Will I love The Wizard and the Prophet?

This wonderful history by the author of 1491 and 1493 tells the story of Norman Borlaug, the “wizard” who believed high-tech, high-yield agriculture could feed the world and prevent the destruction of nature, and William Vogt, the “prophet” who believed our unsustainable growth would doom the planet and ourselves.

Borlaug essentially launched the Green Revolution that has tripled the world’s crop and livestock yields, preventing mass starvation and deforestation. But modern-day enviros point out that it hasn’t prevented all starvation and deforestation, and the ideological battles that Mann recounts are still being fought today.

Here is a double biography that every environmentalist should read. One of its subjects is William Vogt, a grim pessimist who thought the twentieth-century world was blundering toward self-destruction because of human industrial hubris. The other is Norman Borlaug, an optimistic plant scientist whose work with crop hybrids was central to the “green revolution” that massively increased world food supplies and diminished the danger of famine. Mann explains the internal logic of each man’s work, their strengths, and their weaknesses, and compels readers to question their own cherished assumptions about the environment, humanity, and the future.