The Wizard and the Prophet

History, Food, Science. Three of my favourite topics combined into a fascinating narrative. I can’t believe my own ignorance, having not heard of William Vogt and Norman Borlaug, the two main protagonists in Charles Mann’s fantastic book: The Wizard and the Prophet. I’m personally very pleased with the new crop of superb science-and-story books by journalists. Last month I read another superb book, The Tangled Tree, but this one made me contemplate even more – the trait of a great book!

Who is the wizard? Who is the prophet? Why are they so-named? Mann has ingeniously chosen two less well-known names (at least to me) and convincingly argued how they exemplify the archetype of today’s wizards and prophets. Vogt might be called the father of today’s environmental movement. He strongly influenced more familiar names such as Rachel Carson (Silent Spring) and Paul Erhlich (The Population Bomb). Vogt believed that humans needed to reduce consumption drastically; otherwise we would destroy the ecosystem of our planet and usher in our own doom. Vogt is the Prophet. Borlaug, on the other hand, was a key founder of the Green Revolution (earning him a Nobel prize), and believed that humans could leverage science and technology to increase resources, particularly food, to support our growing planet. Borlaug is the Wizard and his disciples are today’s technocrats.

Mann writes: “Vogt rebuked the anonymous ‘deluded’ scientists who were actually aggravating our problems. Meanwhile, Borlaug derided his opponents as ‘Luddites’. Both men are dead now, but their disciples have continued the hostilities... Wizards view the Prophets’ emphasis on cutting back as intellectually dishonest, indifferent to the poor, even racist. Following Vogt, they say, is a path toward regression, narrowness, and global poverty. Prophets sneer that the Wizards’ faith in human resourcefulness is unthinking, scientifically ignorant, even driven by greed. Following Borlaug, they say… is a recipe for what activists have come to describe as ‘ecocide’. As the name-calling has escalated, conversations about the environment have increasingly become dialogues of the deaf.”

That’s a great turn of phrase: “dialogues of the deaf”. Mann has several others. One that jumped out at me is when the role of catalysts in the Bosch-Haber process (N₂ + 3 H₂ à 2 NH₃) is discussed. Mann writes: “Catalysts are like jay-walking pedestrians who cause car accidents but walk away from the without being affected. But unlike the disruptive pedestrians, catalysts are essential to the smooth functioning of thousands of chemical processes.” And I even got a chemical equation into this blog post! It’s one I use very often in my classes because this reaction can be used to illustrate all manner of chemical principles.

I particularly enjoyed the structure of Mann’s book. Here’s what part of the Table of Contents looks like. Chapters titled “The Prophet” and “The Wizard” book-end four chapters that constitute the middle meat of the book that is themed after the Four Elements: Earth, Water, Fire, Air. The topics in discussed in each of these chapters are Food, Freshwater, Energy, Climate Change respectively. As I was reading, I kept thinking that I could structure a yearlong interdisciplinary course that allowed for interplay between the sciences, social sciences and the humanities. I’m excited enough to start re-theming my general chemistry courses along these lines!

So I’m raving about this book but I haven’t told you much about the main arguments. That’s because you have to read it for yourself! Complex questions do not have simple answers, and it’s worth the time and effort to bathe in the complexity. Mann doesn’t try to argue for one over the other. He also drops a variety of interesting tidbits along the narrative path. For example, I didn’t know that many of the largest solar energy companies are owned by petrochemical firms. That sounds counter-intuitive – why would you try to significantly develop competitive technology (because that’s what they’re doing)? You’ll have to read the book to find out – it’s one of the many “ah, that makes sense!” moments you’ll experience.

I close this post with a vignette about science in the lab and the messiness of actual fieldwork. This struck me especially since I’m a theorist by training and computational chemist in practice.

“[The] scientific enterprise studies phenomena – atoms, clouds, organisms, planets – by transferring them from the world we live in, with all of its confusion and sentiment, into a special workshop, a place where they can be reduced to abstract, measurable quantities and manipulated in a controlled manner. It discovered the laws of electricity and created antibiotics and built the atom bomb and invented X-rays and generated techniques to harvest and store energy from the sun and wind. But it is also risky…”

“The air in the scientific workshop is so clean and bracing and the results of researchers sequestering themselves inside so satisfying that they lose their bearings. They don’t want to leave the workshop. They prefer to live in its world of abstraction… worse, the findings of the workshop seem so luminous and clear, so like beacons of truth, they forget the the workshop is a special place within the world and begin to think that it is above the rest of life and should control it… [Here] lies the peril, because the people outside the workshop will come to detest and disbelieve the people within its privileged walls.”

An observant and timely warning indeed. Given its title, The Wizard and the Prophet could have been a book about magic, a topic I occasionally blog about. It’s not. But it’s a magical read and I highly, highly recommend it.