Charles C. Mann, the bestselling author of 1491 and 1493, has written “a book about the future that makes no predictions.” The Wizard and the Prophet (Alfred A. Knopf) concerns the contradictory prescriptions and scenarios for the future made by two remarkable scientist-thinkers of the last century. Although William Vogt and Norman Borlaug are unfamiliar names for most of us, we have, Mann insists, been affected one way or another by their work. Vogt’s ideas were inspirational on the environmental movement’s holistic sense for humanity in nature. Borlaug’s experiments in crop breeding triggered an agricultural revolution that increased yields per acre and led to genetically modified foods.
Borlaug, Mann’s “Wizard,” believed that technology will save humanity in the face of the global population explosion. Vogt, the “Prophet,” feared technology would further degrade the environment, insuring humankind’s destruction. In science-fiction terms, they represented Utopian versus Dystopian futures.
Mann confesses to being of two minds. In the 1970s he was an avid follower of the Prophet—until the doomsday predictions of his more fervent acolytes failed to materialize. In the go-go ‘80s he embraced the Wizard’s high spirits. Nowadays, he admits, he is “waffling” as we race into “a future that seems ever more jostling and contentious, ever closer to overstepping social, physical, and ecological margins.”
Mann connects their ideas with long running debates over the roles of science and citizenship, the relation between humanity and nature, the construction of the best possible society and “different ideas of the good life.” In today’s terms, Vogt means solar panels and Borlaug nuclear power; Vogt promotes organic tofu and Borlaug is for the cattle industry. Even if their names are no longer well known, their ideas fight on in the culture wars.
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Highly readable, The Wizard and the Prophet presents a complicated set of issues with the memorable simplicity of a good undergraduate course. Some would say that Mann’s presentation simplifies too much—there were other key figures behind the environmental movement and other scientists who thought along Borlaug’s lines. However, The Wizard and the Prophet raises one of the most important questions of our time: Does science show us our limitations, as Vogt wrote, or how to transcend them, as Borlaug believed. One imagines Mann finds merit on both sides of the argument.
