology is ruining the planet and Wizards, who argue that science and technology will also be able to solve the problems they have created. This two competing visions are all around us and inform the public debate.
The book is fascinating and is an excellent read for everyone. ( )