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    The Wizard and the Prophet: Two Remarkable Scientists and Their Dueling Visions to Shape Tomorrow's World
    Unavailable
    The Wizard and the Prophet: Two Remarkable Scientists and Their Dueling Visions to Shape Tomorrow's World
    Unavailable
    The Wizard and the Prophet: Two Remarkable Scientists and Their Dueling Visions to Shape Tomorrow's World
    Audiobook18 hours

    The Wizard and the Prophet: Two Remarkable Scientists and Their Dueling Visions to Shape Tomorrow's World

    Written by Charles C. Mann

    Narrated by Bronson Pinchot

    4.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    From the best-selling, award-winning author of 1491 and 1493—an incisive portrait of the two little-known twentieth-century scientists, Norman Borlaug and William Vogt, whose diametrically opposed views shaped our ideas about the environment, laying the groundwork for how people in the twenty-first century will choose to live in tomorrow's world.

    In forty years, Earth's population will reach ten billion. Can our world support that? What kind of world will it be? Those answering these questions generally fall into two deeply divided groups—Wizards and Prophets, as Charles Mann calls them in this balanced, authoritative, nonpolemical new book. The Prophets, he explains, follow William Vogt, a founding environmentalist who believed that in using more than our planet has to give, our prosperity will lead us to ruin. Cut back! was his mantra. Otherwise everyone will lose! The Wizards are the heirs of Norman Borlaug, whose research, in effect, wrangled the world in service to our species to produce modern high-yield crops that then saved millions from starvation. Innovate! was Borlaug's cry. Only in that way can everyone win! Mann delves into these diverging viewpoints to assess the four great challenges humanity faces—food, water, energy, climate change—grounding each in historical context and weighing the options for the future. With our civilization on the line, the author's insightful analysis is an essential addition to the urgent conversation about how our children will fare on an increasingly crowded Earth.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin Random House Audio
    Release dateJan 23, 2018
    ISBN9780449806371
    Unavailable
    The Wizard and the Prophet: Two Remarkable Scientists and Their Dueling Visions to Shape Tomorrow's World
    Author

    Charles C. Mann

    Charles C. Mann, a correspondent for The Atlantic, Science and Wired, has written for Fortune, the New York Times, Vanity Fair and the Washington Post, as well as for HBO and ‘Law & Order’. A three-time US National Magazine Award finalist and the author of three previous books. 1491: New Revelations of the Americas before Columbus won the US National Academies Communication Award for the best book of the year, and both that book and its sequel, 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created, were New York Times bestsellers. He lives in Amherst, Massachusetts.

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    Reviews for The Wizard and the Prophet

    4.5/5

    63 ratings8 reviews

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    • 5/5
      Charles Mann is an excellent author of history. He is very thorough while still being extremely readable. He has a rare ability to make the subject more interesting as you go, so that the deeper you get into the book, the more you want to read.
    • 5/5
      Two approaches to growing population and increased pressure on various resources: Wizards see innovation technological and scientific solutions, Prophets believe in restraint and cutting back. These two schools are represented by the agronomist Norman Borlaug, father of the green revolution (in particular the development of higher-yielding crops) and William Vogt, one of the founders of the environmentalist movement. Very good book with a lot of what should be common scientific knowledge, however, it is fairly dense at times and one needs to really pay attention to get the material. Unfortunately, I did not have the opportunity to do that at the moment, perhaps another time. Recommended.
    • 5/5
      This is largely parallel biographies of William Vogt and Norman Borlaug. Vogt is the prophet, warning us of looming catastrophe from a growing human population hitting planetary limits. Borlaug is the wizard, finding ways to make better use of planetary resources to feed a growing human population. These are leaders of two factions, often called doomers and cornucopians. Mann tells in this book many stories from the lives of the prophet and the wizard, and also of several other people involved with their work. Use more or use less? This is probably the crucial issue of our time. I don't think Mann ever discusses e.g. Jared Diamond's book Collapse. He does mention in the introduction, as I recall, that other societies have crashed in the past from hitting resource limits. But this book doesn't look at historical cycles. It's just focused on the present predicament. I am an old peak oil head - I worked with Ken Deffeyes in the 1970s. I was quite disappointed in the chapter on energy in this book. Certainly the notion that we will someday run out of petroleum, that is a problematic notion. Surely we will stop pumping petroleum out of the ground while there is still some left down there. There's conventional oil, there's tight oil, there are tar sands, gas condensates, ethanol, gas to liquid, coal to liquid, algae... modeling and forecasting require being somewhat precise about what is being modeled and forecast. Mann falls a bit short here. Similarly, looking at the book Limits to Growth... Mann tells how Ehrlich's Population Bomb was thrown together rather hastily. Limits to Growth doesn't look so hasty. If you look at the timelines of their forecasts, it's not clear that we have departed significantly from their trajectories. Mann dances around these details a bit too quickly.Mann does touch on some of the deeper layers of the puzzle we're confronting. Sure, humans are just animals. But how many animals have figured out evolution by natural selection, for example? Are humans smarter than yeast? That's a classic doomer koan. Mann points out that e.g. politics is really more the problem than technology. Even if we are smart enough to figure out how to manage the global situation, we don't really have the political organization needed to make it happen. It's not just that we have not implemented some necessary political strategy... really we have no idea what kind of political organization could possibly work. We seem to be collapsing into a political idiocracy as a first step into technical insufficiency. There are lots of good stories here which very nicely sketch out the dilemma we're facing. Everybody should read this book. It doesn't even try to provide answers. It does a very good job of posing a key question: use more or use less?
    • 4/5
      The Wizard and the Prophet is about two men with competing visions for the future. The first is a Wizard. He sees the solution in ever more technology (think GMOs and nuclear power). The other is a Prophet. He sees the problems of humanity arising from too much technology with the solution to work closer with nature (think organic farming and wind farms). These two visions define our world with real consequences of decisions made by people, companies and states.The division began to emerge in the late 1940s with the publication of William Vought's Road to Survival. It is credited as the first modern environmental book and, prior to Silent Spring which it heavily influenced, was the most important book of its type. The Wizard in Mann's book is the father of the Green Revolution, Nobel Prize winner Norman Borlaug. He was chosen by Mann as an archetypal Wizard and there are some connections with Vought.The book is a history of these two men and their work, and seeks to answer the question: which vision is right? Mann says he has long been a Wizard but with global warming and other natural limits looming he isn't so sure anymore. He wrote the book to work it out. There is a lot of thinking and consideration though he never comes firmly down on either side. The lasting value is the concept of Wizard and Prophet, but also a worthwhile history of Vought and Borlaugh. They are not household names but maybe should be better known. As a former Wizard myself, who later became a Prophet, the book questions assumptions and left me adrift. As someone who reads the Reddit forums Futurism and Environmentalism on occasion, it couldn't be a more perfect "Ah hah!" on the fundamental division over competing (and seemingly contradictory) views of the path forward.
    • 5/5
      Wow, it gave me a lot of insight into the mindsets of those fighting for our environmental future. Those who espouse curbing humane excess, and those who champion technical fixes. Both sides passionately talking past each other.
    • 5/5
      Fine book by a great science writer. Loved it.
    • 4/5
      Mann takes the lives and work of two men as the starting point for an examination of how best to assure our descendants of a livable, sustainable future. The wizards are certain technology can address whatever problems arise, the prophets are convinced that only by controlling population growth and conserving resources can humankind survive. Mann offers a narrative history of the evolution of these positions and also offers a nuanced consideration of the basic problems each side attempts to address: peak oil, climate change, hunger, lack of potable water sources. Excellent,
    • 5/5
      Charles Mann seeks to examine the solutions offered by two opposing scientists, William Vogt and Norman Borlaug,on how to provide food, water, and shelter for the projected 10 billion people on earth in the year 2050without wrecking the earth. Or is it too late?