highlights from the wizard and the prophet

Prophets look at the world as finite, and people as constrained by their environment. Wizards see possibilities as inexhaustible, and humans as wily managers of the planet. One views growth and development as the lot and blessing of our species; others regard stability and preservation as our future and our goal. Wizards regard Earth as a toolbox, its contents freely available for use; Prophets think of the natural world as embodying an overarching order that should not casually be disturbed.
A researcher who specialized in cells and microorganisms, Margulis was one of the most important biologists in the last half century—she literally helped to reorder the tree of life, convincing her colleagues that it did not consist of two kingdoms (plants and animals), but five or even six (plants, animals, fungi, protists, and two types of bacteria).*2
By today’s standards, his methodology was simplicity itself. Gause placed half a gram—that is, just a pinch—of oatmeal in one hundred milliliters (about three ounces) of water, boiled the results for ten minutes to create a broth, strained the liquid portion of the broth into a container, diluted the mixture by adding water, and then decanted the contents into small, flat-bottomed test tubes. Into each he dripped five Paramecium caudatum or Stylonychia mytilus, both single-celled protozoans, one species per tube. He stored the tubes for a week and observed the results. The conclusions appeared in a 163-page book, The Struggle for Existence, published in 1934. Today The Struggle for Existence is viewed as a scientific landmark, one of the first successful marriages of experiment and theory in ecology.
What Gause saw in his test tubes—and what Pearl had theorized before him—is often depicted in a graph, time on the horizontal axis, the number of protozoa on the vertical. By squinting a bit, it is possible to imagine that the curve forms a kind of flattened S, which is why scientists often refer to Gause’s curve as an “S-shaped curve.” At the beginning (that is, the left side of the S-shaped curve), the number of protozoans grows slowly, and the graph line slowly ascends to the right. But then the line hits an inflection point, and suddenly rockets upward—a frenzy of growth. The mad rise continues until the organism begins to run out of food, at which time there is a second inflection point, and the growth curve levels off again as bacteria begin to die. Eventually the line descends, and the population falls toward zero.
And all living creatures have a maximum reproductive rate: the greatest number of offspring they can generate in a lifetime.
Humans are no different, Margulis believed. The implication of evolutionary theory is that Homo sapiens is just one creature among many, no different at base than P. vulgaris. We and they are controlled by the same forces, produced by the same processes, subject to the same fate. When Borlaug and Vogt stood on the tract of bad land, looking at the city, they were on the edge of the petri dish. Wizard or Prophet, it didn’t matter. Homo sapiens, in Margulis’s eyes, was just another briefly successful species.
But P. humanus corporis, the body louse, must not be especially old, because its dependence on clothing meant that it could not have existed when humans went naked. Humanity’s great cover-up had created a new ecological niche, and some head lice had rushed to fill it.
Clothing is ornament and symbol; it separates human beings from their earlier, unself-conscious state. (Animals run, swim, and fly without clothing, but only people can be naked.) The arrival of clothing was a sign that a mental shift had occurred. The human world was becoming a realm of complex, symbolic artifacts.
In the early twentieth century, two German chemists, Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch, discovered the key steps to making synthetic fertilizer. Suddenly farmers could go to a store and buy all the fertilizer they wanted—factory-made, cheap, and plentiful. Haber and Bosch are not nearly as well known as they should be; their discoveries, linked into what is called the Haber-Bosch process, have literally changed the chemical composition of the earth. Farmers have injected so much synthetic fertilizer into their fields that soil and groundwater nitrogen levels have risen worldwide. Today, almost half of all the crops consumed by humankind depend on nitrogen derived from synthetic fertilizer. Another way of putting this is to say that Haber and Bosch enabled our species to extract an additional 3 billion people’s worth of food from the same land.
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 (at least in some ways).
Only in the mid-nineteenth century did scientists learn that these substances benefit crops because they put nitrogen into the soil. Soon after, a chemist in Peru informed the government that guano had very high nitrogen levels. The nation’s barren, excrement-laden islands were, so to speak, a guano gold mine. A few bags of Peruvian guano went to Europe. Farmers sprinkled the contents in their fields, saw harvests rise, and demanded more. It was the world’s first high-intensity commercial fertilizer. European ships flocked to the barren Peruvian littoral and filled their holds with ancient excrement. To satisfy the demand, Lima gave guano-mining concessions to European companies. They stripped the islands as fast as they could, importing bondsmen from China to do the actual mining. Birds from South America were supercharging plant growth in Europe via slave labor from Asia. Guano dust is laden with toxic ammonia and potassium chloride; slaves wrapped their faces in cloths but still died in droves. Meanwhile the Peruvian government cashed checks. Despite the islands’ tiny size, they were responsible for as much as three-quarters of government revenue. To capture the guano trade, Spain seized the most important islands from Peru in 1864. Fearful of losing their guano supply, Britain and the United States threatened to retaliate. At the last moment a global war over fertilizer was avoided.
As he hopscotched from place to place, Vogt learned that bird populations were falling not only on Long Island, but all along the East Coast. The decline had many causes, but he came to believe that one predominated: mosquito control. Mosquito control was another way of saying malaria control. Malaria today is confined to poor, hot places, but in the 1930s it afflicted huge numbers of people on every continent but Antarctica—5 million in North America alone. Malaria is caused by a single-celled parasite that is spread by mosquitos. Because no treatment existed for the parasite, researchers believed that it could best be fought by eliminating the wetlands that were the breeding grounds for its mosquito hosts.
Advised by scientists, thousands of militant birders could act as an environmental warning system: a union of scientifically informed amateurs and politically informed scientists that would rise in defense of Nature. Vogt was groping toward the idea of changing Audubon from a circle for upper-middle-class hobbyists into what would now be called a large-scale, broad-based environmental organization—a pioneering step.*1 The tool to create the movement,
“I’m doubtless one of the few men who ever spent three years on a manure pile in the interest of science,” he said.
transforming Vogt into that most forgivable of annoyances, a food snob.
But to understand the population decline he would need to investigate a host of scientific questions that did interest him: What are the maximum and minimum ages at which Guanays can reproduce? Are Guanays monogamous? What factors limit their reproduction? Do the islands have a maximum capacity? And, of course, he wanted to use the answers to safeguard the birds.
With the help of island guards and local fishing families, he banded tens of thousands of birds—thirty-nine thousand in 1940 alone. He measured air and water temperatures. He counted eggs. He weighed baby birds, live and dead. He sampled plankton and anchovetas.
In 1891 three Peruvians—an engineer, a geographer, and a naturalist—separately figured out how El Niños worked. During these times, the Humboldt Current abruptly weakens, allowing warm equatorial water to surge close to the coast; the warm water heats up the normally cold coastal air, which allows it to hold more moisture than usual, which, in turn, causes heavy rainfall on the desert shore.
At Yale he had been taught that the goal of land management was to wring the maximum volume of some resource—timber or deer or fish—from a given piece of property. Now Leopold became skeptical of humankind’s ability to understand the complexities of nature well enough to guide them. He came to think that ecosystems needed more to be protected from humans than managed by them—
As a Nazi-hunter, Vogt had good anti-fascist credentials, a must-have in Washington in 1943.
A thin but immeasurably rich skin on Earth, the soil was quite literally the foundation of the human enterprise. As Vogt toured the Americas he saw this foundation eroding away everywhere, sliding down slopes in nation after nation, impoverishing ecosystems from the Mississippi headwaters to Patagonia. Soon, he believed, the destruction would be unfixable.
What was driving the destruction in the hemisphere, Vogt thought, was consumption. Ceaselessly striving to satisfy their needs, people were stripping nature bare. The consumption had two causes. One was population growth—new mouths meant new demands on the land. Mexican couples, for instance, were having more than six children apiece, and the numbers were rising. The second, equally pernicious cause was the attempt to maximize economic growth.
Human populations will reproduce beyond their means of subsistence unless they are held back by practices like celibacy, late marriage, or birth control. But the reproductive urge is so strong that people at some point will stop restricting births and have children willy-nilly. When this happens, populations inevitably grow too large to feed. Then disease, famine, or war step in and brutally reduce human numbers until they are again in balance with their means of subsistence—at which stage they will increase again, beginning the unhappy cycle anew.
Human reproduction is geometric, Malthus said; all else is arithmetic. Populations, if allowed to grow freely, always overwhelm their food supply.
Humanity, Malthus thought, will always be one breath from calamity. Permanent victory over deprivation is impossible; prosperity, fleeting, is doomed to vanish. “Misery and the fear of misery,” he said, are “the necessary and inevitable results of the laws of nature.” No matter how good-willed, charity cannot help; aiding the poor leads only to more babies and more hunger. The rules of biology cannot be defeated by ingenuity or virtue. “We cannot lower the waters of misery by pressing them down in different places, which must necessarily make them rise somewhere else.”
Vogt, Leopold, Murphy, and many of their associates were not truly in this company; in fact, they helped begin the transformation in which environmental issues switched from being a cause of the right to one of the left.
ideas now so pervasive that many people don’t even recognize them as ideas, or that people didn’t always think them. None
They were jointly inventing a new literary genre: the concerned report on the global condition. They were the first to portray our ecological worries as a single Earth-sized problem for which the human species is to blame. And by stating that the problem is one interconnected, worldwide issue, rather than something local or national, they implicitly argued that ecological issues could only be solved by a unified global effort, administered by global experts—by people, that is, like Vogt and Osborn.
Vogt and Osborn were also the first to bring to a wide public a belief that would become a foundation of environmental thought: consumption driven by capitalism and rising human numbers is the ultimate cause of most of the world’s ecological problems, and only dramatic reductions in human fertility and economic activity will prevent a worldwide calamity.
Environmentalism is an argument that respecting the rules of nature is indispensable to having a good society and living a good life.
Defining a word in a new sense seems academic and abstract, but its consequences are not. Until something has a name, it can’t be discussed or acted upon with intent. “People, by naming the world, transform it,” wrote the Brazilian educator Paulo Freire. Without “the environment,” there would be no environmental movement.
the second of Road’s main innovations, Vogt summed up the relationship between humanity and this global environment with a single concept: carrying capacity. It is hard to overstate the importance of this.
But as the notion of carrying capacity expanded to other forms of transportation, then environments like pastures and forests, and then the entire planet, it stopped being something that one could enumerate easily. It was unclear whether the carrying capacity of an ecosystem was actually a static, measurable entity or if it had a meaningful upper bound. An idea that could be useful on a small scale could become untenable if it was stretched like taffy to wrap over the entire world. Was the carrying capacity of an individual ecosystem a rule of thumb—the way things happened to work out a lot of the time—or a biological law, something that reflected an underlying physical reality? Was an environment’s biotic potential (and thus its maximum theoretical carrying capacity) a fixed, absolute limit, a value set by Nature, or was it a quantity that could change over time, and thus be influenced by people?
I have omitted the numbers to highlight that the basic argument is as simple as it was in Vogt’s day. Stay within the limits, and people can develop freely. Go beyond the boundaries—exceed carrying capacity—and trouble will ensue.
But these injunctions are also inextricably bound to a conception of the good life—a particular way of living that critics mock with epithets like “tree-hugging” and advocates invoke with terms like “sustainability.”
The parallels between Borlaug and Vogt are inexact. Borlaug never wrote a manifesto and mostly declined the roles of theorist and exponent. Instead he became, by the example of his life, the emblem of a way of thought—the Wizard’s way. His success would show, at least to Wizards, that science and technology, properly applied, could allow humankind to produce its way into a prosperous future. To the question of how to survive, his work said: be smart, make more, share with everyone else. It said: we can build a world of gleaming richness for all. And the concomitants of this world—the giant installations, the whirring machinery in the garden, the glare of artificial light in the night sky—are to be embraced, not feared.
The wet conditions fostered crop diseases; stem rust attacked wheat so often that most local farmers, the Borlaugs among them, gave up planting it. Poor soil translated into poverty for all and early death for many. The Norwegian church held thirty funerals in 1877 alone—
A single teacher taught the entire school—eight grades, ten to twenty children in all, packed into one 28-by-24-foot space. All students were Caucasian; of the county’s almost fourteen thousand inhabitants, only four were African-American.
Your knowledge is the only protection you have in this world! Fill your head now to fill your belly later! Norm
No longer needing draft animals, writes biographer Vietmeyer, Henry Borlaug sold most of his cattle and horses, planted what had been their pasture, and changed the oats to maize. The extra production meant extra money, which allowed him to buy more fertilizer and better seed, further increasing production. Ultimately, Henry’s harvest quadrupled—on the same land. The extra money let him send his children to school without regret.
Fighting over milk erupted in Chicago in mid-September 1933. Scattered violence occurred as far away as Minneapolis, where it was witnessed by nineteen-year-old Norman Borlaug. Walking through a zone of shuttered factories, he saw a throng of gaunt, ragged people encircling a line of milk trucks, blocking their progress. The trucks were guarded by men toting baseball bats. Protesters were berating them. Not all of the shouting men were farmers, Borlaug realized. Some of them were just hungry—famished men, women, and children, almost maddened by want. “Suddenly, a cameraman tried to get up [on a car] to get a better picture with his tripod and his foot went through the canvas top on the car and then all hell broke out,” he remembered. The guards “beat him up and busted his camera, and that triggered it.” As if the violence were a signal, the guards rushed the protesters, bringing their clubs down in a coordinated attack. Cries of pain rose as bloodied men collapsed. Others grabbed at the milk canisters in the trucks, pulling them to the ground, splashing milk on the cobblestones. Borlaug was terrified. Abruptly the milk trucks lurched forward, into the mêlée; people fell back shouting, a panicky shuffle that pinned Borlaug against a factory wall. He couldn’t see but he could hear truck engines heaving as they drove through the gathering. The wailing was like nothing he had ever heard. When the crush eased, he ran shaking through the fight to his boardinghouse. The wounded were lying untended on the ground.
Stakman did not view science as a disinterested quest for knowledge. It was a tool—maybe the tool—for human betterment. Not all sciences were equally valuable, as he liked to explain. “Botany,” he said, “is the most important of all sciences, and plant pathology is one of its most essential branches.”
Stem rust is little known today outside agriculture, but it was long one of humankind’s worst afflictions, responsible for millennia of famine. Borlaug knew it well; a stem-rust outbreak had driven his grandparents out of the wheat business in 1878.
Stem rust was long so pervasive and unstoppable that the Romans viewed it as a malign deity, and sacrificed rust-colored dogs to appease it.
“more rust spores are produced in the world than there are blades of grass or grains of sand in all the world’s beaches or stars in all the galaxies of the universe.” Carefoot and Sprott were exaggerating, but less than one might expect; a single acre of “moderately rusted wheat,” Stakman once estimated, can produce 50 trillion spores.
As the barberry campaign crested, Stakman led a team of researchers that developed a new type of rust-resistant wheat. Thatcher, as it was called, made its debut in 1934. Without barberry, P. graminis wasn’t able to overcome it for almost thirty years. To Stakman, the anti-barberry campaign showed the power of science to improve human lives.
Created in 1913 by Standard Oil owner John D. Rockefeller Sr. and his son, John D. Rockefeller Jr., the foundation had an initial endowment of $100 million, an unheard-of sum at a time when the annual federal budget was less than a billion dollars. An early Rockefeller initiative had been to establish the General Education Board (GEB), which disseminated better farming techniques in the U.S. South—methods to prevent the spread of boll weevils and other cotton pests, for example. So successful were GEB programs that in 1914 Congress used them as a model for creating a national network of extension agents: technicians who transmitted the latest agricultural research to local farmers. (The network still exists and is a critical component of the U.S. agricultural system.)
Red, blue, yellow, orange, black, pink, purple, creamy-white, and multicolored—the jumble of colors of Mexican maize reflects the nation’s jumble of cultures and environmental zones. The small, varied plots in Mexico were like the anti-matter version of the huge, uniform maize fields in the U.S. Midwest.
What they saw was a human catastrophe: the abridgment of hope on a massive scale. “The great majority of Mexican people are poorly fed, poorly clad, and poorly housed,” they wrote afterward. “The general standard of living of the Mexican people is pitifully low.” And things were getting worse. In 1940 the country harvested a third less maize than it had in 1920, even though it planted almost a million more acres of the crop. Meanwhile, the population had risen by more than 5 million.
By contrast, the scientists believed that Mexico’s issues were caused, at bottom, by lack of knowledge and tools.
Graduate school, he told Borlaug, is “not like a novel you can pick up and put down. You’ll have to be a bit more serious about it than that, my boy.”
He ended up spending so many hours squinting at spores that he permanently damaged the vision in his right eye.
Plant pathology had a completely different mission: removing pests and diseases that impeded human needs. Vogt’s ecology was an exercise in humility and limits; Borlaug’s plant pathology was a methodology of extension. Isolate the subject of study, perform the experiment over and over, then push the result as far as possible—this, Stakman told him, was the path to knowledge that could benefit people.
In part, the foundation had posited that a small research group could have a big impact because it would need only to introduce Mexicans to superior U.S. methods. In the spring of 1944 Harrar had planted some of the most advanced U.S. hybrid maize, wheat, and beans on a plot at Chapingo. Borlaug saw the results in October, after his arrival. All three crops had been nearly wiped out by disease, insects, and unseasonable frost. A few wheat plants had survived, but they had produced almost no grain—for some reason, the northern varieties couldn’t bear in southern conditions. “This was our first inkling that raising crops in Mexico might differ from anything we expected,” Borlaug told Vietmeyer. “We’d assumed that our seeds would perform as they did back home.
Winter wheat varieties can’t flower until they are exposed to a period of cold weather—a process called “vernalization”—whereas
Much worse was the poverty. Borlaug had been poor all his life but always well fed and decently clad. In the Bajío he first encountered destitution on a geographic scale. Women walked for miles to carry water from contaminated wells. Men scratched at the earth with wooden hoes and slashed at weeds with sickles as ancient as time. Plumbing was a distant dream. Children died from diseases that were treatable nuisances in richer places. Again and again, he encountered people who had been so badly abused by authority that they clung to beliefs Borlaug found irrational. If Borlaug offered to procure steel plows and hoes, they told him that metal siphoned “heat” from the soil. If he asked about fertilizer, they told him it was a government plot against the farmer. Each conversation was like being thrust into a wildland of confusion and despair.
By contrast, Borlaug saw the farmers as the central characters. Their suffering was caused not by overshooting the capacity of the land but by their lack of tools and knowledge. With industrial fertilizer, advanced irrigation techniques, and the finest new seed stock, they could transform the landscape, making it more productive and themselves wealthy. Fitting in with their world would be a human catastrophe. Instead they needed to reconstruct that world on more useful principles.
The better way, he decided, was to raise yields all over the nation—to target Mexico as a whole, rather than only the Bajío. As Vietmeyer put it, Borlaug thought the objective should be to “feed everyone; not just the hungry. Opt to feed the whole populace.” Produce enough not only to feed every man and woman in Mexico but also to export to other food-short nations.
To create new varieties, plant breeders must stop wheat from fertilizing itself. In practice, this boiled down to Borlaug sitting on a little homemade stool in the sun, opening up every floret on every spikelet, carefully plucking out the pollen-containing stamens with tweezers, and discarding them. Every stamen in every plant had to be removed to ensure control. Now the entire field of wheat was entirely female—the plants had been, so to speak, emasculated. Only pollen from other plants could fertilize them.
Perhaps it is the first time in the history of Mexico that any scientist tried to help our farmers….But why is it, with such a great force like the Rockefeller Foundation, that you do not give your men the tools and machinery they must have to fight with? Why does he come like a beggar to borrow the tools to grow new wheat?
Because Borlaug knew little about the molecular basis of heredity, he worked exclusively with plants’ physical features—the thickness of their stalks, the number of leaves, the time of flowering, and so on. Thus he might give a high-yielding “female” plant pollen from a “male” disease-resistant plant (or vice versa). Or he might mate a fast-growing but rust-susceptible plant with a slower-growing but resistant plant in the knock-on-wood hope of producing offspring with the two desirable traits, not the two undesirable ones. In both cases, he couldn’t know the results of these matches until the plants grew in the field.
He had taken advantage of that lucky break to breed wheat twice as fast as anyone else—wheat that could withstand a much wider range of conditions than other varieties.
Taller plants are more likely to see the sun, and thus more likely to grow and reproduce. Genes for shortness, conversely, put plants at an evolutionary disadvantage, and so are discouraged. In breeding for shortness, Borlaug would be fighting natural selection.
A prerequisite for a successful scientific career is an enthusiastic willingness to pore through the minutiae of subjects that 99.9 percent of Earth’s population find screamingly dull. Bayles and Borlaug ruminated about the quirks of Puccinia graminis as they toured the pampas, running through one possibility after another. The basic problem had been understood for decades: wheat that fended off one rust race could always be susceptible to another. Borlaug asked if it would be possible to create a “composite” wheat—a variety with many types of resistance. What if he found a line of wheat that was immune to 15B and crossed it with a line immune to 49 and then crossed the result with other lines immune to other races? Bayles told him that the standard answer was that wheat was simply too complex. Each time he crossed one line with another, there was a chance that the genetic reshuffling would bury the desirable traits he had elicited in previous crosses. The likelihood skyrocketed if the breeder was crossing many lines at once. Every throw of the darts threatened to undo the results of the previous throws. Borlaug asked if the odds could be overcome by running truly massive trials—tens of thousands of crosses, year after year, a staggering amount of work—with high selectivity. “You might just get away with it,” Bayles said, in Borlaug’s recollection.
Eight seeds! He still had a chance to grow plants with short straw—if he could keep them away from rust. Working with exquisite care, he sowed the seeds in individual pots under grow lights in the basement of the new building. Each pot was wrapped in fine gauze that would block rust spores. Visiting his eight plants daily, he watched them sprout and grow—but only to two feet. By controlling the lights, he was able to induce the dwarfs to flower at the same time as his other varieties. He crossed them with the newest versions of his most resistant wheat varieties, Kentana and Lerma, which he had also grown in gauze-wrapped pots in the basement. At the end of the summer, he harvested about a thousand seeds from the crosses.
In the ass-end of nowhere Borlaug and his Mexican team had created something new to the world: an all-purpose wheat. Short, fecund, and disease-resistant, it could be sown in soil rich or poor anywhere in Mexico and produce well. As long as farmers provided water and fertilizer, the plant would thrive and the harvest would be large. The fertilizer could be cow manure or bird guano or bags of chemicals made in factories. The water could be from rain or concrete irrigation channels. It didn’t matter: pile on the inputs and the grain would grow in quantities greater than ever before, he thought, cascades of wheat that would banish hunger for millions.
Hidden inside the genes of the new varieties were now-unknown negative traits that sooner or later would show up in the field (scientists call this “residual heterozygosity”).
Twenty years before, he said, Mexican farmers had reaped about 760 pounds of wheat from every acre planted. Now the figure had risen to almost 2,500 pounds per acre—triple the harvest from the same land.
Between 1954 and 1965, eighteen scientists received Nobel Prizes for molecular biology; fifteen were funded by Weaver at Rockefeller.
To survive, Weaver said, humans have a single basic need: “usable energy.” That energy comes in two forms: energy for the body (food and water, in other words), and energy for daily existence (that is, fuel to power vehicles, heat and cool buildings, and make essential materials like cement and steel). “In the United States,” Weaver estimated, “each person uses, on the average, 3,000 calories per day for food, [and] 125,000 calories per day for heat and power.”
The true problem was not that humankind risked surpassing natural limits, but that our species didn’t know how to tap more than a fraction of the energy provided by nature.
This turn of events was particularly unjust for what has become known, incorrectly, as Liebig’s Law of the Minimum: plants need many nutrients, but their growth rate is limited by the one least present in the soil. In most cases, that nutrient is nitrogen.
Instead, plants are able to absorb nitrogen only when it is in chemical combinations—“fixed,” as scientists say—that are easier to break up.
By the beginning of the twentieth century, as Vaclav Smil of the University of Manitoba has written in his history of nitrogen use, almost half the nitrates shipped to the United States were used to make explosives.
the Haber-Bosch process, as it is called, was arguably the most consequential technological development of the twentieth century, and one of the more important human discoveries of any time. The Haber-Bosch process has literally changed the land and sky, reshaped the oceans, and powerfully affected the fortunes of humanity. The German physicist Max von Laue put it neatly: Haber and Bosch made it possible to “win bread from air.”
Remarkable fact: “That 1 percent,” Naam says, “roughly doubles the amount of food the world can grow.”
In the Indore process, waste was inoculated with bacteria and fungi and mixed with ash in a five-to-one ratio; the material was periodically turned to expose it to oxygen, maximizing nitrogen fixation. The Howards’ methods, slightly modified, remain in use today for large-scale composting.
His An Agricultural Testament, published in 1943, is often called the founding document of the organic movement.
Indeed, toffs were so heavily represented in the Soil Association, Britain’s leading farm-reform organization, that its early meetings were like house parties at Downton Abbey, except that the discussions over sherry were about manure and earthworms.
Rodale died in 1971—bizarrely, on a television talk show, suffering a heart attack minutes after declaring “I never felt better in my life!” and offering the host his special asparagus boiled in urine. Naturally, this attracted ridicule. But he left a mighty legacy—and he lived twenty years longer than his siblings, all of whom, like him, had heart conditions.
Compounding the sin, in critics’ eyes, the organic movement blithely ignored costs. To make food for millions with compost, wrote the fertilizer chemist Donald Hopkins, would require “a truly colossal effort in terms of labor, transport, and planning.” The outlays would drive up the price of food—terrible for people with limited incomes.
The Haber-Bosch process has been known for thirty years; chemical companies like BASF are capitalizing on it. But natural fertilizer is still important enough that Peru has hired a foreign biologist to protect it. Strikingly, neither scientists nor corporations nor organic advocates understand why it is so important to provide nitrogen to the soil. Not until years after Vogt left Peru did researchers learn the answer: nitrogen is critical to photosynthesis.
Rubisco’s catalytic actions are the limiting step in photosynthesis, which means the rate at which rubisco functions determines the rate of the entire process. Photosynthesis walks at the speed of rubisco.
Alas, rubisco is, by biological standards, a sluggard, a lazybones, a couch potato. It causes reactions to occur, but very slowly. Whereas typical enzymes catalyze thousands of reactions a second, rubisco deigns to involve itself with just two or three per second. It is one of the pokiest enzymes known.
Not only were chloroplasts the result of a long-ago symbiotic event, she said, but so were other objects in cell protoplasm, notably the mitochondria, the minuscule entities that regulate energy flow. In fact, some of the symbiotic protozoan-cyanobacteria associations had themselves been engulfed by other, larger creatures, forming new symbiotic associations. These symbiotic acts were rare, but they had shaped the course of life on Earth.
Fifteen journals rejected Margulis’s paper before it was accepted by the Journal of Theoretical Biology. Today it is regarded as a classic.
What evolution seems to be saying, explains Jane Langdale, is that “there is an inescapable trade-off between precision and speed.” If rubisco could better distinguish between carbon dioxide and oxygen, it would be even slower; if it catalyzed more reactions per second, it would make more mistakes.
Code-named IR8–233–3, grain from that fortunate rice plant was multiplied and planted in test farms all over South and East Asia. It was staggeringly successful. Borlaug’s wheat had doubled or tripled harvests, but the new rice did even better—one trial in Pakistan yielded ten times more than the average of the day.
Even though the continent’s population soared, Asians had an average of 30 percent more calories in their diet. Millions upon millions of families had more food, better clothing, money for school. Seoul and Shanghai, Jaipur and Jakarta; shining skyscrapers, pricey hotels, traffic-choked streets ablaze with neon—all are built atop a foundation of laboratory-bred rice. By 2050, researchers believe, it
At the beginning of the twentieth century, according to Smil, the environmental researcher, barely 10 percent of the world’s grain harvest went to animals, mostly horses, mules, and oxen used as farm labor. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, the figure had risen considerably, though by exactly how much is difficult to calculate: perhaps 40 percent, Smil estimates, the great majority of it destined for dairy and meat animals.
Logically speaking, only two paths to increasing harvests exist. One is to lift actual yields—the yields produced by farmers, some of whom are better at their work than others. If they are provided better equipment, materials, and technical advice, farmers can bring their harvests closer to the theoretical maximum. The other is to increase the potential yield—the theoretical maximum—which should bring up the actual yield with it.*7
Channeling the energy of photosynthesis and the nutrition provided by fertilizer into grain, these varieties had a “harvest index”—the percentage of the plant’s mass that is grain—of about 50 percent, almost twice the previous figure.
Ordinary photosynthesis is a cycle with two main stages. In the first stage, chloroplasts trap solar energy and use it to break apart water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen atoms. This sequence is known as the “light” reactions because it makes use of sunlight. The hydrogen is plugged into the second stage; the oxygen filters out of the cell and into the air.*8 In the second stage—the “dark” reactions—the hydrogen from the first stage combines with the carbon from the carbon dioxide grabbed by rubisco. The result is a compound called G3P that other cellular mechanisms break down and rebuild into the sugars, starches, and cellulose that make up plants. In ordinary photosynthesis, both stages—the light and dark reactions—take place in a layer of cells right below the surface of the leaf. The excess gases and the sugars, starches, and cellulose produced in this layer of photosynthetic cells pass into the interior of the leaf. The gases filter up through spaces in the cells to small holes in the leaf surface while the other materials are passed down into interior cells and then into veins and the rest of the plant.
By contrast, C4 plants split photosynthesis in half. The light reactions—the reactions in which chloroplasts use captured solar energy to break apart water molecules—take place near the leaf surface, as in ordinary photosynthesis. But something different occurs with the dark reactions, those that incorporate carbon dioxide. When carbon dioxide comes into a C4 leaf, it is grabbed not by rubisco but by a different enzyme that uses it to form a compound known as malate (this is the molecule with the four carbon atoms). The malate is then pumped into special cells in the interior of the leaf called “bundle sheath” cells.
More than 3 billion years ago the atmosphere had a hundred times as much carbon dioxide as it does now and almost no oxygen. Rubisco’s inability to distinguish carbon dioxide and oxygen was not a problem, because oxygen was rare.
Barely 3 percent of the flowering plants are C4, but they are responsible for about a quarter of all the photosynthesis on land.
Further evidence for this idea is that a few species are intermediate—some parts of the plant use ordinary photosynthesis, some use C4 photosynthesis. One of these in-between species is maize: its main leaves are C4, whereas the leaves around the cob are a mix of C4 and ordinary photosynthesis. If two forms of photosynthesis can be encoded from the same genome, they cannot be that far apart. Which in turn implies that people equipped with the tools of molecular biology might be able to transform one into another.
Funded largely by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the C4 Rice Consortium is the world’s biggest genetic-engineering project. But the term “genetic engineering” does not capture the ambition of the project. What the researchers are trying to develop bears the same resemblance to typical genetically modified organisms that a Boeing 787 does to a paper airplane.
And instead of slipping genes from other species into rice, the initiative is hoping to switch on chunks of the DNA already in rice to create, in effect, a new, more productive species—
Multiple techniques for genetic engineering have been invented, but at the time the most common for cereals like rice, wheat, and maize involved shotgunning thousands of microscopic particles of gold or tungsten at plant embryos (the first precursor cells for leaf, root, and stem, which in this case have been pulled out of the seed and grown in petri dishes). The particles are coated with snippets of DNA that contain desirable genes. In a process that astonished biologists when they discovered it could occur, a few of these particles slam through the cell walls and hit the cell nucleus in just the right way that the nucleus—or, more exactly, the DNA in the nucleus—incorporates the new bits of DNA. And every now and then the DNA from the particles is transferred in a way that allows the new genes to be switched on.
The project has two main goals: (1) locating and switching on the precursor genes that will create the physical structures of C4 photosynthesis (the bundle sheath cells as well as a network of extra veins for them to wrap around), and (2) locating and switching on the precursor genes that create the substances involved in C4 photosynthesis (the malate-producing enzyme and other molecules that are involved in the reaction).
Nitrogen-fixing maize, wheat that can grow in saltwater, enhanced soil microbial ecosystems—the list of possibilities is as long as imagination allows.*10
Rifkin didn’t think that any product of gene-splicing could be adequately tested or should be released in the wild. Much of the public was equally unmoved. Local officials and environmental groups in Brentwood joined Rifkin in protesting ice-minus. Vandals tried to destroy the strawberry plants and, later, the potato plants in another test. In effect, all were saying: We don’t trust you white-coats—there have been too many examples of unintended consequences. National and international organizations have followed Rifkin’s lead. Genetically modified crops have been banned in parts of Europe, Asia, Latin America, and Africa.
Contrast the behavior of the European and North American consumers who fear putting GMOs into their bodies as food with that of the European and North American patients who willingly put GMOs into their bodies as medicine. Genetically modified E. coli creates synthetic insulin for diabetics; genetically modified baker’s yeast produces hepatitis B vaccine; genetically modified mammal cells make blood factor VIII for hemophiliacs and tissue plasminogen activator for heart-attack victims. Although activists have occasionally campaigned against these drugs, their efforts have not caught fire. The divergent reactions are not because people are foolish but because the two circumstances have different ethical benefit-cost calculations. In both cases scientists assure non-scientists that the likelihood of negative side effects is small. But the diabetics who use synthetic insulin personally benefit from it, compensating for any risk. The same is true for the hemophiliacs and cardiac patients. Meanwhile, the Californians who lived around the strawberry and potato patches would receive no benefit whatsoever from the ice-minus test. From their point of view, they were being asked to expose themselves to an unknown peril for the benefit of some rich venture capitalists in a city hundreds of miles way. Imposing any risk, however tiny, would make them worse off. They were being used purely as a means to somebody else’s end—something that philosophers have regarded as unethical since the days of Kant.
The conundrum is that poor nations are less likely to accept an innovation if it is rejected by their richer neighbors—it can become stigmatized. The stigma turns into outright economic harm if the rich nations ban the innovation; if C4 rice cannot be exported, farmers seeking extra cash are less likely to grow it. The action by which middle-class people refuse to take risks on behalf of rich companies becomes a way of blocking aspirations of the distant poor. Weighing the relative pluses and minuses is an exercise in morality that is outside the realm of science.
In this way GMOs became a focus for a larger disquiet, a synecdoche for a larger anxiety about being an insignificant part of a vast economic complex that did not have the citizen’s best interests at heart.
Calendula, canna, and carrot; celosia, coleus, and collard.
“Organic” may be the wrong term for these enterprises—like the Nichols farm, not all of them follow the official rules for certification. More important, it implies that they are somehow “natural,” not constructed landscapes based on scientific information. To run these sorts of farm requires integrating multiple forms of knowledge—botanical, biochemical, pedological, economic, legal, cultural—that are constantly interacting and changing. The results are exotic cosmopolitan objects, as thoroughly driven by contemporary technology as the products of the pharmaceutical plants that they (mostly) abjure.
To their minds, evaluating farming systems wholly in terms of calories produced—in terms of usable energy—is a perfect example of the flaws of reductive thinking. It does not include the costs of overfertilization, habitat loss, watershed degradation, soil erosion and compaction, and pesticide and antibiotic overuse; it doesn’t account for the destruction of rural communities; it doesn’t consider whether the food is tasty and nutritious. It’s like evaluating automobiles entirely by their gasoline mileage, without taking into account safety, comfort, reliability, emissions, or any of the other factors that people consider when buying cars.
By contrast, the wild grasses that used to fill the prairies of the Midwest, Australia, and central Eurasia are perennial: plants that come back summer after summer, for as much as a decade.
The greatest obstacle for Vogtians is something else: labor. Lloyd Nichols’s operation requires a lot of workers, and so does every farm like it. Heinberg, Nichols’s neighbor, was able to take advantage of a host of incentives and subsidies provided by the state of Illinois and the federal government: land-tax incentives, depreciation allowances, crop subsidies, and so on. Nichols couldn’t, because almost everything he planted was not on the official state list of eligible crops. And he didn’t devote sufficient acreage to those on the list that he did plant to qualify as a grower. On the official, regulatory level, it was as if his farm didn’t exist. “I’ve never got a subsidy check in forty years of doing this,” he said to me. As he pointed out, many of the supports were intended to promote the acquisition of machinery, rather than labor. He might get a special low-interest loan to buy a combine, but not to hire a human being.
We saw vast storage and processing facilities in which layers of crisscrossing conveyor belts carried red rivers of tomatoes past advanced sensors. A manager demonstrated how breeders had created tomatoes with extra-thick, machinery-proof skins by dropping one from chest height onto a concrete floor. Another manager took us to high-tech laboratories in which masked women tested tomato juice and loud salsa music played. All the workers are illegals from Mexico, the manager said, explaining the music.
Tomatoes are essentially little balls of flavored water.
California produces more fruits, vegetables, and nuts than anywhere else in North America, and most of them are grown in the Central Valley. The valley runs for about 450 miles between the Coastal Mountains on the west and the Sierra Nevada on the east. Its floor is a trough of impermeable rock. Over the eons, the mountain ranges have eroded and filled the trough with bands of silt, gravel, sand, and clay several thousand feet deep. Water from melting snow in the heights runs into the deposits and is trapped there by the impermeable rock. Some of the water eventually spills out at the edge of the valley into streams. The rest is stored far underground. Early in the twentieth century, deep-well drills were invented. Suddenly farmers could draw from the ground as much water for irrigation as they wanted. Within a few decades they had sucked out so much water that many parts of the Central Valley were drained and some were sinking like foundering ships into the earth. Here and there the water table declined by more than three hundred feet.
In the next forty years the Central Valley Project captured and channeled two-thirds of the runoff in the state. It retooled two big river systems with a thousand miles of giant canals and aqueducts, more than twenty big dams and new reservoirs, and a score of huge pumping plants.
That left California free in the 1960s to pursue an additional, overlapping State Water Project that was almost as large—twenty-one dams and more than seven hundred miles of canals that funnel water from the far north of the state down the west side of the Central Valley to within fifty miles of the Mexican border.
River and surface water moves through the cycle quickly, in weeks or months; groundwater moves through it slowly, in years or decades.
But other flows—“critical-zone resources,” in the jargon—can be exploited to exhaustion. Consider an archetypical critical-zone flow: the run of salmon swimming upstream to spawn. Drop a net across the watercourse and the fish will swim right into it. As long as the number of fish taken from the river every year doesn’t exceed the number of new young fish born in the river that year, fishing can continue indefinitely—the supply won’t go down, no matter how many years people put in nets. But leave the net in too long one year and it will take every single salmon and there will be no more fishing after that. Catching the last fish is just as easy as catching the first—laying the net across the stream doesn’t get more costly as the supply diminishes. With critical-zone flows, things typically go fine until they suddenly don’t.
Interruptions of water flows can be particularly severe because water, unusually, has no substitute.
Most important groundwater sources are aquifers: underground layers of permeable, water-holding rock.
The flow through the northern part of the Ogallala Aquifer, to give one example, is on the order of fifty to a hundred feet a day. Drill a few wells and the current is unaffected; the water will pass through as before. But take more than the flow allows and bad things happen—the particles in the porous sand and silt, which had been held apart by water pressure, suddenly compact and become impermeable. The flow is interrupted and often cannot resume.
According to the European Environment Agency, nitrates, heavy metals, or harmful microorganisms contaminate groundwater in nearly every European country and former Soviet republic. Some of these will filter out of groundwater over time, but all too often the damage is permanent.
Journalists sometimes describe unsexy subjects as MEGO: My Eyes Glaze Over.
By 2025, the institute predicts, all of Africa and the Middle East, almost all of South and Central America and Asia, and much of North America will either be running out of water or unable to afford its cost. As many as 4.5 billion people could be short of water.
But most freshwater is actually used by agriculture—almost 70 percent, according to the U.N. Food and Agricultural Organization. Just 12 percent goes to direct human consumption: drinking, cooking, washing, and so on. (Industry takes the rest.)
Farm water goes into fields; because any excess sinks into the ground or evaporates into the sky, it is not easy to gather for reuse.
As with food, the disciples of Borlaug tend to react in one way to these worries; those of Vogt, in another. These have been called the paths of hard and soft water, and the choice between them will resonate in the lives of generations to come. The debate between hard and soft is occurring in many places, but can be seen with especial clarity in the Middle East and California. With its rapidly growing population and febrile political tensions, the former bids fair to have the world’s most severe water problem. If the latter were a separate nation, it would have one of the world’s ten biggest economies. Its water problem may be the biggest in scale.
Walter Lowdermilk had made a great career from failing to look before he leaped.
When Inez returned briefly to the United States, Lowdermilk drove to California and saw her for the first time in eleven years. Forty-eight hours later, he proposed marriage. Inez was returning to China; Walter quit the Forest Service to join her. He learned Chinese and took a two-thousand-mile solo trip up the Yellow River. Along the way inspiration filled him and he understood the path of history and the rise and fall of civilizations.
Human incompetence with water management had destroyed countless societies over the millennia.
The Fertile Crescent was no longer fertile; the land of milk and honey had neither.
The Sea of Galilee drains through the Jordan Valley into the Dead Sea, a salty lake 1,412 feet below sea level. If much of the Sea of Galilee’s water were diverted to the south, other water would need to feed the Dead Sea. An obvious solution: pumping desalinated seawater from the Mediterranean into the Jordan Valley. The water coursing into the deep valley could be used to drive turbines, Lowdermilk said, generating electricity for “well over a million” people. Water and power would be supplemented by a program of range management and reforestation; the project would also extract minerals from the Dead Sea.
The nation’s leaders believed they had no choice—three-quarters of a million refugees had come to Israel in its first five years. Debates about absorptive capacity had been rendered irrelevant. First came a kind of practice pipeline from Tel Aviv along the Mediterranean coast to the Negev, near the Sinai Peninsula. In 1956 Israel committed to building a Lowdermilk-style, north-to-south project: the National Water Carrier.
The National Water Carrier was and is a Wizardly demonstration of technological prowess. Thousands of workers carved an underground pumping station 250 feet long and 60 feet high at the edge of the Sea of Galilee. Working twenty-four hours a day, its three huge pumps push millions of tons of water almost a thousand feet through the surrounding hills to the newly constructed Jordan Canal. Ten feet deep and forty feet wide and about ten miles long, the canal conducts the water through a series of reservoirs, canals, and pumps into a nine-foot pipe that runs for more than fifty miles to southern Israel, where the water is spread through a specially built irrigation network. The cost was enormous: on a real per-capita basis, the nation spent more on the National Water Carrier than the United States did to build the Panama Canal.
Justus von Liebig’s connection to Israeli sewage-treatment policies is insufficiently appreciated.
Gradually Howard became convinced that reknitting the seams between city and country was key to improving the human condition. In 1898 he released To-Morrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform. It was his first published work. Four years later a revised edition came out under a new title: Garden Cities of To-Morrow. The To-Morrow books transformed the idea of the city. They were to urban planning what Road to Survival was to environmentalism—a summation and extension of others’ thoughts that created a movement.
Like William Vogt, Ebenezer Howard put together a complex of beliefs now so conventional that it is surprising to discover that it had an origin. And, like Vogt, Howard has mostly been forgotten, even by the urban planners whose visual language of open spaces and connectivity was largely his creation.
Taking the idea further, Howard sought to harness wastewater to improve society. Howard created an association to bring his vision to fruition. It quickly discovered that building brand-new cities was expensive. Moreover, few places had the right combination of idealistic beliefs and platoons of new inhabitants without housing. Among them was Jaffa, on the Mediterranean shore, one of the first destinations for Jews migrating to Palestine. An ancient port, Jaffa had been inhabited for at least seven thousand years. Its long history was manifest in its tangle of dark, narrow streets and open sewers. The newcomers had not come all the way from Europe to live in the squalor of the past. They wanted to create a homeland that was clean and modern, filled with sunlight and healthful air. Zionist leaders in Germany supported this ambition. They sent Garden Cities of To-Morrow. Half a dozen new Jewish settlements around Jaffa were modeled on Howard’s ideas. Over the years so many Jews moved to them that what had originally been suburban villages swelled into the city of Tel Aviv, which swallowed Jaffa. All the while, other new Jewish settlements were built according to Howard’s precepts. And in 1956, the municipalities that made up greater Tel Aviv committed to recycling wastewater and sewage water, much as Howard had proposed.
Contemporary sewage treatment occurs in three steps, in an ascending ladder of squeamishness.
But rather than deploy tertiary treatment they decided to pipe the water from secondary treatment to a sand-dune region a few miles away. Layers of fine, packed sand sit there atop a coastal aquifer. (Or, more precisely, atop a section of the large sandstone aquifer that runs along most of the Israeli coast and down to the mouth of the Nile.) The wastewater would be channeled into newly created ponds on the dunes. In six months to a year, the water would filter slowly through the sand and then through a layer of sandstone. When it reached a hundred feet or more beneath the surface, it would recharge the aquifer. Water from the aquifer could then be pumped through a fifty-mile pipe into a reservoir in the Negev, where it would be disbursed for irrigation. Some of the irrigation water would in turn percolate into the ground, recharging another portion of the coastal aquifer.
unlike the flow of rain, the flow of sewage is as constant as the North Star.
The hard path asks: How can we get more water? Focused on increasing supply, first and foremost, it stems from the belief that the demand for clean freshwater is inexhaustible. Its logical outcome, according to Peter Gleick of the Pacific Institute: “ever-larger numbers of dams, reservoirs, and aqueducts to capture, store, and move ever-larger fractions of freshwater runoff.” Enabled by the development of cheap cement and cheap fossil fuels, the hard path has produced drinking and irrigation water for huge numbers of people. Like the invention of synthetic fertilizer, the reshaping of water systems has profoundly affected the contours of everyday life, allowing the inhabitants of today’s megacities to live at a level of cleanliness, health, and comfort that would astonish our ancestors. But it has also sucked water from rivers and lakes, degrading their ecosystems, and made water tables sink in every corner of the world.
The soft path, by contrast, is something new. Decentralization, efficiency, and education are its hallmarks. It “draws all ‘new’ water from better use of existing supplies and changing habits and attitudes,” Brooks and a co-author explained in 2007. It eliminates waste and squeezes inefficiencies from the system. It says it is usually easier and cheaper to be smart about current water uses than to build big new projects.
In arid areas like the U.S. Southwest, middle-class households use as much as three-quarters of their water on the lawn.
Exactly that conflict occurred in Israel when water authorities adopted soft-path methods in the 1980s and 1990s. In addition to mandating wastewater recycling, regulators successfully pushed farmers to stop growing cotton, a water-intensive crop. They mandated low-volume showers and dual-flush toilets (one button for big loads, one for small). They raised water prices. They launched water-education programs in schools that taught children to value water—classroom posters exhorted children “not to waste a drop.” (“If my shower goes too long, my kids yell, ‘Dad! You’re draining the Sea of Galilee!’ ” Noam Weisbrod of Israel’s Zuckerman Institute for Water Research told me.) Utilities fought leaks by equipping every meter with a cell phone that reported unusual flows.
Notably, Israel provided incentives for farmers to switch to drip irrigation, in which pipes with tiny holes provide small, precisely adjusted flows of water. Ideally, drip irrigation provides water at just the rate at which it can be absorbed by plant roots. Invented by the Israeli engineer Simcha Blass, it can use half or less of the water used in ordinary irrigation to nourish the same number of plants.
Political scarcity referred to the likelihood that some of Israel’s water would be seized by its hostile Arab neighbors. These neighbors had objected vehemently to the National Water Carrier, which they viewed as an illegitimate regime’s scheme to steal the region’s water.
Meanwhile, Jordan, Israel, and the Palestinians announced in 2013 a vast project to link the Red Sea to the Dead Sea. For its first phase, to be completed in 2021, a desalination plant on Jordan’s Red Sea shore would provide water to southern Israel and the Palestinian territories. In a swap, Israel would send desalinated water from its Mediterranean facilities to Amman, the water-short Jordanian capital.
Few of the inhabitants seemed to have electricity; only a handful of lights were visible in the darkness. Fifteen years later I returned to the same spot and saw a city almost twice the size of Chicago. Its light covered the stars.
Water has a poorer record. Cairo, Buenos Aires, and San Antonio; Dhaka, Istanbul, and Port-au-Prince; Miami, Manila, Monrovia, Mumbai, and Mexico City—all have greatly expanded, and all have failed to keep up with the demand for clean, plentiful water.
But cost and technical difficulty are not the primary reason so many modern cities have been unable to provide water to their inhabitants. Again and again, the biggest obstacle has been what social scientists call governmentality and what everybody else calls corruption, inefficiency, incompetence, and indifference.
So much of India’s urban water supply is contaminated that the lost productivity from the resultant disease costs fully 5 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product.
The Mountain Aquifer that straddles the border between Israel and the Palestinian territories is the most important source of groundwater for cities in both nations. In an atypical act of collaboration, both societies are polluting it.
Out of the morass emerged Veolia, the biggest private water-service operator in the world. It runs water systems in nineteen nations, including China.
Many of the world’s water problems arise because the sacred aura around water induces governments to treat it “as common property—it’s free to use, no matter what you do with it and how much you use.” In consequence, huge quantities are wasted. Equally bad, the fact that water is free means that governments can’t recoup the cost of extending water networks—so they don’t. Utilities don’t fix leaky pipes for the same reason. All over the world, Briscoe said, “you have these hugely underfunded, very inefficient services producing very bad service.”
In a few hours of wandering around Towel Factory Square I found half a dozen men and women who were paying a quarter or more of their income just for water.
About 3.5 percent of the weight of seawater consists of dissolved salts, most of it table salt. The most common way of removing the salt is known as “reverse osmosis.” Simple in principle but complex in practice, reverse osmosis involves forcing seawater through a membrane with extremely fine holes—so fine that they allow water molecules to pass through but block the slightly larger salt molecules. One sort of complexity stems from the need to make membranes that are both strong enough to withstand continual pressure but fine enough to allow water to pass through. Another stems from the cost of fueling the motors that pump millions of gallons through the membrane.
Today more than eighteen thousand desalination plants are operating around the world. The field is growing—but it is also contentious. Some of the biggest disputes are in California.
Prophets instead point to water recycling, stormwater capture, lawn and garden watering rules, leak tracking, graywater reuse, appliance- and fixture-efficiency standards, well controls (drilling is almost unregulated, leading to groundwater depletion)—an array of small-scale changes that mostly involve nudging people and businesses to change their habits and become more efficient. Encapsulating this approach is the mantra of the Three R’s: reduce, reuse, and recycle.
Most of the almonds in the United States, for example, are grown by about four hundred large operations in the San Joaquin Valley, which use about 10 percent of the state’s water supply.
Meanwhile, more water is used to grow alfalfa than is consumed by all the households in California.
In every direction the landscape was stripped of trees to build oil silos, oil barrels, oil roads—and a new oil city, population fifteen thousand.
Seizing the opportunity, an inventor developed a wheeled firefighting dredge that scooped up mud, hundreds of pounds at a time, and catapulted it into the flames. While demonstrating his invention at a fire, its creator fell into the machine and was thrown into the blaze.
Fossil fuels are ancient light.
In these smashed jungles and seabeds, glossy and black, solar energy waited, frozen in time, ready to be tapped.
The impact of fossil fuels exhausts hyperbole. Energy has any number of sources (solar, wind, hydroelectric, geothermal), but for all of the modern era the overwhelming majority has been derived from fossil fuels (coal, oil, natural gas), and it was fossil fuels that transformed daily existence. Take any variable of human well-being—longevity, nutrition, income, mortality, overall population—and draw a graph of its value over time. In almost every case it skitters along at a low level for thousands of years, then rises abruptly in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as humans learn to wield the trapped solar power in coal, oil, and natural gas. “The average person in the world of 1800 was no better off than the average person of 100,000 B.C.,” writes the economic historian Gregory Clark of the University of California at Davis. “Indeed in 1800 the bulk of the world’s population was poorer than their distant ancestors.” The Industrial Revolution, driven by fossil fuels, changed that, possibly until the end of days.
But Monticello was so frigid in winter (12°F indoors!) that Jefferson’s ink froze in his inkwell, preventing him from writing to complain about the cold.
One of the first and most enduring products of the age of fossil fuels was the fear that the age would rapidly end.
In economic terms, as I said in the last chapter, food and water can be thought of as a flow—or, more precisely, a critical-zone flow, a current with a volume that must be maintained. By contrast, fossil fuels are like a stock, a fixed amount of a good.
Fear of running out has been a malign presence for more than a century, driving imperialist forays, stoking hatred among nations, fueling war and rebellion. It has cost countless lives. Equally problematic, peak oil helped establish a set of wholly mistaken beliefs about natural systems—beliefs that have repeatedly impeded environmental progress. It laid out a narrative that has led activists astray for years. Far too often, we have been told that the future will be wracked by crises of energy scarcity, when the problems our children will face will be due to its abundance.
In what is now called the “Jevons paradox,” he reasoned that improvements in efficiency would reduce the cost of energy from coal. Lower cost would encourage people to use more, draining Britain’s reserves faster.
Coups and attempted coups in Iran, Venezuela, and Nigeria; oil shocks in 1973 and 1979; failed programs for “energy independence”; wars in Iraq, Kuwait, and Syria—this cancerous relationship, a mix of wrath and dependence, has continued with little change for nine decades. Driven by the recurrent panic of peak oil, it sometimes seems as fundamental to the structure of global relations as the law of gravitation is to the rotation of Earth around the sun.
Historians used to call the European era after the fall of Rome the Dark Ages. Now we know that scholarship and the arts continued and flourished. Still, use of the sun nearly ceased. Rich people stopped placing glass windows on the south side of their villas and mansions; poor people didn’t orient their shacks to take advantage of sunlight. (In this respect the Dark Ages actually were dark.)
But Mouchot was the first to use sunlight and mirrors to boil water and then employ the steam to drive engines.
Tomorrow, he avowed, would be as clean and luminous as sunlight itself. It would be a world without smokestacks or toxic furnaces or lightless coal mines. Buoyed on a refulgent tide of free solar power, communities everywhere would provide themselves with heat and light from millions of local solar engines. A new era of universal prosperity!—all from harnessing the inexhaustible light of the sun.
Half genius, half fraud, Winsor helped create an institution so fundamental to modern life that it is almost invisible: the power utility.
A font of blarney, bunk, and braggadocio, Winsor constantly fell out with his partners and was so careless with money that at the moment of his greatest success he had to flee abroad to escape his creditors. Nonetheless, he changed the world.
Because energy is critical to modern life, these utilities, as we now call them, became so politically important that many governments seized them as essential tools of the state; other nations contented themselves with heavy regulation.
By contrast, Father Himalaya’s first solar engine, which avoided both problems, generated temperatures hot enough to melt iron. Indeed, its very effectiveness was a problem. His second prototype, incorrectly operated by an assistant, melted itself down before a delighted mob.
Hubbert was a poor boy from central Texas who scrabbled his way to the top. Even before he finished his dissertation he was invited to lead Columbia’s new geophysics program. These early accomplishments, real and impressive, gave Hubbert an equally real and impressive estimation of his own abilities. He came to believe that he was destined to exert an impact upon society. In this he was wholly successful. Hubbert, one of the nation’s most important petroleum scientists, built much of the intellectual framework for the environmental movement. He was a Wizard who became a Prophet.
They were rushing toward inevitable disaster—after which they would be replaced, thank Heaven, by an elite corps of eco-engineering mandarins with the technical know-how to “operate the entire physical equipment of the North American Continent.”
In a fit of pique, McKelvey snatched away Hubbert’s secretary, a low blow in the pre-computer era.
During the 1973 Arab-Israeli war, several Arab nations decided to slap the United States for supporting Israel. They cut oil production for four months. Huge public alarm ensued. Passions boiled over as people waited for hours in gas lines; line-jumpers got into fistfights. To Hubbert, the oil shocks presaged “the end of the Oil Age.” Today most historians and economists instead view the oil shock as a product of mistaken government policies.
Graph after graph depicted a Hubbertian race to a peak of production, followed by a ruinous decline. Like Hubbert, the Limits writers saw a direct connection between economic growth and calamity.
Notably, his administration sought to offset the approaching decline of oil and gas by tripling the use of coal, a much dirtier fuel.
If a company’s engineers develop new equipment that can pump out more petroleum at a lower cost, the effective size of the reservoir increases. Not the actual size—its physical dimensions—but the effective size, the amount of oil and gas that can be extracted in the foreseeable future.
An oil reservoir in the earth is a stock. If it becomes too costly or difficult to extract, people will either find new reservoirs, new techniques to extract more from old reservoirs, or new methods to use less to accomplish the same goal. All of this means that the situation constantly changes, which in turn means that we can see only a limited distance ahead.
“It is commonly asked, when will the world’s supply of oil be exhausted?” wrote the MIT economist Morris Adelman. “The best one-word answer: never.” On its face, this seems ridiculous—how could a finite stock be inexhaustible, when a constantly renewed flow can run out? But more than a century of experience has shown it to be true. As a practical matter, we know only that there is more than enough for the foreseeable future. That is, fossil-fuel supplies have no known bounds. In strict technical terms, this means they are infinite. Hardly anyone who is not an economist believes this, though.
The photoelectric effect occurred when these particles of light slammed into atoms and knocked free some of their electrons. In Fritts’s panels, photons from sunlight ejected electrons from the thin layer of selenium into the copper. The copper acted like a wire and transmitted the stream of electrons: an electric current.
Sun power’s image as the province of baling-wire hippies was at odds with reality. Today’s multibillion-dollar photovoltaic industry owes its existence mainly to the Pentagon and Big Oil.
Why did Big Oil keep investing in a technology with such a slow potential payoff? One reason was a new wave of peak-oil anxieties. After
an Ozymandiac installation
Exact figures are hard to nail down, but in many places the cost of building a big solar plant is now equivalent to the cost of building a big coal plant, and in all likelihood photovoltaic prices will continue to fall.
To provide electricity at night, energy generated in daylight must be stored in some form for later use, a practice called “load-shifting.”
If nations switched over wholly to renewable energy, Chu said, they would have to come up with mechanisms to supply entire regions with power during long periods of cloudy or still weather. Engineers, he said, have barely begun working on this challenge. A century and a half after Mouchot, the problems he identified with solar energy remain unsolved.
Strikingly, Crescent Dunes has been fought by Prophets. As a rule, renewable-energy leaders see their goal as building giant, centralized facilities like Crescent Dunes—they are Borlaugians through and through, hard-path advocates in solar guise. But many or most renewable-energy supporters are Prophets who view Big Solar and Big Wind with almost as much distaste as the Big Coal and Big Oil they seek to replace.
Most objectionable, to Prophets, are these projects’ scale. Some complaints, to be sure, are linked to the selfish unwillingness to sacrifice anything for the common good encapsulated in the slogan NIMBY—Not In My Back Yard. But others are rooted in a respect for limits. Prophets see the mile-long stands of photovoltaic cells in projects like Charanka as inherently destructive to communities, natural and human. Industrial giantism is the problem, in their view, not the solution. True to Ericsson’s original vision, they argue instead for smaller-scale, networked energy generation: rooftop photovoltaic panels, air-source heat pumps, biological fuel cells, solar air heating, methane generated by agricultural or municipal waste, and so on.
His constant chill may account for his interest in the physical question of how heat spreads,
In school he contracted the science virus. The infection worsened in adulthood until he quit his surveying job at twenty-eight and moved to Germany to study physics at the prestigious University of Marburg. There he acquired a new disease: mountain climbing.
Tyndall paid next to no attention to carbon dioxide, because so little of it was in the air. At the time, carbon dioxide comprised about .03 percent of the atmosphere by volume (the level has risen slightly since then). If somebody collected ten thousand scuba tanks of air, the carbon dioxide in them would be enough to fill up three tanks. It was hard to credit that anything so tiny could be important—as if a child’s toy bulldozer could knock down a skyscraper. Carbon dioxide, Tyndall thought, was too inconsequential to have any real effect.*3
Two mechanisms are responsible for the escape. The first is that the water vapor releases some of its absorbed energy as infrared radiation, and some of that released infrared beams into outer space (it is re-absorbed and re-emitted by water vapor many times along the way, but eventually passes beyond the atmosphere).
The second is that water vapor doesn’t absorb all of Earth’s infrared radiation—it is effectively transparent for certain wavelengths. New measurements, Callendar learned, showed that the most important of these “windows” occurs at wavelengths around 10 micrometers—that is, water vapor lets through light waves that are about ten-millionths of a meter long. Another prominent window occurs at 4 micrometers.
Buoyed by visions of “climatological warfare,” the military funded the computer pioneer John von Neumann’s plan to create the first digital simulation of the atmosphere.
Increasing temperatures would attack the ice in two ways: warmer air would melt it from above, forming pools on the surface, and warming ocean currents would eat at the underside of the sheet, creating large cracks. The pools on the surface could drain through the cracks, widening them and splitting the ice sheet into unstable pieces that would fall apart under their own weight. The remaining chunks, surrounded by warm water and air, would melt quickly, like the ice cubes in a cocktail. If the two men were correct, melting Antarctic ice could by itself raise the world’s oceans more than three feet by 2100, enough to swamp Miami, Tokyo, Mumbai, New Orleans, and many other cities. By 2500 the rise could be as much as fifty feet.
Quite possibly every person who reads this book will be dead before they occur, as will most of their children. How many governments make plans for such long-term contingencies? How many families do?
Chichilnisky, a major figure in the IPCC, has argued that this kind of thinking about discount rates is not only ridiculous but immoral; it exalts a “dictatorship of the present” over the future.
Climate change is all of these and more: gradual, impalpable, world-altering, multigenerational, a situation that will not become readily tangible until irreversible lines already have been crossed. “It is not the sort of problem that Mother Nature raised us to solve or even notice,” Jamieson, the philosopher, has written.
If small changes in initial conditions could have enormous long-term effects, he said in a summary speech, then perhaps tiny rises and falls in atmospheric carbon dioxide could “ ‘flip’ the atmospheric circulation from one state to another.”
Using a similar model, the three men tested its predictions against the results of an actual volcano: the 1963 eruption of Mount Agung in Bali, which killed more than a thousand people and shot enough junk into the air to have a measurable effect on the climate. The predictions of the model matched events closely enough that Hansen and his colleagues were able to sort out the relative contributions of aerosol cooling and carbon dioxide warming.
More important, scientific research took off. Before 1988 peer-reviewed journals had never published more than a score of articles in a given year that contained the terms “climate change” or “global warming.” After 1988 the figure climbed: 55 in 1989; 138 in 1990; 348 in 1991. By 2000: 1,340. In 2015 it was 16,576.
The Clean Air Act of that year, which set up U.S. emissions regulations, was one of the world’s first general air-quality laws, more stringent and comprehensive than any of its predecessors. Congress passed it overwhelmingly: 73–0 in the Senate, 374–1 in the House of Representatives.
With little dissent, Washington passed twenty-one major environmental bills, one after another, in the 1970s.
Arrhenius tried to figure out what would happen to global average temperatures if atmospheric carbon dioxide levels doubled, a measure of what today is known as “climate sensitivity.”
Four decades of additional research has not brought us closer to predicting the precise impact of dumping carbon dioxide into the air.
Designer anti-pollution face masks are increasingly common in great conurbations like Shanghai and Guangzhou.
Outdoor air pollution in China, most of it from coal, contributes to about 1.2 million premature deaths per year, according to a major scientific study involving almost five hundred scientists in more than fifty nations. A Chinese-U.S.-Israeli research team has estimated that eliminating coal pollution in northern China would raise average life expectancy there by more than five years.
India’s outdoor air pollution causes 645,000 premature deaths a year, according to a 2015 Nature study. Even in the United States, which uses less coal than other big nations, coal pollution leads to as many as 25,000 deaths per year.
Humans produce four main types of climate-altering gases: carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, and a bunch of fluorine-containing gases (these have names like hydrofluorocarbons, perfluorocarbons, and sulfur hexafluoride).
About 85 percent of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions come from fossil fuels, and about 80 percent of those come from just two sources: coal (46 percent) in its various forms, including anthracite and lignite; and petroleum (33 percent) in its various forms, including oil, gasoline, and propane.
Reducing global coal emissions, by contrast, means dealing with 3,300 big coal-fired power plants and several thousand big coal-driven steel and cement factories.*10 The task is huge, but it is at least imaginable—and it targets almost half of the world’s emissions at a stroke.
coal plants release a fine soot that researchers call “black carbon.” Black-carbon aerosols rise high into the air; because they are black, sunlight heats them, which in turn heats the air around them. The particles interact with clouds, augmenting their ability to trap heat. The soot lands on glaciers, covering them with a thin black film. Rather than reflecting sunlight, smoky ice absorbs it and melts.
Cleaning up coal is the province of Wizards, who extol a technology known as “carbon capture and storage,” or CCS. Conceptually speaking, CCS is simple: industries burn as much coal as before, but remove the pollutants. Already they filter out toxic gases. Now they extract carbon dioxide and pump it underground, where it is stored for eons.
Constantly boiling a silo’s worth of toxic chemicals in a stripper requires a great deal of energy. Common estimates are that this kind of carbon capture will gobble 10 to 15 percent of a power plant’s output. Given that even the most efficient coal plants translate less than 50 percent of the energy in coal into electricity, deploying CCS means that power plants will consume 20 to 30 percent more of the black stuff—at minimum.
Wizards argue that putting CCS in coal plants drives up construction costs to the point where a new nuclear plant and a new coal plant have about the same price tag.
Reliability is measured by “capacity factor,” the fraction of the time that the power plant is actually sending out electricity at its maximum rate.
Cheapness refers to the price for a kilowatt-hour of electricity.
Safety usually is measured by the number of deaths in the “energy chain”—that is, how many people are killed by the entire cycle, from exploration and mining to refining and transportation to actual power generation, as well as waste treatment and disposal.
Brand cites the example of France, which constructed “fifty-six reactors providing nearly all of the nation’s electricity in just twelve years.” Nuclear power provides about 77 percent of French electricity, a far greater proportion than in any other nation.
They just don’t see solar and wind power as playing a major role in the human comedy—not
More distressing still, several thousand coal mines have caught fire in Australia, Britain, China, India, Indonesia, New Zealand, Russia, South Africa, and the United States; many have been burning for decades, some for centuries. An infamous example is the Jharia coalfield, in the northeastern Indian state of Jharkand. Covering 170 square miles, Jharia is India’s main reservoir of coking coal, the hard coal used to make steel. It has been on fire, calamitously, since 1916; entire villages have disappeared into the smoking ground. Undermined railroad lines have fallen into the earth, followed by farms and streams. When I visited the region, toxic fumes shimmered in the air. Issuing from cracks in the earth, they wreathed the ruined buildings and black, leafless trees. In the evening, patches of smoldering red were visible, scattered like watching eyes across the charred landscape: Mordor without the Orcs. Centralia, Pennsylvania; Greenwood Springs, Colorado; Barnsley, Yorkshire; Wuda, Inner Mongolia; East Kalimantan, Indonesia—Prophets look at these smoldering places and see an insult to the future.
Nuclear plants produce several types of waste, of which the most dangerous is “high-level” waste. Mostly spent reactor fuel and by-products from the reprocessing of spent fuel, it accounts for more than 99 percent of the radioactivity produced by nuclear waste—the
Most of all, Vogtians see waste deposits, even if contained, as no-go areas that will endure for what is in human terms an eternity. Leaving such noxious gifts to future generations is a moral calamity.
The most detailed roadmaps to this kind of future have been issued by research teams led by Mark Z. Jacobson and Mark A. Delucchi, engineers at, respectively, Stanford University and the University of California at Berkeley. In a long study published in 2015, Jacobson, Delucchi, and eight other researchers laid out a path for taking the United States entirely to wind, water, and solar power by 2050.
To Vaclav Smil, the University of Manitoba environmental scientist, the intractability of the quarrel reflects the fact that both Wizards and Prophets are fooling themselves. “Energy transitions are always slow,” he told me by email. Modern energy infrastructures, assembled over decades, cannot be revamped overnight. In every nation, modern electricity grids took decades to assemble. Disassembling and replacing them quickly enough to avoid the worst impacts of climate change would be an unprecedented challenge for societies that are still rapidly increasing their energy use. Worse still, in his view, there is little public appetite for beginning the process, or even appreciating the magnitude of what lies ahead. “The world has been running into fossil fuels, not away from them.”
Pinatubo offset that 1°F of warming with about 20 million tons of sulfur dioxide. Doing the arithmetic again, sulfur dioxide is, molecule by molecule, more than thirty thousand times more effective at lowering temperatures than carbon dioxide is at raising them.
The greatest danger posed by planet-hacking comes from its greatest virtue: its low cost. Wagner and Weitzman, the economists, call it a “free-driver” problem; driving the car is so cheap, anyone can take it for a spin. Spraying sulfur is cheap and easy enough that a single rogue nation could reengineer the planet by itself.
The Carboniferous, one recalls, was the period in which large land plants emerged: lepidodendrons, horsetails, giant ferns, and a host of other now-vanished species. Forests grew in such proliferation that they sucked huge amounts of carbon from the air. Average temperatures fell from 75°–85°F to something like 50°F, lower than today’s average of 55°–60°F—low enough to set off not one but two ice ages, killing huge numbers of plants and setting in motion the creation of coal.
With little or no support or direction from governments or aid agencies, local farmers used picks and shovels to reforest more than forty thousand square miles, an area the size of Virginia.
Charcoal, properly manufactured and deployed, can dramatically improve bad farmland.
Yellowstone and Yosemite were turned into parks by expelling people who had been there for centuries.
“green blob”—would go on to lead campaigns against pollution, awaken the world to threats of extinction, acquire and set aside huge tracts of land, and play a prominent role in the sterilization of millions of women, under varying degrees of compulsion.
Truman’s Point Four, the historian Thomas Jundt has written, “was the opening salvo in the U.S. postwar mission to modernize former colonies through intensive economic and technological development.” Researchers, private groups, and federal officials would join hands to reshape the new nations into affluent Western-style democracies. “The goal was humanitarian—to improve the standard of living” in poor places.
Point Four’s promise of science-driven development was electrifying. India, Pakistan, Egypt, Ghana, Brazil, Mexico—all embraced rapid economic growth as a national goal.
orbited by a Kuiper belt of several thousand U.N. staff, journalists, minor diplomats, minions and toadies of all sorts, and security personnel.
Among the few commonalities was that everyone seemed to have read Road to Survival.
Moore folded himself some test cups, origami-style. They looked so good he quit Harvard.
she was fluent enough in Bird to join the give-and-take.
Becoming a campaigner for birth control—a term she invented—she published (illegal) birth-control pamphlets, delivered (illegal) birth-control speeches, and, in 1916, opened an (illegal) birth-control clinic, the first in the United States.
Her opponents ranged from the Roman Catholic Church to the Indian Communist Party.
In a mix of calculation and enthusiasm Sanger allied with anyone who offered to help her, supporting at one time or another anarchists, socialists, labor activists, race purifiers, conservationists, and Wall Street bluebloods. At various times she espoused racist sentiments that seem appalling today. Historians disagree on whether she truly embraced these ideas or was merely mouthing them to ingratiate herself with powerful people who would serve her larger cause.
many of her male allies didn’t believe that women were competent enough to use a pill if one existed.
Nobody in PPFA, she wrote to Sanger, “is really concerned over achieving an oral contraceptive. It is to me vague and puzzling—really mystifying.”
Contraceptive research being illegal in much of the United States, the work was conducted in secret.
He was still shouting from the stage, but the audience wasn’t there. Why wouldn’t they listen? The ecology was so clear, the implications so unavoidable. It was bewildering to Vogt.
The results of the campaigns were ghastly. Millions of women were sterilized, often coercively, sometimes illegally, frequently in unsafe conditions, in Mexico, Bolivia, Peru, Indonesia, Bangladesh, and, especially, India.
In the 1970s and 1980s the Indian government, then led by Indira Gandhi and her son Sanjay, embraced policies that in many states required sterilization for men and women to obtain water, electricity, ration cards, medical care, and pay raises.
Vogt was not responsible for these cruelties—he died before they began, and in any case was no longer in a position of influence. But his intellectual guilt is heavy.
But the crowding that gave him, ever after, “the feel of overpopulation” had little to do with birth rates and natural resources and density of numbers and much to do with laws and institutions and government plans. “If you want to understand Delhi’s growth,” Narain said, “you should study economics and sociology, not ecology and population biology.”*5
As a whole, U.S. forests are bigger and healthier than they were in 1900, when the country had fewer than 100 million people. Many New England states have as many trees as they had in the days of Paul Revere. Nor was this growth restricted to North America: Europe’s forest resources increased by about 40 percent from 1970 to 2015, a time in which its population grew from 462 million to 743 million.
When I asked why, he became exasperated with my stupidity. “Look, the basic facts are obvious,” he said. “You can’t keep growing forever on a finite planet—there are limits.” But the exact relations among economic growth, environmental destruction, and planetary limits no longer seemed so obvious to me.
Danes eat so much meat and drive so many automobiles that in 2014 the Worldwide Fund for Nature claimed that Denmark had the fourth-biggest “ecological footprint” in the world. The main cause was the huge amounts of animal feed grown to support the Danish pork industry. To feed its meat habit, Denmark used more farmland per capita than anywhere else.
How many people? is an important question, but it is less important than What are those people doing?
But the contribution of population growth to them is indirect, and the relationship to economic growth is equivocal. Focusing on them as a root cause, as Vogt did, is a distraction. It was a waste of two decades, and doubly unfortunate because the fight over population sometimes shrouded the more important part of Vogt’s message, the part about limits.
No food shipments occurred. About 3 million people starved to death.
Fingerspitzengefühl—“knowledge of the fingertips”—an
lacuna
But unlike Borlaug, Nehru and his ministers believed that the poor harvests were due not to lack of technology—artificial fertilizer, irrigated water, and high-yield seeds—but to social factors like inefficient management, misallocation of land, lack of education, rigid application of the caste system, and financial speculation (large property owners were supposedly hoarding their wheat and rice until they could get better prices).
The researchers blasted wheat kernels with gamma rays for several hours, hoping that the gamma rays would tear into the DNA in the seeds and induce favorable mutations. In twenty-first-century terms, this was like trying to perform surgery with a chainsaw—a hopelessly crude procedure. In mid-twentieth-century terms, it was the most advanced method available.
His language was so nakedly desperate that the foreign ministry initially refused to send the letter to the White House.
So politically toxic was the loss that the official report on the war was kept secret for decades;
Borlaug reserved special disdain for Indian wheat breeders, who were focusing on “beauty of grain…rather than total yield.”
so little fertilizer was imported that aid officials liked to say that India was not overpopulated—it was underfertilized.
farmers—literally snatching bread from their mouths.
The results were remarkable. Indian farmers typically reaped less than half a ton per acre. The four Mexican varieties yielded a per-acre average of about a ton and a half, and some plots came in at almost two tons.
contretemps
The operation was successful in that it prevented widespread death. It was unsuccessful in preventing sickness and misery.
Hard by the social costs were the environmental costs. The intensive fertilization mandated by the Green Revolution has heavily contributed to nitrogen problems on land and water. Pesticides have wreaked havoc on agricultural ecosystems and sometimes poisoned sources of drinking water. Poorly constructed and managed irrigation systems have drained aquifers. Soils have become waterlogged or, worse, loaded with salts when irrigation water evaporated. Possibly most worrisome, the energy costs of agriculture, mainly from making fertilizer, have soared. Industrial-style Borlaugian agriculture is a significant contributor to air pollution and climate change.
vituperative.
When Borlaug spoke at conferences, students sometimes booed.
Critics, he said, never wanted to answer the counterfactual question: Where would the world be today if we had the same growth in population and affluence but none of the yield increases of the Green Revolution?
He asked me if I had ever been to a place where most of the people weren’t getting enough to eat. “Not just poor, but actually hungry all the time,” he said. I told him that I hadn’t been to such a place. “That’s the point,” he said. “When I was getting started, you couldn’t avoid them.”
For a Westerner, Iowa-born and -raised, to insist that Indians and Pakistanis make chapati with this strange Mexican wheat was as if a foreigner were demanding that French people make baguettes from pumpernickel.
Without telling anyone at Rockefeller, they began irradiating the Sonora wheat at the particle accelerator in Mumbai in November 1963, three months before the meeting in Pakistan. Nothing happened the first year. The second year, Swaminathan got lucky. The color of wheat bran, we now know, is mainly controlled by four genes that are in turn switched on or off by a single gene known as R. By chance, the gamma rays passing through the seeds disabled some aspect of this mechanism; the bran color in the next, mutated generation was amber. Miraculously, its yield seemed to be unaffected.
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.
But what was left out was the color of the bran, the texture of the grain, the pleasure of having several different types of flour, or, more important still, the relationship of the farmers to their land, and to each other, and the structure of power in a community or a nation. And then there was the omnipresence of greed. Borlaug was like a physicist who figures out how something should work on an idealized frictionless plane and then is startled when it doesn’t function in the same way in the real world of hills and valleys.
A poor boy who had never been able to finish his university degree, Huxley had risen to a full professorship through ambition, brilliance, and dogged work.
Prickly and quick to take offense, he enjoyed a good, vicious fight with plenty of character assassination.
If natural selection directs the course of life and people are part of life, Wilberforce wrote in his review, the clear implication is that “the principle of natural selection [applies] to MAN himself.” (Note
Homo sapiens has an inner flame of creativity and intelligence that allows it to burn down barriers that would trap any other species. Or, more succinctly: human beings are not wholly controlled by the natural processes that control all other creatures. We are not simply another species.
the bishop was effectively asking whether Huxley was prepared to affirm that he and all other people were prisoners of biology.
Wizards and Prophets each have a separate blueprint for the future. But both assume that Wilberforce, not Huxley, was correct—that human beings are special creatures who can escape the fate of other successful species.
Serpentine soils occur usually in isolated patches with relatively defined borders—natural petri dishes, one might say. The lily reproduces slowly enough that it never overwhelms its environment. It never hits the edge of the petri dish.
In 1860, slaves were the single most valuable economic asset in the United States, collectively worth more than $3 billion, an eye-popping sum at a time when the U.S. gross national product was less than $5 billion.
Yet despite the institution’s great economic value, part of the United States set out to destroy it, wrecking much of the national economy and killing half a million citizens along the way.
Like stars winking out at the approach of dawn, cultures across the globe removed themselves from the previously universal exchange of human cargo.
Look at early modern Europe, where war followed upon war so fast that historians bundle them into catch-all titles like the Hundred Years’ War or the even more destructive Thirty Years’ War.
Germany lost a greater percentage of its people to violence in the seventeenth century than in the twentieth, despite the intervening advances in the technology of slaughter, despite being governed for more than a decade by maniacs who systematically murdered millions of their fellow citizens.
There is no permanent victory condition for being human, as the writer Bruce Sterling has remarked.
It would be a reverse Copernican Revolution, showing that humankind is exempt from natural processes that govern all other species. But might we be able to do exactly that? Might Margulis have got this one wrong? Might we indeed be special?
Inevitably, small errors build up. To account for them, the models must be “tuned.” This means manually tweaking the parameters (the change in temperature as altitude changes, say, or the way heat moves in the ocean). The tweaked models are then compared to twentieth-century weather records to see how well they reproduce them. Unfortunately, the models are also supposed to explain those same weather records. The unavoidable risk is that scientists will fool themselves, inadvertently using the tweaks to mask the inaccuracies of a model. It also means that other scientists using the model won’t know whether a specific prediction arises directly from the underlying science (good) or is largely due to tuning (bad). None of this is shady in any way—all large physical models must be tuned. But doing it correctly is a constant worry.
The land sheds organic molecules into the water like a ditchdigger taking a shower.
They discovered that the warming that was pushing up the methane was also pumping nutrients from the seafloor to the surface. The nutrients were feeding huge blooms of phytoplankton. To the scientists’ astonishment, the plankton took in so much carbon dioxide via photosynthesis that they more than canceled out the effects of the methane.
one person’s “wasteful spending” is another person’s “vital government function.”
If, as most economists believe, people tomorrow will be more affluent than people today, the hazard is that we end up valuing tomorrow’s rich more than today’s poor.