A new Volvo ad sums up the theme of this book: “There are two types of people in the world: those who fear the future, and those who embrace it.” In Charles Mann’s new book, the Wizards are thinkers who push technological innovation to confront the world’s biggest challenges, while those who fear the future, the Prophets, devote themselves to (in Mann’s words) “decrying the consequences of our heedlessness” in advocating technological solutions, whether they seek to feed the planet’s faceless masses or to deal with climate change.
In Mann’s view, the clash between these two sets of visionaries is epitomized by two men whose legacies are still celebrated in their own circles but who are not so well known to the public. They also happen to be Americans. One is Norman Borlaug, the father of the Green Revolution and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970, who used new agricultural methods to save tens of millions from starvation. The other is William Vogt, one of the founding fathers of modern ecology and a fierce critic of the kind of optimism that motivates Wizards like Borlaug and others whose (in Mann’s paraphrase) “faith in human resourcefulness is unthinking, scientifically ignorant, even driven by greed (because remaining within ecological limits will cut into corporate profits).”
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