Wizards and Prophets, Ecomodernists and Environmentalists
6:26PM Aug 26, +0000
Speakers:
Dr. Chris Keefer
Charles C. Mann
Keywords:
profits
argument
wizards
book
idea
system
energy
people
malthusian
water
interesting
problem
terms
land
population
world
kinds
archetypes
nuclear
agriculture
Hello, everybody, and welcome to the Decouple podcast, where we explore the science and technologies that can Decouple human wellbeing from its ecological impacts, and the politics that can make decoupling possible.
Welcome back to Decouple. Today I'm joined by Charles C. Mann, an American journalist, author and science communicator, his book 1491, new revenue, new revelations of the Americas before Columbus won the National Academies communication award for best book of the year. He's a contributing editor for science, the Atlantic Monthly and wired, and the author of four books, including the wizard and the Prophet, which is what we're going to focus in on today. It's great to have you on the show, Charles? Oh, it's my pleasure to be with you. So Charles, I always get, you know, the accolades and bona fides of my guests out of the way early. But I find that my guests can typically do a far more interesting introduction that I can. So I'd like to get my guests to introduce themselves. But if you could do that, and kind of in the light of maybe exploring the kind of wizard profits, archetype within your own life, in a short time, maybe give me like in two minutes?
Well, I'm a science journalist. And that means basically, I am lucky enough to have the job to find out about cool things that other people were finding about them, tell me tell people about them. I've been covering environmental issues, which I've been very interested in, for, like 30 years, and talking to many, many scientists, activists, politicians, ordinary people about these issues. And over time, I realized that the kind of answers I was hearing to the question, what should we do fell into two broad categories. And for convenience, like I called them wizards and prophets. And basically, this book is cooking for a long time is sort of my attempt to describe the types of solutions to our environmental questions, broadly construed, that people have come up with, and talk about the this conflict between these kind of two different visions of the world of tomorrow. Mm hmm.
No, I definitely noticed that in reading your works, you know, because you're collecting, you know, the individual works, that people that are studying a very precise topic, right, and they dive into it and really delve into it. And you get to come along, and like beads kind of string together this necklace, which is just, it's kind of a beauty to behold. And sometimes I feel bad for the people that are kind of so focused in on their little territory. I'm like, oh, Charles got to have all the fun, like, you got to weave this into a really expensive argument. So
on the other hand, they get to really know what they're talking about. And always,
yeah, I gotta say, your books are very well researched, I feel like you do a lot more than then scrape the bottom of the petri dish. But well, we'll talk about the petri dish in some detail to come now. You know, it's it's funny, the first episode of this podcast actually spent quite a bit of time talking about this concept of wizards and prophets. I found it you know, when I read your book, having this kind of archetypal binary structure, I mean, it's, it's a little simplistic, but it really helped me understand the basis of a lot of, you know, the arguments I might be getting into with people, and it sort of kind of depersonalized the debate a little bit and made it more kind of humane give me more compassion and understanding for my opponents. And indeed, in terms of my own background and upbringing, I've sort of swung from being fairly prophetic to being fairly wizardly. You know, and again, not quite fitting in clearly into these categories as they're kind of defined. But, you know, I was raised in a very, you know, humanistic family had a lot of sort of conservation values growing up in the country and kind of loving the woodlot that I kind of grew up next to and, you know, vowing that I would, you know, fight the developers to the death if they tried to bulldoze my forest. You know, in high school, I was very dismissive of, you know, the kind of tech technical fixes, I had a lot of the anxieties that I think you described within the profits. In university, I saw a lot of kind of Malthusian ism in my biological studies, especially kind of microbiologists, and these kind of petri dish analogies. So, it's been interesting, more recently, you know, learning about climate change, becoming concerned about it, looking for solutions and being very much swayed now into more of a wizardly focus. So, you know, these archetypes have been have been very useful for me, you know, you you center these archetypes around to two figures, Norman Borlaug and, and William vote. Could you you know, just give us a little overview on on these personalities and why you chose them as as the kind of representatives of these archetypes.
Sure, when I talk about, you know, wizards and prophets, as you're saying, it's a superficial way. I like to think about All models are wrong, but some are useful. And I think this is a useful way of describing things. And wizards are basically people who believe that science and technology properly applied can let us produce our way out of our environmental dilemmas. And with that idea comes a whole lot of other sort of ideas about values and what's important and what's not important. And profits, on the other hand, don't believe that they believe that the laws of nature, the laws of ecology, what have you, dictate that there's a system that we have to function within, and that system has limits, and we surpass those limits to our peril. And if you think about it, these kinds of ideas have kind of the opposite of each other. And I wanted to find people who embodied them. And the two people that I found, we're unfortunately, sorry, there's a telephone that rang it, and one was Norman Borlaug. And reason I picked him really was that over the many years have had conversations with researchers who are of that what I call the wizardly. bent, very, very often, I would hear something like I want to do for x, what Norman Borlaug did for wheat. And what he did was through this sort of fantastic amount of hard work was to double or even triple the amount of wheat that you could extract from a single field. And this had enormous impact all over the world. And, you know, he has been credited variously with things like saving a billion lives, that kind of thing, ending hunger, and all this little more complicated than that. But there's no question that he had an enormous impact on the world. And the other is a guy named William Vogt. And he's much less well known of Baroque, after all, won a Nobel Prize vote is the guy who wrote the first modern, we're all going to help if you know what I mean. First, he is the antecedent of Paul Ehrlich who wrote the the population bomb are the people and the limits to growth, or the people who wrote famine, 1975, or Al Gore's books, or, I would argue Bill McKibben, books, all of these stem directly from the ideas that we invoke put together. And his fundamental idea is that the, that there's an ecological concept called carrying capacity, which refers to, you know, when he took it to the amount of, you know, cows that you could put into a field without over, over grazing, or, and he stretched it like taffy to cover the whole world and said, there's only so much human activity that the world can take. And we're exceeding that, and the results will be catastrophic. And this sort of the fundamental idea behind the modern environmental movement, and in sort of happy coincidence that makes writers like myself, very pleased, these two guys met each other, they got their ideas at roughly the same time, in almost exactly the same place. They met each other, they hated each other, they fought, and then they never talked. And I thought, this is exactly what's happened is that these ideas have been colliding without people speaking to each other for decades now.
Yeah, yeah. You know, and it's, sometimes it's kind of easy to see why. And again, having that empathy for sort of having walked in both shoes, in a ways is interesting for me, but you know, of late I've become, I've had a hard time sort of seeing the goodness in the profits, particularly when looking at, again, this this kind of Malthusian ism that permeates the movement, right from vote himself. Could you situate us a little bit because you mentioned the sort of 1950s timescale, you know, and the anxiety around, you know, population explosion, the sort of limits that we were facing at that time, you know, the very real threat of famine that I think had been, you know, quite common in the early 20th century. You know, I just want us to kind of go back to that moment in time. If you paint a little picture of what's happening there. I mean, every generation obsesses and has anxieties, right. And, I mean, you know, there was the fear of nuclear war when the Cuban Missile Crisis that's coming up shortly after this time. I mean, now, we're threatened by climate change. But you take us back to that sort of cultural Zeitgeist of population anxiety.
Yeah, it's a mix of two things. One of which I think is seems perfectly reasonable, at least in retrospect, and the other which is really should make environmentalist profoundly uncomfortable. There is a great fear, beginning in the 1890s, and then growing up until the 1920s and 1930s. By sort of the upper crust that the mob of black and brown people over the world, we're going to come in and sort of wipe out the white race and there is a whole lot of explicitly racist bestsellers that we're about Just this, and there's a real overlap between the people who are worried about this. And the early conservationists, the people who wanted to kind of purify the United States, from, you know, the lower races, and the people who wanted to purify the wilderness by bringing back pristine nature. And so you had a whole lot of kind of biological races, I don't know what to really call them, you know, people were on the one hand doing praiseworthy things like trying to save the bison and trying to create national parks, and on the other hand, fretting tremendously about the ethnic composition of the United States and Europe. And this came into full flower, really, in the 1940s and 1950s, as those nations, you know, in Africa, and Asia, broke off from the various colonial empires, these people felt, embattled, and that there was a huge tide of humanity that was come washing over our shores, and something had to be done about it. And it was absolutely true that the, in, you know, the invention and deployment of antibiotics and better water systems, and a whole host of things had led to a gigantic population rise, particularly in the global south. But there sort of fears understanding of what was causing it, and what if anything to do about it, were really deeply infected by the sort of previous generations fears of, you know, the about the ethnic purity of places like the United States, and these all got tangled up together in the population movement, which enhances somebody like vote, who really, by the standards of the day was not much of a racist, he certainly you can certainly scour the kinds of things that he wrote, and you can find things that were uncomfortable, he was just as hard on, you know, the wealthy white capitalists, he regarded capitalism as equally destructive as you know, the hordes over there. And so what His goal was to introduce birth control, and if necessary, sterilization in practice, what this worked out to was organizations from the developed world, you know, Europe and North America, imposing coercive practices, that killed a lot of people and sterilized a lot of people and did a lot of awful stuff in the 80s 70s 80s, and 90s. In places like India, South Asia, in general, parts of the parts of East Asia, much of Latin America and Africa. And so that's the sort of Malthusian side of this. And on boats parked in environmental movements, Park, it was this belief that this huge number of people would, that the population and environmental damage were inextricably linked. And essentially, the more people, the more mounts the more damage. And I think just as a factual matter, that it's much more complicated than that much. And if you look at it, the kinds of things that they were worrying about,
are really off, not to worry about environmental damage, but you understand that population is the is the cause of it. And I would take very much the task for that. The example I give in the book is I look at this very famous book, the population bomb by Paul Ehrlich, and has this really impressive scene right at the beginning, where the Arabic family is in Delhi, and they take a taxi and somehow they end up in a really poor neighborhood. And there's people everywhere, and there is just, you know, the middle of the night and they're defecating in the streets, it's horrible. And they say, this is our future. But actually, Delhi at the time, had fewer people in Paris. And the reason and nobody's going around saying Paris is right as an example of a dystopian future. And the reason is, people are there is because of government policy, India was trying to industrialize it located a whole bunch of steel and cement and fertilizer factories right in the periphery of Delhi, of Delhi. And it really wanted to attract workers to those. So it brought in huge numbers of people lost complete control of the process. And so this was a completely government made disaster had nothing to do with birth rates or, you know, any of the kinds of things that the sort of more biological phenomenon that the Malthusian trot out. It was a disaster. It's just that those guys completely misinterpreted the cause of it. And I think that's a big weakness of that Malthusian argument. You see it over and over again.
Yeah, yeah, there's there's a really great quote I like from I think he's gonna get this wrong. I think he's either Dutch or Swedish. Hans Rosling. Really great. informatics guy. And he says, you know, human beings have never lived in harmony with nature, we've died in harmony with nature. And certainly, you know, going back to Malthus, his writings, I mean, he was agonizing about the fact that, you know, 40 per 1000 people used to die, and now it was 30 per 1000 every year, and this was gonna lead to that sort of arithmetic versus geometric growth of a population versus food supply. But, you know, something that I think is really interesting, and I don't know if this maps super well over to wizards and profits. But this idea of kind of humanism versus environmentalism, I was, I was talking with a friend of mine, who went to university probably in the 70s, and 80s, no, sorry, would have been 90s. She's about 10 years older than me. And she was saying, you know, the activism of her generation was totally based in humanism, it was, you know, anti racism, anti poverty, anti imperialism, this kind of stuff. And I think we're seeing more and more that, you know, the activism of the youth these days, at least in the developing world is very much around environmentalist concerns now, and there's a bit of a dismissal of, of the human element, or it's not centered in humanism. At the same time, I think, if you bring up, you know, some of the dark underpinnings of you know, the, the man that you call sort of the intellectual kind of godfather of the environmental movement, and his apostles, like, like air, like, you know, if you bring up that kind of dark Malthusian undertone, they would be very quick to kind of deny that. And, you know, lastly, I think there's been this real shift in terms of, you know, he described vocht. And, and the the kind of profits being very caught up in sort of the, the financial elites of the country, the wealthy, the reactionaries, the conservatives, and it's been really interesting to see how, you know, the the politics have changed, and now the profits are sort of in the camp of the left, kind of, and, you know, the wizards are now considered to be in the camp of the right, like, it's, how do you explain that?
I think it has to do, you know, the politics is, you know, shifts back and forth, for all kinds of reasons. But one of the fundamental differences between the two perspectives is what their frame of references for vote and who is basically, is an ornithologist, basically regarded himself as a biologist, the frame of reference is, you know, for well being, you know, what is good? Is the well being of the ecosystem, you know, how rich is it? How thriving is, is it? And that's how you measure things. For other people, the that's, like, nonsensical, you know, they say, how can you apply that kind of value judgment to objects that are outside yourself, so the real measure of well being is how are people doing it, because it's just crazy to say, the more trees, the better off we are, something like that, you know, is a forest better than a meadow, you know, they make that kind of it is complicated. And so, if your measure is human beings, you end up with a really radically different preference for the kind of policies that you you want you want to have, then if your measure is, you know, the world outside you and the, in some sense, the, you know, the health of nature.
You know, I think that's what's kind of interesting, in my reading of the Ecomodernist literature, you know, there's this idea that, you know, population control should never be your goal, it could be a side effect, right. And so there's this idea that if we can, you know, employ specific technologies that have a very low environmental impact, yet can still provide, you know, plentiful material and energy resources, then we can achieve higher rates of development, you know, women can be freed from sort of chattel, domestic labor and get educated and empowered and, you know, have reproductive autonomy, fertility rates will then drop, and we actually see that happening within knowledge. So, you know, there's this idea, I think, within Ecomodernism, that what's good for humans is good for the environment, you know, that there is a kind of upper level of consumption that, you know, where things start to sort of balance out and that really, you know, those upper limits even are quite flexible if we, you know, say move from, you know, chemical energy to atomic energy, for instance, right, where there's just that, like million fold gain and an energy density. But, yeah, I think that is that is interesting that there's this, you know, anyway, there's maybe it's a little bit idealistic, but this hope that, you know, through meeting human goals through being a humanist, you can actually improve the environment and, you know, a lot of profits, I think, sort of, they're nostalgic, they're quite conservative. They harken back to the good old days, maybe kind of pre industrial days. But when you look at places like pre industrial Britain, I mean, they were coppicing all of the woodlands that they kind of hadn't already felled. And, you know, there's large amounts are kind of regeneration of the ecosystem once they shifted from cutting down trees to using coal and obviously coal came with all sorts of its own problems, but it's just interesting, you know, especially when I speak with you know, younger people that are very idealistic. And I think about the younger versions of myself kind of wanting to go back and kind of do permaculture or something, you know, the actual impact on the land of of, you know, agriculture that's not very intensive can be really damaging, you can do more tilling, you need to bring more marginal land under, under tillage, and, you know, potentially actually increase the ecologic damage. It's, it's an interesting paradigm.
Yeah, well, one of the things is that it, there's a, you know, a great deal of, I guess, for lack of a better word, I would call philosophical confusion, it's sort of in shrouds this whole subject, you know, for some Ecomodernist, I'm sure you talk, what their idea is that we should all somehow pack into cities, and then you'd have, you know, huge amounts of unspoiled nature around us where, you know, giant predators can roam around, and so forth. And I'm sure that that's a kind of a caricature, but it's pretty close to vision that you hear a lot. And the other version of it is of a working landscape of landscapes that have been, you know, people have loved and worked with over centuries, you know, the English countryside, you know, huge swaths of West Africa, big chunks of Latin America, or areas where, you know, people have integrated themselves into landscape in a truly, you know, profound, and I think, rather beautiful way, and, you know, it's in sometimes people, you know, have these sort of ideas in their head that one is somehow much better than the other I don't, I don't think it's at all obvious that that either case is stronger than than the the other. And it has more to do with your intuition of what's good. And if there's a thing I was trying to get at, in the book is that a lot of these discussions we have about the future and what kind of world we want to live in, and what kind of path we should follow for environmental dilemmas are often framed in terms of sort of, you know, technical necessities, like, you know, what you need dispatchable nuclear or no, you know, there's the waste problem we need to have, you know, solar, what's really underneath them is sort of deep intuitions about the kind of life we want to lead. I don't think that's bad. I do think it's bad that they're not openly discussed.
Yeah. And I mean, you know, just you talked about kind of working nature, unspoiled nature, and even this whole concept of nature, I think, you know, your, your book 1491. In the Americas, before Columbus, you know, it was a really important ecstasy, certainly, for North Americans, I think South Americans are more aware, because of the imprint of the Incan societies that, you know, pre European, Americas were a very managed landscape, right, that there's no such thing as pristine wilderness anywhere in the world. And it strikes me that you know, your description of the early profits, these kind of conservationists, who wanted this idea of kind of an unspoiled nature, that's now become kind of a wizardly thing where you want to rewild right, and kind of trouble humanity from nature. And I think that's a really interesting tension is something that I struggle with is, you know, again, I still don't label myself as an Ecomodernism Ecomodernist. But thinking about the clumsy ways within which say, the Ecomodernist manifesto rubs up against issues of indigenous rights, for instance.
Yeah, and, you know, if we really wanted to have, you know, to return is, in some sense to what was there before, in a place like California, what you'd be talking about is just a huge amount of fire, you know, Native people were burning, you know, up to an eighth of the state every year, it was an absolutely fantastic amount of burning far more. I mean, it's a much different character than what you have now. Yeah, these giant, uncontrolled wildfires, these were just, you know, huge numbers of much, much smaller fires in the spring and fall as opposed to giant, summer wildfires. But the point is that, that nature existed for 1000s of years. And if anything is a benchmark, it's got to be that. And that is something I think that makes both wizards and prophets a little bit uncomfortable. And so there's another theme I guess, I talked about in the book is that we have all these apprehensions of what we mean by nature. And he actually, the actual historical ecology almost always makes us uncomfortable.
I wanted to touch a little bit more on the ways in which the politics have kind of swapped out in terms of profit sort of becoming part of maybe the new left. And, you know, in my mind, I think that has a lot to do with the way that the the new left has kind of abandoned the working class as sort of its center of organizing where it situates itself as its kind of retreated to the academy into the ivory tower. And in a sense, you know, much of the the new left is actually kind of very much representing an elite within society that's maybe out of touch with those, you know, day to day pocketbook material concerns of, you know, working class people and it's interesting seeing kind of right wing populist now appropriating that language and Not necessarily delivering the goods, but certainly taking that political space back. But, you know, it's something that I find very interesting is that there's this kind of idea of a, like parallel libertarian authoritarian tendency within each group. So, you know, in terms of profits, it seems like they have a very libertarian idea of, you know, decentralized energy solutions, for instance, for climate change, right, everyone should have a solar panel on the roof, and, you know, community on wind, wind turbine over here. And there shouldn't be any sort of technocratic centralized fix. So very libertarian in that regard, but authoritarian, when it comes to we're going to regulate human social economic activities to enforce these limits, right, your shower is only going to be three minutes long, we're going to put a timer on there. And on the wizardly side, it's kind of the opposite, right? There's a real aversion to regulating, you know, social and economic activities. But, you know, there's a tendency towards wanting, you know, mesmer style French nuclear plans, for instance, that can kind of most efficiently deliver, you know, the benefits of a high energy society with, you know, low carbon footprint, etc. And it's, I find that a very kind of fascinating twist on things. Well, I
think that the that they have different ideas about what's authoritarian, I think if you look at the wizards who want to pack everybody into cities, you'll find that they typically are really against neighborhood control. Because the neighborhood control leads inevitably to nimbyism, nimbyism immediately leads to much more lower density housing than they would like and the preservation of, quote unquote, values, which often means, you know, keeping certain types of people out of neighborhoods. And so they would like to, you know, crush, that that kind of thing and have severe regulation that says you can't do this, or you can't do do that. So, while you're in the people in those neighborhoods, I'm sure we'd experienced that as, you know, authoritarian rule. So, you know, you have to be careful in all this that. People typically it's, it's relatively rare to meet somebody who is a thoroughgoing libertarian. Let's put it that way. Yeah. Usually, they they define themselves as in terms of fondness for certain types of regulation, and passionate hatred for other types of regulation.
Yeah. of interest. Interesting. You were talking a little bit sort of the the, the story, one second here, the differences between the kind of technologies that each side kind of favors, and it seems like, you know, profits aren't technophobes. I mean, they're, they're down with some very high tech solar technologies, for instance, but, you know, the, these technologies need to sort of harmonize and stay within natural flows of energy, I guess.
Yeah. And I think even more than that, they see it is within, you know, staying within the limits means staying within more democratic means of control. And so they see, instead of giant, centralized utilities run from huge mega power plants, they would like to have just as you said, you know, neighborhood scale, energy with, you know, me and my neighbors swapping back power back and forth, all of us have their own little battery packs, and maybe a neighborhood windmill, you know, this kind of thing which they would see is, is under our control, and not some utility that's, you know, far away, and it's just essentially views us as, you know, objects to be built. And I think this is also their fundamental beef with the agricultural system is that very much as a result of government policy. You know, that was enacted, kind of in parallel with the technical advances of people like Borlaug, the countryside all over the world, especially in the developed world, but also in the developing world was emptied and put into cities. And that's led to some huge social problems, both here and in Europe. You know, the GLA shown protests over here, all kinds of rural problems with meth addiction, and, you know, you name it. And the result has been that you have these sort of profoundly different apprehensions about what we should do about these things that are tied up in terms of the environmental visions.
Yeah, I think that's that's the issue of agriculture is very interesting, because it points towards that tension there of, you know, Borlaug's work, which, you know, he may have saved and billion people or 3 billion people may be alive today because of his efforts. He got a Nobel Peace Prize for that. But the critics of his work would say that, you know, he because his, his techniques, you know, required, I guess, capital investments that sort of discriminated against small stakeholder farmers. And lead to, like agricultural conglomerates drove people off the land. And I think that harkens back to this idea of kind of the enclosure of the commons. And on the one side that would be seen, as you know, this is, you know, folks like Vandana Shiva or whatever would wouldn't be really calling that I think on the other side, people would say, Yeah, but I mean, agricultural, rural life is drudgery and misery, it's where there's the most sort of backwards, you know, social hierarchies, where women are, you know, the most abused and sort of, you know, again, sort of involved in just kind of chattel labor all day long without opportunities for education or self advancement. It's it's an interesting tension.
It's a very interesting tension. And again, it depends on what kind of values you see. In this, you see it played out today and the fights over GMOs, genetically modified organisms, these were have always been presented as the future of agriculture, right? That's what you know, folks like Rob Fraley, the guy who used to run Monsanto until quite recently, he would always talk about you and give these talks and say, this is how we're going to do it in tomorrow. And if you don't like the agricultural system, seeing a new technology presented as the savior of that thing that you don't like, it's quite natural for you to be against it, right? It's, you know, it's from your point of view, it's like, this guy is coming up, there's a fire, you want to put out the fire and this guy's coming up and saying, hey, I've got a whole gallon of gasoline, let's pour it on there, you would say, No, you're, you'd be an anti gasoline advocate. And so this is, you know, the kind of thing that you see that warlocks technology, though, did not have to be used in that particular way. You could do it have done it a different way. But it worked in concert with existing government policies to try and get with a cold, stagnant rural labor, you know, that should be done in quotes, right? stagnant rural labor, off the farm, and, you know, into factories, so they can make steel and cement and cars, and you know, all the good things for industrial civilization. And it worked. I mean, that happened all over the world, with the extra productivity of agriculture being you know, funneled into into this. And the problem that we're now living with is the aftermath of that success in which you have depopulated rural areas all over the developed world, with lots and lots of really broken communities in them. And so, yes, people are living much better. Yes, were much more productive, but also, yes. So in a funny way, this is one of those arguments where both sides are correct.
Mm hmm. What's interesting is, you know, that kind of organic agro ecology model that's favored by the profits, you know, as a as a population measure. I mean, it's very labor intensive, it kind of requires you to have large families. You know, and I think the wizards would really look at it as just this is a tragedy, like you're condemning people to sort of this drudgery of agricultural labor. I mean, you know, my, let me let me let me give you my answer. dairy farmer. I mean, she's one of the most handy intelligent people I know. You know, she can weld she can birth animals. She's basically a veterinarian. Like, I have an enormous respect for farmers. Certainly, I don't, I don't romanticize it. I mean, this woman sleeps, you know, in little one hour births throughout like her four week lambing season, which she does three or four times a year like she's a, she's a people don't understand, I think in terms of modern people that don't have to use their muscles to gain a living just how hard these these lives are. But yeah, it's in terms of that population issue, and the agro ecology and population control seems like you're, you're holding a contradictory position.
So so but here, the counter argument I'm not trying to give this to you is to say, this is right. But to say, you know, there is a plausible counter argument on this, you say, right now something like 3% of the population, the United States is engaged in agriculture. I think that's about the right figure. In the 1930s, you know, when we started working, it was much more like 30%. So you had a 90% production. Now? Suppose that it was 5%. Okay, that's a huge change in farmland, it also is a huge change in the number of people you need to have jobs. You know, there's a persistent unemployment problem in all these areas. If you one of the certainties about that kind of agro ecological farming is that you need more work workers to do it. And it's it's hard work, but part of the reason it's hard work is that the people who invent farm machinery, you know, the UC Davis's the folks involved in university in Europe, those German guys, the Japanese, all their incentives have been to produce these gigantic, you know, half million dollar combines, right. Yeah. You know, our there. We live in a rural community. It's a farm, you know, quarter mile away They, he wants to mechanize, right, he employs, it's not a large farm, he employs a whole bunch of people, and the weeding and stuff like that is backbreaking, he had to import to get a small scale leader, he had to buy it from Germany. You know, and instantly, his job was much easier. Now, he's never not going to employ more people than, you know, a guy who grows, you know, GMO soy or something like that. But he's one of the, in his our area, he's one of the larger employers, you know, with 20, some 20. Some people, he would like it to be down to 10. And, right, the wheat farmers down down the road, or the potato farmers, they have to, you see what I'm saying? Yeah, make an enormous difference. And the wheat farmers, you know, that's hard work, just as you say, there's lots of people are willing to do it. And so you could buy judicious application technology, where it hasn't been before, there's been, you know, very little work on reducing the labor for smaller, more complex farms, you could do that. And if you apply the same kind of tax incentives you use to help farmers buy more equipment, you can dramatically change the situation if you wanted to, and make it a much more viable system, if that was what you wanted to do.
And I guess I mean, this is gonna sound really kind of flippant and cynical, but maybe if there's a lot of kind of upper class urban, hippie children that want to go out and do that kind of labor.
But there it is. I mean, you know, you know, here in Massachusetts, where I'm from, you know, this school, it's down the road is the University of Massachusetts, I live there because my wife teaches here. And they're an ag school, right there land grant university. And the note their enrollment is dramatically risen in the last 10 or 15 years by people who want to be small farmers, maybe the children of the rich, maybe they're a bunch of Quakers, I don't know who they are, but they're there.
I just to pivot a little bit. You know, the, the argument of the profits is like, okay, you proved us wrong, again, Borlaug, yet, yeah, got another 3 billion people on the planet, you know, you've changed the rules of the game, in terms of the carrying capacity, the walls of the petri dish, you know, somehow you managed to push those a little further away, but we'll be right eventually, right? Like, we're gonna get you eventually, this is all gonna come crashing down. And I think, you know, a lot of the other criticisms of the Green Revolution are sort of the the ecologic damage from say, draining aquifers, polluting, polluting waters, disrupting the nitrogen cycle, you know, the wheel? Oh, absolutely. Yeah, I mean, a little bit for us, so that we, you know, maybe if we have biases, we can understand the critiques a bit better.
Sure. I mean, you know, here, we, you know, I certainly have tried to give it to vote for the sort of population stuff, what, essentially, Borlaug did this, you know, what they call the scientistic approach, you know, where you're, you treat a problem purely as a matter of science. And he, you know, if you read his letters, what he was looked at was purely about increasing production was about, you know, more calories per acre. And so that was all that he was focused on. But agriculture is a human endeavor. And it exists in, you know, a matrix of human institutions. And the thing that he never really understood was that if you can produce three times as much food from, you know, an acre of land, that land is three times more valuable, right? And it becomes, it becomes worth stealing. And that's essentially what happened all over the world, particularly in places with poor proper, poorly enforced property rights. And so there are real cases, there's a, you know, in places like Bangladesh, where these kind of improvements to the land were actively resisted by farmers who feared that once that they were installed, their land would be taken from them, and it happened. So what, you know, the prophets, I think, are correct in saying is that the consequences to the whole in terms of increased food supply? were genuine and important, but the consequences to huge numbers of rural people were also negative at the same time. And, you know, there's a kind of reluctance, I think, among the wizards often to say, yes, these these things, these bad things did happen that hundreds of millions of rural people all over the world, the poorest and most luckless people were displaced, rather brutally. And you see that in you know, like, Those rohinton mystery novels, which are basically all about that, you know, find balance and so forth. And so that's a very real problem. And the problems we're now having in rural United States, the rural Europe, the giant farmer protests that you're seeing now in India, which are taking place right now, as we speak. All are in some respects, you know, owed to the Green Revolution. And I think the prophets are quite right when they point to them.
Yeah, that's interesting. Yeah, I was I was looking at him just trying to get a sense of various attitudes towards Borlaug. And I mean, it's it really runs the spectrum. And usually, they're very strongly held positions on either end, you know, people seeing him as an absolute Savior. And I mean, this guy, you have some beautiful anecdotes in your book. You know, when he was at the research station in Mexico, I forget the one in the south or in the north, he, you know, he shackled himself to the yoke to plow the land at first because he couldn't, he didn't, it wasn't well enough funded to have a tractor until like, I think a local farmer took pity on him. And he what he cross pollinated, just like it must have been just absolute drudgery, cross pollinating these wheat varieties, right?
Oh, my god, it was, you know, reading about it, I, my back was aching just in sympathy from you know, there's just never was a harder working guy. I'm a guy who really was motivated by the desire to feed more people. Just a simple genuine desire to do that. Kind of good. I think it's a mistake to, you know, lay a lot of the negative the blame for the negative consequences on him. What happened was that he didn't really think about, you know, he's a, he, if you look at this education, he was at the University of Minnesota, you know, if you're a plant pathology guy, which is what he's started off with, you didn't have to learn foreign languages, you didn't have to learn soil science, he didn't have to learn economics, he didn't have to learn, you know, virtually anything other than your own specialty. And he reflected that, and so he was focused like a laser beam on this one part of the problem, and it was a big important part of the problem, but it wasn't the only part of the problem.
Mm hmm. Sir, carry on. Yeah.
And the other actors in this, you know, the governments, the companies, the the officials, or, you know, played a role in what happened.
I guess, again, coming back to that idea of, you know, the Malthusian will be proven right, one day, you know, Borlaug's style of agriculture, obviously, it was this painstaking crossbreeding and selection for these hyper productive crops. But, you know, they did require much larger inputs of nitrogen that was, you know, fixed through the use of fossil fuels, I mean, much of modern agriculture in terms of the kind of calories in calories out, only makes sense, because of the enormous fossil fuel inputs. And so there's this idea in terms of, you know, the way in which, you know, in the last 200 years or 300 years, humanity has just, you know, undergone this incredible acceleration in terms of our technology and our capacities, and the ability to increase our carrying capacity, that that's all very dependent on fossilized sunlight. And I mean, I've heard estimates that we use basically a kind of 500 years of planetary fossilized sunlight every single day, you know, the amount of energy we use is absolutely kind of mind boggling. And, you know, no kind of society in human history is able to maintain that productivity, while reducing their energy consumption to any kind of great degree. So I think that's probably one of the other big criticisms that that Borlaug faces is that this this, you know, agriculture is completely dependent on fossil fuels, and that those, those may not last forever. And, you know, maybe it won't be for another 100 or 200 years, but we're gonna hit that, that hard limit. And so in the meantime, we should really sort of cut back and find ways to decrease the population so that we have a gentle landing, is that sort of kind of what modern profits are sort of saying these things?
to some of them? I think they, you know, I don't think that's a very good argument. If only because, if we keep using fossil fuels for another 100 years, the climate consequences will be catastrophic. So, you know, the idea that there are limits, there may be limits, but they're irrelevant in a time when we actually dramatically need to cut fossil fuel consumption for other reasons. But I do think there's an expression in journalism, sports metaphor, so sorry, which is that you should play Notre Dame like it's Notre Dame which means you should grant your opponent you should fight your you should argue with your opponent's best arguments, not their stupidest ones. Rand That's a that's an argument that I don't think it's very bright. And the better argument I would argue goes something like this, we prophets told you that if you did this, you would be inflicting terrible, unacceptable environmental damage on the world. You are eutrophication, huge numbers of lakes and rivers, there are gigantic dead zones in the Bay of Bengal in the Gulf of Mexico of almost every agricultural coastline. The soil microbiome is being wrecked all over the world, which apparently it is, I don't know that much about it. But the reports that you see are dire, even the forgotten the name of it promote, where the tractors compactification compactification of the soil is a huge ruinous problem. And the most developed parts of the world, including the, in the Middle West. You know, you're draining aquifers, at a ferocious rate with three quarters of that draining being due to agriculture. And so the Ogallala is declining so much that parts of I think it's Nebraska, I think it is where they do the soil that the land has dropped by about 30 feet, the same thing is happening in Central California, and it's in the Central Valley and in the Middle East, and so forth. And all of this are tremendously difficult environmental problems that we warned you about, we said would become problems, and they are. And so when you say their profits have been proven wrong, we'll scratch our heads, and we profits, you know, so to speak, putting on their head for a moment, look at you and say You're crazy. They're right here. We told you they were coming. And it rained. If you read votes, book, there they all are, he's saying this is gonna happen in 1948.
Right, right. I mean, they're smarter, that's a smarter version of their orders. I think that's, that's a very good argument to be making. And I guess that, you know, the counter argument is, well, what hasn't happened yet, and humans have never been more prosperous, have longer lifespans or, you know, had better writers of which they
did. And so was actually, yeah, until when, right, you're driving off of 100 floor building, you know, the first 99 floors of the drop are pretty comfortable.
This idea of, of kind of retreating back from modernity, or abandoning this kind of mastery of nature, which is, has given us so much bounty. For me, I think where that argument falls apart is in this idea that you can sort of you can't have your cake and eat it too, right? Like the fruits of modernity are not easily sort of transported back to earlier kind of modes of production or earlier economic models, you don't have the same, again, capacity to educate women and to entertain movements like feminism, or even the abolition of slavery, you can very much tie that into moving from the muscle era to the machine era through the steam engine. Right. So that's kind of where I worry about, you know, what the prophets are advocating for us to do? And?
Well, you know, I think that you certainly can find, you know, prophets advocating for really silly things. I'm pretty sure you can find wizards advocating for things that you would sort of roll your eyes at. Right. Yeah. But you know, again, imagine, you know, and, again, I'm not saying that this is what I'm trying to.
You're playing devil's advocate a bit, I guess, I
even did devil's advocate, I'm just trying to present their side of the thing, as I understand it. And again, and I also tried to present their, what I think of is their best arguments, as opposed to the other one where we should all put on Kingdom dresses.
The women should go.
Yeah, I mean, it may it may not be the best argument. But I mean, that is something that really pervades the environmental movement. Certainly folks like, you know, Naomi Klein, for instance. I'm not sure to what degree Bill McKibben, you know, whether it's it's really consciously stated or not, I mean, these are the kind of implicit messages right in terms of, you know, draft energy, you don't you don't have to actually, they don't kind of walk through the consequences, what that actually means. What did you think it through? It's,
yeah, so I reviewed what I think is Bill McKibben, his most recent book a couple years ago called blood in cold blood and oil and honey, oil and honey, sorry. And it's about his, you know, activism and anti climate stuff. And it's contrasted with a guy who's lived near him who wants to story of him setting up his honey farm. And if you read that book carefully, the picture that guy is seems like a great guy. Once it's happened, organic honey farm, but he's using a boatload of Modern technology to survey the health of his bees
to basic species to to North America. Right. Right, right. Is there a weed from here?
Yeah. So, you know, the and the kind of farm. I mean, it seems fine to me. You know, and it doesn't seem like some remnant of the past, it seems like something that's trying to keep certain kinds of traditional values in terms of connection to the land and, you know, working with natural cycles in a way. But it's, you know, when he's using these very fancy things to do alert for the presence of mites on the bees, or when he's testing the honey with all kinds of fancy equipment to make sure of its purity, when he's using all kinds of centrifuges to whirl out the honey, you know, he's doing what somebody did in the past, but with 21st century technology, I think the argument that would be made is that the kind of giant farms that we have, are not a natural creation, they're created by decisions of government about what we subsidize what we improve, and that we could do the same for smaller farms and have a mosaic of smaller farms, they would definitely use more land, then we now have, but they would also employ more people, you would have more vibrant rural communities. And you could use the same kind of labor saving devices to make it so that it wasn't completely that it wasn't drudgery, it hard work. And always you as farming is always but that there's enough people who would want to do that if they could make a working wage at it. Yeah. So that would be I think, the good argument.
Yeah, that's an easy proposition. Let's let's move a little bit beyond the kind of back and forth on the wizard versus the profit towards, I guess, a synthesis. So I think one of the more interesting chapters that I came across that painted that idea of a synthesis, and I don't, you know, I'm not a kind of all of the above mushy middle type guy, generally speaking, I think you need to assess arguments. And it's kind of the modern, convenient thing to do, why can't we all just get along, and it kind of abandoned the merits of either argument I like to write but an area that I personally felt there was synthesis was in your description of the Israeli water system. And you focused on Walter loudermilk, and Albert Howard, and this kind of hard and soft water policies. You know, leaving aside, I guess, some of the regional geopolitics and you know, the way in which is really water usage impacts the Palestinians, for instance, it's a very interesting system, this this kind of combination. Can you can you walk us through that a little bit? I mean, do you agree that that's an interesting synthesis? Or that these two things play together? Well,
I would say it's a synthesis, but it's a it's, it's one that is more like, two parallel systems that are operating at the same time and don't necessarily get along that well. So, you know, what you have in Israel to is a, you know, and again, sort of weird to say this, but let's leave aside the geopolitics for the moment. And, you know, the questions of like, who does the water really belong to and all that which, and sort of put on our, you know, technical hat on and
we find the sociology and just figure out how to make the unfertile Crescent a little more fertile and get a bit more water.
Right. Okay. And so, there is, you know, on the one hand, all these systems for recycling water, which is essentially the difference between visits and profits on the question of water, is the question of new water versus bringing it you know, using your old water well, new water is like in California, where they have giant channels that in canals that bring in water from the Colorado, you know, hundreds and hundreds of miles to places like like Los Angeles, you know, stuff that you see in the movie Chinatown, right. And what that is, is the idea is let's just, you know, bring in the water and then people will use it however they they they use it the Prophet say, wait a minute, you know, there's there's not that much water, which they're right about. Almost always, that leads to one kind or another of environmental disaster, and you have it like with a Colorado running out of water before it actually hits the ocean. With these incredible systems, like you see in the Stafford valley of, of Eastern Arizona, where they grow Pima cotton, which is very, very fine, you know, wonderful cotton, but they're growing at 110 degree weather with, you know, with flood irrigation to flooding the fields. You know, when I asked a local water control officer as a couple years ago, you know, how much Water is just you know, that is taken from the Colorado River and pumped 1000s of miles or 1000 miles there. And I said, how much of it goes up into the air when it hits the field? Oh, all of it. The the profits look at that and say that's insane. You know, what you should be doing is, you know, harvesting, though and using thriftily the water that's already there. So you don't have to build these mega systems that are incredibly expensive and have environment and big environmental downsides. And so that's the initially what they did in Israel, you know, and all the key blitzes and so forth, they had these incredible systems, where they would take water that had been done a primary cleanup from sewage water, and filter it through, you know, you know, 100 meters of sand or so you know, these natural sand dunes on the coast, and then recycle it back and use it for agricultural water. And they were real pioneers know that that kind of system they invented is not as they didn't invent it, but they essentially took the invention of drip irrigation, which came from, you know, scientists in California and other places, and they made it practicable. Most of the big drip irrigation companies in the world today are from Israel. Drip irrigation is where you have tubes that have these tiny holes in them. And they just lit up very small amounts of water over a long period of time, very slowly provide irrigation as opposed to flooding the field, which is what we typically do in United States, where you just wash the whole field of water. And you can use 1% of the water, some tiny amount, so that they use the systems that were very prophetic, but also shut out some of the big utilities. And so then, you know, new new governments came in, and they said, Let's build desalination plants. And what's been true in Israel. And so Israel has that sort of largest collection of big desalination plants in the world, sort of per capita. And they've provided just a tremendous amount of water. It's been a fantastically successful system, but it has had some severe environmental downsides. Like in the, in the very southern tip of Israel, there's this whole area that's apparently famous for its scuba diving and beautiful fish, and so forth. And these big piles of salt, are changing, that come from desalination, are changing the salinity of the water and making it harder and harder for the aquatic life to be there. And the same thing is happening on the northern coast of Israel, getting rid of the salt turns out to be a big problem for desalination. And so, and the money that's gone into constructing these big plants, and the big pipes that come from the networks of distribution has taken away from the development of the other system. So they have both systems, but it's really been a lot of jostling back and forth between them.
And that's a really long winded. I think it's a really important example. So I'm glad you went into in some detail, but it kind of sounds like they need both to sort of live at the the level of development that they do. And, you know, yeah, extra water from the DSL plants, but they don't want to be wasteful of it. So they're they're trying to use it as efficiently as possible. To me that sounds like a decent synthesis, like maybe conservation wouldn't be enough.
What happens though, is that when you do both, you end up paying for the expenses of both and, and governments. And one of the problems, I think of all democratic governments is, Stuart brand is writing a book about this, I'd like to sort of gnash my teeth when I heard it, because it's such a good idea. It's they don't want to pay for maintenance. And, and when you have these two systems, it is what i think i think you're absolutely right. But in practice, they don't want to do it, typically don't want to do it, because it's too much maintenance.
And it's, you know, it's a source of when we move over to the issue of energy, which is just so important now, in the midst of, you know, contemplating and trying to trying to engineer an energy transition away from carbon based energy. You know, I do see that tension amongst, you know, I would consider myself strong on the wizard side when it comes to the energy side of things for a number of reasons, but I do find it frustrating. The kind of dismissive dismissal of conserving energy as well, you know, mostly because of the sheer scale of what we need to achieve in terms of deep decarbonisation. I mean, 85% of primary energy is still fossil fuel related, even if we were to have the most efficient, standardized, you know, nuclear build out in the world. We're still not going to get there for a long time. Every carbon atom we emit now is going to come back and haunt us later, you know, and repay that debt two or three. So it seems like a really important thing, but but I do see this, this kind of ideological rigidity amongst members of my kind of new wizardly tribe Whereas just there's a kind of complete dismissal. And maybe maybe I'm being inaccurate here, because I think everyone loves LED lighting and things like that no one wants to kind of throw incandescent bulbs in or take a step backwards. But yeah, I guess maybe it's because, as you were saying, like doing both involves enormous costs of both.
Well, also, yeah, and they operate on a different scale. And, you know, in different ways. I mean, one of the great things about nuclear power, in a weird way is that allows you to be lazy. Now, let me explain what I mean by that, you know, it's kind of like, if you get the power plant, right, which is obviously a non trivial task, but then you can just plug it into the existing system. And it's like, you know, whereas if you want to do with the profits do, you know, have these much more decentralized solar and urban system, that there's a lot more work involved with that, because you have to change the system. And the, and that is also true, with energy reduction, because what you then have to do is change things like building codes, you have to change the way architects are educated, you have to change the the recommendations of the engineers, you know, there's a whole bunch of, of midscale, to small scale changes that you have to make, you have to make it so that I'll give you an example. It's very close to my heart, my wife, it's an architect, teaches at University of Massachusetts, near us, and she builds, you know, it's kind of part of her practices, experimental, energy efficient homes. And, you know, they're close to zero energy, and these kinds of modern materials, and so forth. And I think they're really beautiful. But one of the things that's really frustrating for her is that the energy efficiency, which you would think is just an absolute no brainer, in terms of the value of the house adds nothing, when the bank looks at the house, and that this house is not going to use any energy, you know, because it's, you know, super insulated, and that sort of stuff with all these wonderful modern insulation techniques we have, it just doesn't matter. And so it's extra cost is in no way recuperated by the value to to the house. But that's not a physical law or anything that's just happens to be the way banks operate. You know, and so, a lot of it the things involved here, as a general lesson is that it has to do with things like governmental policies, it has to do with, you know, all kinds of odd institutions. And the, one of the attractions of the nuclear power, is that you sidestep a whole bunch of those.
So, you know, throughout this conversation, you know, because I think I've been coming at this with a bit of a wizardly angle, you've been giving me sort of the best of a prophetic response. I'm wondering if you could take a stab at something for me, I got a challenge for you. How if you were going to try and sell nuclear power to the Prophet say, I'm a prophet, and you're trying to convince me that based on your kind of deep understanding of the psychology of the prophets, how would you make a kind of pitch for nuclear energy to me? I,
you know, I often wonder, I've thought a lot, I just a wonderful question. And I've thought a lot about it. I think what the profits don't like is sort of the massiveness and the centralization of nuclear energy. And that then there's these other arguments about it's unsafe, or what have you, that they sort of cost him because everybody looks for Prudential arguments, rather than just talk about principle. And so then I wonder what would happen. I mean, if you had, if he said, nuclear energy is a bridge fuel, you know, we have small scale, you know, almost neighborhood size nukes, we scattered them all over the place, and we figured we're gonna have them for 50 years, until battery technology gets to the place where we can really imagine having efficient batteries and efficient, efficient solar. And we have tons of examples of the small scale nukes, that that are exist in all over the United States and Europe, but nobody like them. There's a there's a nuclear power plant in at the University of Chicago, right in downtown Chicago is another one in Columbia University. There's all these, you know, medical nukes, there's a ton of different kinds of very small nuclear birth. But instead, the energy system is biased towards these enormous projects that you had in South Carolina, which become magnets for, for opposition. So I wonder if you would, if you would say, look, we're envisioning this as something that's going to be here for about 30 years while we deal with climate change. And then we can decide whether we want to keep it or not.
You got the wizard and me all fired up there. Charles, I gotta say it's an issue that I think in the kind of pro nuclear community we kind of arm wrestle about because, you know, small nuclear is sort of the, the fad of the day. And, you know, it's, it's, it kind of addresses some of the the NIMBY concerns and hopefully addresses some of the concerns of the profits and other Anti-nuclear folks. But I think a big argument in terms of, you know, the benefits of having, you know, large, centralized nuclear is, is very interesting, I did a interview with someone from France about kind of the social solidarity model of their nuclear sector, which was, you know, that having these these, you know, efficient, large projects that are able to provide like a standard, high quality level of energy that's affordable to the whole population, is it's actually very progressive and good thing compared to this sort of, you know, Great Leap Forward of everyone having their own little production in their backyard, which, in a sense, is very libertarian, and leads actually to a lot of inequalities in terms of like, Well, do you own your house? Can you can you? Can you get a loan from the bank to put the solar panels on? Oh, you're getting subsidized by your neighbor, who's the rate payer? Who, who doesn't own a house? So what's this weird wealth transfer, you know, rich, and then, you know, also these these issues? Just have, you know, the the scale, again, of the transition and the material intensity, what we're going to need, the amount of copper and stuff are all the extra transmission between these small, inefficient decentralized structures, yes, it appeases the profits, but it's an enormous waste of copper and resources. And Shouldn't the profits get that but you know, we want to use as little you know, material inputs as possible to steward the environment. And it's, you know, these kind of arguments that I think, Dr. Curie, personally, but I get it,
I think, I think you're right, but you know, the, I think the right answer is that neither side purely cares about material things, you know, central to the profits argument is a sense of, you know, living at the proper scale. And, you know, that there's a kind of humble, community oriented way that we should live. And, you know, there's that, and that goes all the way back to Rousseau, and Jefferson, and, you know, tons of people before that, right. I mean, it's not a strange thing. It's a big part of the human enterprise. And then the other is that the human enterprise to be written very large, and, you know, boldly go where no person come before, and that goes back to people like john Dorsey, it's really long ancient argument about our place in nature. And so and so, you know, to apply, I think, to a prophet, you know, if they're being honest, he said, Yeah, we're gonna use more copper. But if I, you know, I don't really care about using more copper, if, if, if it's making it possible for huge numbers of people to live better. Yeah. And more appropriately. So, yeah, I don't think it's it's, I don't think it's really critical. And the other thing that I see in that is, there is a fundamental unease, I think, that many people have with these large structures, because they think they're fundamentally unresponsive and uncaring to their concerns. And whether it's, you know, Facebook, or Amazon, or, or Walmart or the federal government, or whatever your bugaboo is, and, you know, it's striking to me that, that these two large plants that they just were building in South Carolina, they just didn't have any community support, even in South Carolina. Yeah. And I think it was just a matter of scale, I think was in other things, Anti-nuclear, they just looked at these gigantic things and said, This isn't for me.
Yeah, yeah. That's interesting. I mean, most nuclear plants in their communities, they're very popular, obviously, because they're providing around 1000 jobs, plant and they're well paying and things but yeah, vote on. Yeah. I guess it kind of a closing question for you. In terms of, you know, what both both approaches are, you know, we're in this petri dish to some degree, right. And I think there's this issue of carrying capacity and whether that is a fixed thing, or whether we can play with the fundamental dynamics that might determine that play with the variables a little bit. Yeah. And I think we can personally, yeah, I do as well. I think what's interesting, there's a thinker, a guy named Mark P. Mills, who talks a lot about sort of anticipating what our future energy needs will be. And he says, you know, for food that's quite easy to predict, you know, the difference between a starvation diet and a diet of opulence is about you know, two to four times the number of calories right? For you have the products that we use, that's a little easier. A little harder, because who knows what new gadget we're gonna want next. But it's, it's, you can still predict it, you can do some math on it. But he says, for energy itself, especially with, you know, the rise of complex computing, artificial intelligence, you know, neural learning networks, you know, the potential for that amount of energy that we'll need is really almost infinite. And I mean, that, of course brings with the benefit of being able to sort of sequence the Coronavirus genome, every time there's a new variant and hammered out, you know, in a few days, right, and all the medical research we've been able to do. You know, I was talking with an expert on China, who was saying all of the nuclear they brought on in the last, you know, 15 years is gonna be just enough to fire up all the new 5g infrastructure there. Do you think that that, let's say we take a wizardly path? Do you think that human beings are gonna see shit themselves and arrive at a certain place? We're seeing those trends in terms of certainly fertility declining in developed countries? What do you see in terms of, you know, your best predictions looking forward? Are we gonna make it? Are we gonna stay within the confines? I mean, obviously, climate change, this is a very big question and a bit of a mess of a question to throw at you. But I guess I'm just trying to get your, you know, are you are you optimistic? Are you pessimistic? Are you so here's,
here's it, here's the description of a future, I think, quite possible. I mean, I'm not predicting it, but I wasn't going to be surprised. 50 years from now, or whatever, you know, 70 years from now, we're looking at a future where the, you know, the temperature's going up 2.5 degrees? That's quite a bit with some very negative consequences. But most of the what is it 1.3 billion people in the world without electricity now have electricity. So is that a good world or a bad world?
Yeah, I guess it depends what if we're smashing into the side of the petri dish, because you've got a lot of agricultural land that's no longer useful that I mean, that's, that's certainly the argument that, um, you know, folks like Michael Shellenberger make where they say, listen, deaths from natural disasters have dropped a hundredfold since the beginning of the 20th century, right. And that's development, that's, you know, water drainage systems and meteorologic prediction, and, you know, health health infrastructure. And so it's, you know, and I guess that's the Bjorn Lomborg argument as well, right. Like, we can't just focus on climate change or these other issues. It's, it's
right, well, how do you balance them? And I think that has to do again, you know, not to debate the issue, which is to say that it has to know the value. And the other thing is, you know, I think if you're a prophet, and you look at the farmland that can't be used, you know, because it's desertified, or, or what have you, you look at that, and say that, that is a loss in and of itself, even if we're able to make up for it by growing stuff elsewhere. Just wrecking a whole bunch of land, that's just bad. And, and then a wizard might look at that and say, Well, yeah, but we're still feeding everybody. And, you know, there's no intrinsic difference between that desert, you know, in terms of what God thinks or something. And again, this is a, you know, a question of, of values, I can imagine that world in which there's quite a lot of loss, and yet, human beings are better off. And depending on what kind of lens you put on, you say that's a triumph for you feel really bad about it.
Okay, final question. I promised her. Kim Stanley Robinson, I can give you on forever. But yeah. Do you think that the sort of wizard and profits camps are as fixed in our kind of philosophical imagination and permanent as say, the political left and political right, like, is this always with us? Is this just
about the political left and the political right? Is it keep switching? It's a morality play in which the, you know, the vices and virtues keep going off stage and switching masks? And so, in that respect, yeah, probably about as fixed is, as this. No, I you know, the thing about all this is, these aren't physical laws, right. You know, there's no inherent thing that says that people have to do this. But it's just been particularly persistent pattern that's now you know, going on since the 1940s. At least now, and you know, I, there's no reason it couldn't change, but I don't see that much evidence that it is changing.
So are you saying like, the profit school is new since the 40s. And that didn't exist so much before? Because everyone was so concerned with meeting their material needs and people were saying environment who gives a shit about the environment? We gotta, we gotta put food in our mouths.
Yeah, relatively, um, you know, it's the more modern of the two. I think, the kind of and it really comes to the idea with the idea that there is something called the environment which is again, a contribution of William Vogt. Before we talk about environments he talks But specific locales, you know, you'd say, and they had it's kind of it's kind of environmental with the geographical racism, as they called it, you know how people who grew up in in hot places were slower and stupider. And that that that sort of stuff that you see in textbooks from the 1910s. And then what and the idea was the environment was a place, and the particulars of that place, acted on people, and vote took that and flipped it around and said, No, the environment refers to the whole world. And it's a place that people act on, you know, the the the, the the agency got switched, is I think the social scientists didn't say, and that is something that he came up with in the late 1940s, along with people like it with Aldo Leopold. And it's now such a big part of the way we think that we don't even realize that this is a concept that some guy and we never heard of invented, but in, you know, within living memory,
and I mean, that may be how people look back on your contribution here with giving us these archetypes. So, Charles, thank you for introducing some of our listeners for the first time. So this is wizard and Prophet, archetype and metaphor. It's such a pleasure to have you on the show. I am contemplating starting a Decouple podcast book club. So if people are interested in in book clubbing, the wizard and the Prophet, you should definitely message me on on my Twitter account at Decouple podcast. And I really am looking forward to sending something like this up, and I'm sure Charles would be interested in selling some books. And we could all benefit here, Charles, how can how can my listeners learn more about you and and find you online and in some way, shape or form?
Well, my website is now down and got hit by a domain squatter. And I've been too lazy to put it back up because I'm finishing another book. But eventually, I will put it back up. For now, I guess the best way to do it will be actually to read something that I wrote, which, you know, of course, being a writer, I'm really happy to have you do.
Beautiful, beautiful, I just give us a quick sneak preview on what your upcoming book is.
It's a book about the North American West. And it's one of the arguments that it makes is that in some ways, the future the West, you know, the the foreseeable future, the next 50 to 70 years will have a lot to do with what it was like, you know, a couple 1000 years ago when that West was hotter and drier than it is now. And when it was a jumble of different languages in places and peoples.
Interesting. Interesting. Okay, well the I'll be cruising Amazon looking looking to see when that title emerges. Thanks Thanks so much again, Charles for coming on the show. It's a it's certainly been an aspiration you were the kind of the main topic on the episode one of the Decouple podcasts. I think this is Episode 34. So it's it's great to finally major acquaintance and kind of made made this dream come true of of getting to talk to to the person who kind of inspired the first episode. So thanks. Thanks again for coming on. Oh, shucks. My pleasure in blessing yet. Bye bye. Okay. Take it Cheers.
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