• In total there is 1 user online :: 0 registered, 0 hidden and 1 guest (based on users active over the past 60 minutes)
    Most users ever online was 789 on Tue Mar 19, 2024 5:08 am

The Wizard and the Prophet (Ch. 2) The Prophet

#168: Dec. - March 2020 (Non-Fiction)
User avatar
DWill

1H - GOLD CONTRIBUTOR
BookTalk.org Hall of Fame
Posts: 6966
Joined: Thu Jan 31, 2008 8:05 am
16
Location: Luray, Virginia
Has thanked: 2262 times
Been thanked: 2470 times

Re: The Wizard and the Prophet (Ch. 2) The Prophet

Unread post

Robert Tulip wrote:Chapter Two ends with a fascinating philosophical discussion about two books that started the modern environmental movement in 1948: The Plundered Planet by Fairfield Osborn and Vogt’s Road to Survival. Both were widely read, controversial and influential for their shared argument that consumption driven by capitalism and population growth is causing an ecological crisis that can only be solved by a reversal of growth in human numbers and wealth.
The two men helped erase words that had epitomized the human struggle, "too little," replacing them with "too much." It's important to note, though, that only in a restricted intellectual sphere did this new assessment of the human condition take hold. The growth of economies and therefore of the physical effects of people is still very much dominant. The environmental/ecological minority emerged because the situation became fraught; it's indication of how bad things had become, but not much of an opposing force. When there were still frontiers, with their illusions of inexhaustibility, of course we didn't hear any prophetic warnings. And aren't warnings now falling on deaf ears, as far as any actions are concerned? Those who say they take the warnings seriously go about their normal business anyway, as if unable to do otherwise. Mea culpa.
The way of thinking behind protecting the integrity of an ecosystem establishes a system of moral values that see the stability and beauty of life as intrinsically good. This change in the idea of the environment moved the ethical compass from how nature affects us to how we affect nature, paving the path of the Anthropocene, as our new global totality.

The Anthropocene is the most telling arrival of all. It means that ecosystems have become irrelevant in practice, if valued in abstraction.
The key idea of carrying capacity provided the warming signal of looming catastrophe, due to unsustainable production. But Vogt was unsure if carrying capacity could change, increased by technology. Later ecologists quantified this problem with analysis of planetary boundaries, which could produce non linear abrupt system change if transgressed.
Carrying capacity shouldn't be equated to some limit beyond which the planet can't cope. Carrying capacity should be restricted to the limits of a species' population, determined by the species' fitness in the environment. Does the environment have what is necessary for humans to grow their numbers? Obviously, yes. As long as we can feed enough people to make births outweigh deaths, we're not exceeding capacity. As long as medical science can combat serious epidemics and prolong lifespans, we're not going to exceed capacity. I'm saying that carrying capacity is an ineffective warning; it puts no meaningful restraints on most things we're inclined to do. How can concerns about carrying capacity stop us from, for example, mining the ocean floor, probably obliterating hundreds of species now unknown (See Atlantic, Feb. 2020)?
The panoply of ideas about living lightly upon the planet originate in these themes, with the vision of humble local simple community life as a human ideal, a Jeffersonian agrarian self sufficiency.

Against this rural ideal, the Hamiltonian urban view saw productivity and industrial prosperity as the basis for protecting nature through wealth, producing the fundamental dispute between Wizard and Prophet.
I don't know of instances of living lightly on the earth save for peoples who lived, or live, in very harsh conditions, such as African Bushmen. Mann's previous 1491 happens to offer perspective on that stereotypical concept of native peoples' environmental ethic. By and large, the people who inhabited the Americas before Columbus arrived were very adept at effecting large scale changes to the environment. Thomas Jefferson's vision of a plantation economy doesn't strike one as particularly light on the earth. Sustainable? Maybe, though slave labor made it run.

By my reading, nobody was concerned around 1800 with protecting nature. Maybe some Romantics in England, but not in the U.S.
Robert Tulip wrote:
DWill wrote: However, Robert, though we may indeed be able to engineer a planet supporting 25 billion people in relative wealth (even though we are not supporting very well a goodly percentage our current 7.5 billion), we cannot do that while giving space and life to the millions of other species who live here. Wizardry has no answer for that problem, and I'm not aware that wizards have claimed any ability to achieve an ecological feat such as that. Incredulity in this case is highly justified.
My view is that by shifting the main place of human life to the world ocean, living on vast floating island cities, we will be able to manage the continents and the oceans to maximise both biodiversity and human wealth, in ways that will come to value educated simplicity. The underlying problem is to use technology to increase biomass. The immense quantities of unused nutrients in the world ocean can be mined to create a sustainable circular high carbon economy, potentially with as much energy as we want. I am currently setting out my ideas on this for a journal article.
I appreciate that you don't pretend, as some do, that we don't have to choose between protecting terra firma and growing as big as we want. You choose moving offshore. But wouldn't that happen only subsequent to some catastrophe that makes the land totally unlivable? Otherwise, people just won't go out there. The proposal doesn't strike me as a first line option for any of our environment problems.
User avatar
DWill

1H - GOLD CONTRIBUTOR
BookTalk.org Hall of Fame
Posts: 6966
Joined: Thu Jan 31, 2008 8:05 am
16
Location: Luray, Virginia
Has thanked: 2262 times
Been thanked: 2470 times

Re: The Wizard and the Prophet (Ch. 2) The Prophet

Unread post

Harry Marks wrote:I am not reading along, but the commentary is interesting and I thought I would drop two cents in.
Thanks for your comments. Others not reading the book should drop in, too. The topics are accessible and familiar in general.
First comment: Norman Borlaug was no wizard. His plant breeding processes followed a familiar pattern already understood from breeding in Northern Climes, but he had Rockefeller money to bring the blessings of High Yielding Varieties to less advanced agricultural systems. The essential innovation is to breed shorter, stronger-stemmed plants which would then turn more of the growth from artificial, industrial fertilizer into actual food (without falling over from the weight of the grain, a problem known as "lodging".) It did not pass unnoticed that Rockefeller family investments (you may have heard of one of their companies: Exxon?) would benefit from wider use of industrial fertilizers, but regardless of what you think of their motives, the result has been awesome.
One estimate of starvation deaths prevented is one billion, although there is no way to know for sure. Mann says Borlaug didn't endorse any such estimates of the value of his work.

That Borlaug wasn't a Wizard, in the sense of scientific innovation, is implicit in Mann's treatment of Borlaug's career. It's the manner in which science serves society that identifies Borlaug as a Wizard--and the faith in science to solve the current problem, and then the problem that might spin off from the solution, and so on. Not much thought is given to how introduced measures might affect an entire system; such qualms would impede progress. Vogt's valuing of science was more along the lines of providing accurate information about the systems that we are affecting, so that we can proceed less recklessly.
Second comment: carrying capacity is a real thing. We have escaped the Malthusian trap mainly by virtue of industrialization and its achievements in agriculture, and secondarily by plateauing population as family size has fallen. It is now only in countries quite poor and quite backward that birth rates per woman remain much above replacement. I gather you consider this levelling off to be rather barbaric, Robert, but from an ecological perspective it carries many blessings, and one can make a very strong case that we have substituted more investment in quality of life for the older orientation toward breeding like rabbits.
Short-term, nations will have to weather the negative effects of aging populations for a while. There will be calls for patriotic increases in family size, but those will probably be resisted, anyway, because affluence and education do seem to steer couples toward having fewer children, or having no children.
The real pessimism of Malthus was to declare the inevitability of poverty, and it is now realistic to instead think of a world without hunger, and with secondary education for every human. At the time of Malthus (and "Les Miserables") it made sense to think of the ruling aristocracy as a parasitical growth on the body of humanity, but the privileges of the wealthy have become the ordinary comforts of middle class life, and much of the world has escaped the traumatic bonds of desperate poverty. From 9/10 of the world being gravely underfed at the time of Malthus we have moved to only 1/6 gravely underfed today.
Mann notes that were it not for climate change being so huge a worry, excess nitrogen from agricultural runoff might be the dominant concern. Is that one carrying capacity element that could circle around to whack us? I make the assumption that current industrial agriculture must continue in order for us to maintain our record of hunger reduction. A second Green Revolution might even be needed. But it's doubtful that such agriculture as we have now is sustainable without a new revolution including the means to make it so. Prophets may indulge in differing views of agriculture--anti-monoculture, organic methods only--but unless an additional 20% of the workforce is going to return to food production, it's hard to see us even running in place.
Fourth comment: although I obviously see great possibilities for technology permitting a more comfortable life for the 12 Billion or so humans expected when population has genuinely leveled off, I would like to throw in a word for the "harmony with nature" quest. I have on my Kindle a book I dip into now and then, and oddly enough had just been reading when I turned to look into Booktalk this evening. It is "The Great Work" by Thomas Berry and it has a refreshing sense of the sacred located in the wildness of nature, cast directly in the "I-Thou" terms that animate so much of modern theology.
There is a section later in the book where Mann lists the number of plants and installations we'll need to erect if we are to fuel our lives with renewable energy alone--no nuclear. The numbers are astronomical (ex.-328,000 5-MW onshore wind turbines; 156,200 offshore 5-MW wind turbines; 208,000 1-MW geothermal plants), and after reading the whole list you ask yourself, "Is this the Prophet's way or the Wizard's? What's the difference?" Probably the only telltale sign of the Prophet is that lack of nuclear plants. Those are excluded not just for the horrors of the wastes, but for their gigantic output relative to that of renewables. Distributed rather centralized is the preference of Prophets.
Berry argues, and I think I agree, that a sense of the sacred in nature is a fundamental gateway to restoring balance in our overall lives. We have gone from a way of life that was closer to nature but also more materially desperate (and so could hardly resist the possibility of exploiting nature more successfully) to a way of life that is relieved of the drivenness of desperation, but so divorced from nature that we have little sense of how drastically we are damaging it. It is hard to escape the possibility that there is further progress to be made, in which the elevation of our lives continues more in ability to think and communicate about how we make choices rather than in relieving the strain of disease, starvation and death, and that this further elevation will put us into a more balanced and spiritually healthy relationship to nature. A simple example of such an improvement is the growing "death with dignity" movement.
Let's have a end to bucket lists that have us whirling around the world. We have to learn how to experience the sacredness, as you say, of the nearby and familiar. Only then can we really value our own environments and nature itself. I might even emerge from my grumpiness and embrace virtual reality as a very light-on-the earth way of experiencing the exotic.
User avatar
Harry Marks
Bookasaurus
Posts: 1920
Joined: Sun May 01, 2011 10:42 am
12
Location: Denver, CO
Has thanked: 2335 times
Been thanked: 1020 times
Ukraine

Re: The Wizard and the Prophet (Ch. 2) The Prophet

Unread post

DWill wrote:That Borlaug wasn't a Wizard, in the sense of scientific innovation, is implicit in Mann's treatment of Borlaug's career. It's the manner in which science serves society that identifies Borlaug as a Wizard--and the faith in science to solve the current problem, and then the problem that might spin off from the solution, and so on. Not much thought is given to how introduced measures might affect an entire system; such qualms would impede progress. Vogt's valuing of science was more along the lines of providing accurate information about the systems that we are affecting, so that we can proceed less recklessly.
Thanks for giving me perspective on Mann's presentation. I agree with framing Borlaug's work as part of an overall "wizard" view of science and its capabilities. And it sounds like Vogt did a good job of reflecting on the holistic aspects of the impacts of science. Apropos of my comments on prophecy, one could make a strong case that religion should be about integrating the various aspects of our life, including our mental life. A right brain process, to be a bit reductionist about it, to go with the left-brain process of analysis and exploitation.
Mann notes that were it not for climate change being so huge a worry, excess nitrogen from agricultural runoff might be the dominant concern. Is that one carrying capacity element that could circle around to whack us? I make the assumption that current industrial agriculture must continue in order for us to maintain our record of hunger reduction. A second Green Revolution might even be needed. But it's doubtful that such agriculture as we have now is sustainable without a new revolution including the means to make it so. Prophets may indulge in differing views of agriculture--anti-monoculture, organic methods only--but unless an additional 20% of the workforce is going to return to food production, it's hard to see us even running in place.
Well, those are good questions, but I tend to think a continuing role for wizardry combined with an increasing role for prophetic holism can get us through. I think some version of intensive, industrial agriculture will continue to be vital, but I hope we can set about addressing the problems of spillover effects with careful investigation and some combination of innovation with incentives to adopt valuable innovations. I continue to be charmed by Robert Tulip's ideas combining exploitation of CO2 with exploitation of runoff nutrients.
There is a section later in the book where Mann lists the number of plants and installations we'll need to erect if we are to fuel our lives with renewable energy alone--no nuclear. The numbers are astronomical (ex.-328,000 5-MW onshore wind turbines; 156,200 offshore 5-MW wind turbines; 208,000 1-MW geothermal plants), and after reading the whole list you ask yourself, "Is this the Prophet's way or the Wizard's? What's the difference?" Probably the only telltale sign of the Prophet is that lack of nuclear plants. Those are excluded not just for the horrors of the wastes, but for their gigantic output relative to that of renewables. Distributed rather centralized is the preference of Prophets.
I am essentially pro-nuclear, though with eyes open to the scary possibilities seen with Chernobyl and Fukushima, as well as the costs of waste disposal, which remain unaddressed. There is a lot to be said for distributed energy and local production, in the ways Stewart Brand and Wendell (not Thomas) Berry have advocated, but I would not presume to insist on local production when economies of scale push strongly toward centralized solutions.
Let's have a end to bucket lists that have us whirling around the world. We have to learn how to experience the sacredness, as you say, of the nearby and familiar. Only then can we really value our own environments and nature itself. I might even emerge from my grumpiness and embrace virtual reality as a very light-on-the earth way of experiencing the exotic.
Okay, I am on board with that. We could call the company Virtual Virtue. I will never go to the Galapagos or peer into an active volcano, let alone see the Taj Mahal or Angel Falls, but I could imagine a Virtual Experience giving me more joy from those than a packaged TV program can do by itself. And with a little bit of tweaking it could get people off their couch to go be part of the sacredness of nearby nature, as you suggest. People already pay to go be part of a working farm (temporarily, of course).
Post Reply

Return to “The Wizard and the Prophet: Two Remarkable Scientists and Their Dueling Visions to Shape Tomorrow's World by Charles C. Mann”