The Wizard and the Prophet by Charles C. Mann

And, this book follows in the same vein while it is about a completely different subject (the twentieth century rise of environmentalism), it is equal in quality to his previous books. I read two of them, 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus and 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created, and they are both excellent. With our civilization on the line, the author's insightful analysis is an essential addition to the urgent conversation about how our children will fare on an increasingly crowded Earth.Ĭharles Mann has written some wonderful books.

Only in that way can everyone win! Mann delves into these diverging viewpoints to assess the four great challenges humanity faces-food, water, energy, climate change-grounding each in historical context and weighing the options for the future. Otherwise everyone will lose! The Wizards are the heirs of Norman Borlaug, whose research, in effect, wrangled the world in service to our species to produce modern high-yield crops that then saved millions from starvation.

The Prophets, he explains, follow William Vogt, a founding environmentalist who believed that in using more than our planet has to give, our prosperity will lead us to ruin. Can our world support that? What kind of world will it be? Those answering these questions generally fall into two deeply divided groups-Wizards and Prophets, as Charles Mann calls them in this balanced, authoritative, nonpolemical new book. In forty years, Earth's population will reach ten billion. From the best-selling, award-winning author of 14-an incisive portrait of the two little-known twentieth-century scientists, Norman Borlaug and William Vogt, whose diametrically opposed views shaped our ideas about the environment, laying the groundwork for how people in the twenty-first century will choose to live in tomorrow's world.

The Wizard and the Prophet by Charles C. Mann