Travel two roads on ecology issues
Views on population explosion and earth’s carrying capacity, writes Karen Watkins
HAVE you ever thought what kind of world you are leaving for your children and your grandchildren? This book with a catchy title is a
both in the reading and the writing of the 477-page tome, excluding abbreviations, notes and index.
The world population is presently at 7.6 billion people and is expected to reach 10bn by 2050, compared to 6.8bn in 2008. With growing awareness of starvation, homelessness and unemployment and increasing pollution of water sources and oceans, can the earth support this burgeoning population explosion?
In this book, Charles C Mann delves into history to provide the fascinating backdrop of two scientists who thought of themselves as environmentalists. Wizard Norman Borlaug and prophet William Vogt travelled in the same orbit but rarely acknowledged each other. Their first meeting in the mid-1940s ended in disagreement.
Mann uses these differences to illustrate how future generations can face the conundrums of the four elements of earth (food), water (fresh water), fire (energy) and air (climate change). Wizards are those who think science and innovation will solve our ecological problems and we will be able to do more with more while prophets believe in limited growth and doing less with less.
Vogt, who was born in 1902 and was a scandalous adulterer, loved nature and believed that using more than the planet has to give would lead to ruin. He was a founding environmentalist and one of the century’s great crusaders against careless human breeding.
In 1939, aged 36, Vogt’s interest in birdwatching led him to being recruited by the
He spent three years wallowing through cormorant nesting grounds and poo (guano) on Peru’s deserted offshore islands.
As a result of his research, Vogt implored the Peruvian authorities to stop harvesting the guano and give the island time to return to its natural state and for the ecosystem to heal.
His interest in birds also led him to realise why the bird population on Long Island and the East Coast was falling. He believed that one cause predominated – malaria. Vogt linked the increase in mosquitoes to the destruction of wetlands to make way for golf courses, housing developments and shopping malls.
Borlaug was born into a poor Iowa farming community in 1914. A research programme he was working on led him to become part of the “Green Revolution” of scientific innovations that increased agricultural yields worldwide.
In 1944, this plant pathologist went to Mexico where he patiently pollinated wheat to produce high-yield crops with resistance to a parasitic stem-rust fungus that saved millions from famine. In 2007, when he was 93, the Wall Street Journal editorialised that he had “arguably saved more lives than anyone in history. Maybe one billion”.
Also of interest is Vogt’s idea of an ideal society – a network of self-sufficient citizens guided by ecological principles that return to American eco-friendly past president Thomas Jefferson. He saw virtue arising from agricultural villages, as opposed to the market and cities. That of frugal independence over opulence and commerce.
In this book, Mann travels far and wide setting off from America to watch wheat breeding in Mexico to reforestation, soil building and tree planting in Burkino. South Africa features positively as one of the first countries to proclaim a wilderness area in Tsitsikamma, a few months after Yosemite in America, and negatively in research into how KwaZulu-Natal lost more than a third of its water supply to leaks.
The book is also peppered with other experts, such as ecologist Paul Ehrlich who in 1985 predicted that our society would not collapse and whose first experience of overpopulation was when he travelled to a crowded slum in Delhi. The carrying capacity of the planet and the pressure of providing for “unbridled population growth” is at the core of this book. Other topics include deforestation, desalination, nuclear energy, over-fishing, organic soil from human waste, solar power versus peak oil fears and the history of climate change.
If you are looking for unbiased answers to the exploding population you will not find them. Some sections of the book are like watching paint dry, or in this case wheat and the occasional rain paddy, but the ideas on environmental issues affecting the 21st century are challenging.
Read it with an open mind, think of the prophet and wizard options and be prepared for a tsunami of emotions.
Mann’s research into each side of the topic is exhaustive and will have you examining your conscience and morals in finding a path to a better world.