By: Lisa Schmidt 

I have been absorbing two books lately. Both of them talk about how humans solve – or don’t solve- problems.

The Wizard and the Prophet, written in 2018 by Charles Mann, compares Norman Borlaug’s wizard philosophy that humans can solve all of the problems of the world with technology to William Vogt’s prophet philosophy that if we don’t impose limits on food, water, energy and climate change, and live within those limits, we all will perish.

Borlaug focused on developing wheat varieties that would feed more people. Vogt developed the idea that the limited natural resources of earth can only support so many living beings, whether those beings are birds, bacteria or babies.

Vogt was the first to name these limits carrying capacity. Carrying capacity is easy for ranchers to understand – our pastures only feed so many cattle and sheep. Frankly, I scratch my head when wildlife managers in Yellowstone National Park deny what an overpopulation of bison is doing to the land.

Meanwhile, wizardly technology has fed millions of people across the globe with new varieties of wheat and rice, among other foods.

Vogt assumed humans are one cog of biology, like rats or bacteria. Borlaug assumed humans are separate from other species, with the capacity to analyze and invent. Charles Mann does not advocate for either the Wizard approach or the Prophet approach.

In fact, he acknowledges that both sides point to the immense problems inherent in the others’ solutions. All of those problems boil down to the cost of implementation and the risk that they won’t work. Think about small-scale nuclear energy instead of coal, one single wheat species grown across the globe instead of many species with diverse disease resistance and growth characteristics or mandated population limits as examples of solutions with high potential risk of failure.