Nowadays we use terms like planetary boundaries or ecological limits, but it’s basically the same thing. He took it from an arcane scientific idea - used to figure out how many deer can survive in a meadow - and stretched it to cover the entire world. Vogt popularized the idea of “carrying capacity.” That is a term you get hit with if you ever take Ecology 101: It’s the idea that environments can only produce so much and if you go over that limit bad things happen. Your prophet is the ecologist William Vogt, and you make a good case that he really cued up the modern environmental movement.Ī. He’s the main figure behind what’s been called the Green Revolution - the combination of hybrid seeds, high intensity fertilizer, and irrigation that boosted grain yields in the ’70s and ’80s. I kept hearing his name from wizards, people who said we’re going to have to use science and technology, we’re going to have to be like Norman Borlaug.
The wizard you chose to focus on was the agronomist Norman Borlaug. And both of them have really strong arguments. We recently talked with Mann about the types of solutions preferred by wizards and prophets, and why he thinks this division means that no one ever changes their mind about nuclear power, renewable energy, or genetically modified food.Ī. The ones who thought technology would save us he dubbed “wizards.” Those who thought we were screwed unless we controlled population growth he called “prophets.”Īfter years of these interviews, woolgathering, and worldwide travel, Mann turned it all into his latest book, The Wizard and the Prophet: Two Groundbreaking Scientists and Their Conflicting Visions of the Future of Our Planet. The responses he got fell into two broad categories depending on the person. Ever since the night of his daughter’s birth, Mann has asked the scientists he interviewed if he could buy them a cup of coffee afterward in order to ask them his nagging question: What are we going to do as population rises? Mann makes his living as a science writer and is best known for his bestselling histories of America around 1492. He was walking outside the hospital on a freezing New England night when the thought stopped him mid stride: By the time she reached his age, there would be 10 billion people living on the planet. Mann has been troubled by a realization that struck him just after his daughter was born.
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