BOOK REVIEW: The Wizard and The Prophet
The Wizard and the Prophet is a book about two different views of the world, or of a good way of living: scarcity and abundance. The Prophets, characterised by William Vogt, in my view are champions of scarcity — go back to the old ways, stay close to nature, never leave the soil. For much of humanity, we’ve been living this way and what have we to show for it? Malthusian constraints intermittently leavened by plagues and wars.
Human psychology was forged in scarcity, so it is evolutionary. Biology also afforded man, presumably, from the industrial age to think in abundance with the help of science. But Science didn’t happen in one fell swoop, it was a hard slog and a testament to what the human brain is capable of. It was also cummulative. We stand on the shoulders of giants, our ancestors, many of whom left their mark on the world (environment) to make it possible for us to use our brains the way we do today.
Two mindsets
Vogt’s activism was about two things:
1) Environmentalism — humans remoulding the environment
2) Carrying capacity — the ability of the earth to sustain living creatures B — E = C
B biotic potential
E environmental resistance
The debate about carrying capacity has been around in different guises for centuries. What the twentieth-century prophets had to do was add “environment” for a doomsday scenario that hooks the part of the human brain that calls for self-preservation. It is emotive. A dogma for the converted. This idea that the world is at peril and the earth cannot sustain human population as advanced by Paul Ehrlich resulted in the forced sterilisation of women across the world and catastrophically in the one-child policy of Communist China.
The Wizards, characterised by Norman Borlaug, are techno-optimists though not of the sci-fi kind. While the Prophets are driven by fear, Wizards are driven by ingenuity. Borlaug’s ambition to feed Mexico to the extent that it can export wheat to other food short nations was a classic example of big thinking typify by the maxim “a rising tide lifts all boats.”
Scarcity mentality as demostrated by Vogt is the moral inclination to help the visibly poor while neglecting the structural whole. There is no appreciation for complexity and human progress. Abundance mentality is the ability to think big because the spillover will create more where there is less. This is why successful high impact work is humbling, because you know there are chances it could go wrong and what the consequences are.
The “justness” or “unjustness” of what we see is rooted in our moral instinct, but we can’t absolve morality from the actualization of acts that constitutes unjustness. For most of human history, what is just is not transcendental, it’s economic. And the narrative shifts after most have achieved economic mobility. Without knowing it, our morality has been utilitarian while we tend to exaggerate the last mile problem.
The fallacy of dichotomies
This is a story about water, a common yet scarce resource. It started in the Central Valley of California and came into its own in the Middle East.
California’s coastal regions, the Sierra Nevada foothills, and much of the Central Valley has a Mediterranean climate, with warmer, drier weather in the summer and cooler, wetter weather in the winter. Despite being the most productive agricultural region in California which “produces more fruits, vegetables, and nuts than anywhere else in North America”, the Central Valley is prone to seasonal rainfall and drought.
To solve the water problem of the early twentieth century, the state initiated the Central Valley Project by building giant aqueducts, big dams and new reservoirs to capture two-thirds of the run-off in the state. An additional State Water Project was added in the 1960s to “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”. These projects allowed water surplus to the extent Californians can afford their lush porches and farmers saturate their rice paddies.
While the story was of agricultural productivity in California, it was of life and death in the Middle East. The Middle East has had chronic water shortages before the state of Israel. However, with the influx of refugees from Nazi Europe, “Zionist dreamers” of Israel were left with no choice but to build a National Water Carrier for their country. The Carrier is a “network of reservoirs, canals, pumps and irrigation system that runs to southern Israel from the edge of the Sea of Galilee”. Just like in California, it is a shuffling of water from areas of surplus to those of want.
Including the pumps in the Mediterranean that provides 80% of Israel’s drinking water, this is the hard path. The author leaned on the works of the natural-resource economist, David Brooks to categorise water solutions as hard or soft path and tries to fit them into a wizard/prophet dichotomy. This doesn’t map really well.
The soft path describes a process of recycling sewage water for drinking, changing habits, confronting our morals and values, and general sustainability. This is all good, but sewage treatment for domestic use takes time. What are the chances of success when people are in desperate want? The first test of a large scale sewage treatment in Israel took five years of testing into an “experimental pond”. And took over ten years to get the political nod to expand the project. In a situation where people need water for immediate use, this can’t be the responsible solution.
But it can be a solution built on existing solutions. The soft path may even be likened to the lessons Lee Kuan Yew learned to avoid the mistakes of the West in building more enduring systems in Singapore but t is not a prophet way. Because it is not any less difficult to achieve and still require people of the wizard disposition in terms of ambition and scale. Abundance and sustainability is a win-win solution.
The soft path, maybe, speaks to the limit of ambition, the prophet way is the death of ambition.
Common pool problem
Looked at keenly, the story of life is one of abundance. Once upon a time, the earth was choke-full of co2 gases, carboniferous plants emerged to utilise it to produce abundant oxygen. With abundant oxygen came other forms of life that paved the way for us to evolve. Life will always find a way, especially with anything available in abundance.
The writer asked some climate scientists what they see as the biggest uncertainties, the first answers was from the “fact that no computer today can handle calculations that cover the entire surface of the earth and its atmosphere.” The ambiguity over what lies where and the lack of tools to accurately measure an entity that is in constant flux shows that the climate problem is a common pool problem and the struggles of the climate accord bear this out. Going by this logic, it’s clear to me that the solutions will be local: within industries, within nations. We have works like those of Elinor Ostrom to guide us in finding local solutions to common pool problems. Hopefully, these solutions can be scaled globally via bi- or multilateral cooperation.
The book concludes that we don’t know enough to go one way or another. I know enough to put my fate in human ingenuity.
