In his 2018 book, The Wizard and the Prophet, Charles Mann portrays two men, contemporaries, whose competing visions of the future shaped the world we live in now. They may have only met once. Both were from humble backgrounds.

William Vogt (1905-1966), whom Mann calls “the prophet,� was raised by a single mother on Long Island, New York, when it was covered in farms and forests, dotted with villages. When Vogt was a young man, this pastoral landscape was swallowed up by systematic suburbanization, one of the first of its kind in the North America. Vogt mourned the loss of the places where he once hiked and delighted in watching birds. He carried a lifelong dread of population growth.

This view was hardened by his formative fieldwork, where he lived on the guano islands off the Pacific Coast of Peru. Sent to find out why the bird populations were crashing, Vogt realized that the cormorant population rose and fell as the El Niño events favored or killed off the coastal fish. Vogt recommended that if the government wanted to restore the island ecology, they should stop mining guano, then kill the cats, rats and chickens, and leave the islands to the birds.

Vogt may no longer be well known, but he encouraged Roger Peterson to write the first ever field guide to birds (still a beloved series of books). For a time Vogt directed Planned Parenthood, and his 1949 bestseller, Road to Survival, influenced writers like Rachel Carson (Silent Spring) and Paul Ehrlich (The Population Bomb). Mann credits Vogt with sparking the modern environmentalism and the anti-population growth movement.

Mann’s “wizard,� Norman Borlaug (1914-2009), grew up on a small farm in Iowa. He got a chance to go to college, barely, in 1932, after his father bought a tractor, freeing up enough labor that the Borlaug children could leave the farm. This left a lifelong impression on Borlaug: technology could give people opportunities.

After studying plant pathology at the University of Minnesota, Borlaug was tapped by the Rockefeller Foundation to go to Mexico to breed wheat that was resistant to rust, a fungal disease. Borlaug identified with Mexican farm families who often went hungry. He decided that it was his job to help them to grow enough to eat. Doggedly crossing and testing thousands of wheat varieties, Borlaug, who had no formal training in plant breeding, managed to produce a variety that was rust-resistant. The plants were also short, which meant that if sown with chemical fertilizer, the large heads of wheat would not cause the plants to topple over. This new wheat had an enormous impact on the world. Indira Gandhi bought 18,000 tons of Borlaug’s wheat. He sent two shiploads of seed from Mexico, allowing India to grow enough wheat to free itself of food aid. Borlaug’s model was also used to develop high-yielding rice in Asia. The International Center for Wheat and Maize Breeding (CIMMYT) in Mexico would grow out of Borlaug’s Rockefeller project.

Borlaug recommended that the new wheat be planted with irrigation, chemical fertilizer and pesticides: a package that became known as the Green Revolution, credited with saving a billion lives. The Green Revolution also led to water logging, soil degradation, chemical-resistant pests and social problems as some landlords dismissed tenant farmers after bumper harvests tempted land owners to farm all of their own land with machinery rather than with low-paid labor.

Vogt visited Borlaug once in the early days, in Chapingo, Mexico. As the prophet he was, Vogt realized that growing more wheat would let more people inhabit the Earth, and Vogt tried, unsuccessfully, to have Borlaug’s project shut down. The two men despised each other after that.

Vogt’s life ended in obscurity, and suicide. Borlaug won the Nobel Prize and lived to be an old man. He once visited the university where I worked in Honduras, and the students who met him found him to be kind and unassuming. Instead of rehearsing his accomplishments, he asked them to tell him where about they were from.

Mann’s book includes a long discussion in the middle, about the world’s main problems. Today a host of wizards and prophets debate how to find enough food, clean water, and renewable energy, while fending off climate change.

Mann avoids taking sides and refuses to try to blend prophesy and wizardry. That is for us, the readers, to do. In recent decades, the world has made real progress solving problems. Hunger and poverty are in retreat. Formal, legal slavery has ended. Human rights are more widely recognized. Like Mann, I also ask: can’t we find a way to feed, house and clothe everyone without destroying the world we live in?

Further reading

Mann, Charles C. 2018 The Wizard and the Prophet: Two Remarkable Scientists and their Dueling Visions to Shape Tomorrow’s World. New York: Vintage books. 616 pp.

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