9
" On October 7 the cormorants abruptly came back, hundreds of thousands of them, only to disappear after a week. On the 20th the birds returned, then vanished on the 24th. By November 7 they were back—only to bolt a few days later. In 1940 the warm waters came again. And in 1941. And they showed up earlier, at the beginning of nesting, so the birds then fled their nesting grounds and didn’t reproduce. Entire generations were not being born. Vogt was looking at a demographic collapse. But why were the Guanays fleeing? The temperature was not enough to hurt them directly; if they got hot, they could always take a swim. Nor did the birds’ returns correlate with colder weather. They suffered from no obvious disease. What was going on? The key to the puzzle, Vogt thought, was the condition of the few adults that didn’t leave the Chinchas: hungry. The remaining Guanays left every morning to hunt for fish. But they returned ever later in the day, and their crops were often empty, which meant they couldn’t feed their offspring. The lack of food, he concluded, was due to El Niño. Warmer water on the surface acted as a cap that blocked cold water from rising from the depths of the Humboldt Current, which set off a cascade of horribles: no upwelling meant no nutrients for plankton, which meant no plankton for anchovetas, which meant no anchovetas for Guanays. "
― Charles C. Mann , The Wizard and the Prophet: Two Remarkable Scientists and Their Dueling Visions to Shape Tomorrow's World
11
" As any biologist would predict, this success led to an increase in human numbers—slow at first, then rapid, tracing Gause’s S-shaped curve. We began rising up the steepest part of the slope in the sixteenth or seventeenth century. If we follow Gause’s pattern, growth will continue at delirious speed until the second inflection point, when we have exhausted the global petri dish. After that, human life will be, briefly, a Hobbesian nightmare, the living overwhelmed by the dead. When the king falls, so do his minions; it is possible that in our desperation we might consume most of the world’s mammals and many of its plants. Sooner or later, in this scenario, Earth will again be a choir of microorganisms as it has been through most of its history. It would be foolish to expect anything else, Margulis thought. More than that, it would be strange. To avoid destroying itself, the human race would have to do something deeply unnatural, something no other species has ever done or could ever do: constrain its own growth "
― Charles C. Mann , The Wizard and the Prophet: Two Remarkable Scientists and Their Dueling Visions to Shape Tomorrow's World
12
" The conflict between these visions is not between good and evil, but between different ideas of the good life, between ethical orders that give priority to personal liberty and those that give priority to what might be called connection. To Borlaug, the landscape of late-twentieth-century capitalism, with its teeming global markets dominated by big corporations, was morally acceptable, though ever in need of repair. Its emphasis on personal autonomy, social and physical mobility, and the rights of the individual were resonant. Vogt thought differently. By the time he died, in 1968, he had come to believe that there was something fundamentally wrong with Western-style consumer societies. People needed to live in smaller, more stable communities, closer to the earth, controlling the exploitative frenzy of the global market. The freedom and flexibility touted by advocates of consumer society were an illusion; individuals’ rights mean little if they live in atomized isolation, cut off from Nature and each other. "
― Charles C. Mann , The Wizard and the Prophet: Two Remarkable Scientists and Their Dueling Visions to Shape Tomorrow's World
13
" Vogt spent ten months in Mexico, much of it with Juana, at the behest of the Mexican agricultural ministry, writing a guide to conservation for Mexican schoolchildren, and struggling with his cane and braces through twenty-six national parks. Although statistics showed that the country was Latin America’s wealthiest, its landscapes were enshrouded by suffering: impoverished subsistence farmers, scratching at depleted soils, taking down the last stands of timber for their cookstoves. “Unless land-use patterns are radically altered,” Vogt said, “most of Mexico will be virtually desert within a hundred years. "
― Charles C. Mann , The Wizard and the Prophet: Two Remarkable Scientists and Their Dueling Visions to Shape Tomorrow's World
14
" humankind, though “apt to forget it, is a creature of the earth. ‘Dust thou art’ and ‘All flesh is grass’ were not said by scientists, but they are sound biology.” When lower creatures exhaust their resources, Vogt argued, bad things happen. Exactly the same is true for Homo sapiens. The article tallied example after example of overreaching, most drawn from Vogt’s travels in Latin America. But then, provocatively, he switched to the United States’ current enemy, Japan: “Many explanations have been offered for Japanese aggression,” he argued. But, he asked, “can anyone deny that population pressures set off the explosion?” Unless humankind controlled its appetites for procreation and consumption, Vogt said, “there can be no peace. "
― Charles C. Mann , The Wizard and the Prophet: Two Remarkable Scientists and Their Dueling Visions to Shape Tomorrow's World
20
" The two people were William Vogt and Norman Borlaug. Vogt, born in 1902, laid out the basic ideas for the modern environmental movement. In particular, he founded what the Hampshire College demographer Betsy Hartmann has called “apocalyptic environmentalism”—the belief that unless humankind drastically reduces consumption its growing numbers and appetite will overwhelm the planet’s ecosystems. In best-selling books and powerful speeches, Vogt argued that affluence is not our greatest achievement but our biggest problem. Our prosperity is temporary, he said, because it is based on taking more from Earth than it can give. If we continue, the unavoidable result will be devastation on a global scale, perhaps including our extinction. Cut back! Cut back! was his mantra. Otherwise everyone will lose! Borlaug, born twelve years later, has become the emblem of what has been termed “techno-optimism” or “cornucopianism”—the view that science and technology, properly applied, can help us produce our way out of our predicament. Exemplifying this idea, Borlaug was the primary figure in the research that in the 1960s created the “Green Revolution,” the combination of high-yielding crop varieties and agronomic techniques that raised grain harvests around the world, helping to avert tens of millions of deaths from hunger. To Borlaug, affluence was not the problem but the solution. Only by getting richer, smarter, and more knowledgeable can humankind create the science that will resolve our environmental dilemmas. Innovate! Innovate! was Borlaug’s cry. Only in that way can everyone win! "
― Charles C. Mann , The Wizard and the Prophet: Two Remarkable Scientists and Their Dueling Visions to Shape Tomorrow's World
The Wizard and the Prophet: Two Remarkable Scientists and Their Dueling Visions to Shape Tomorrow's World