I am bradley graham, the coowner of politics and prose along with my wife. On behalf of the entire staff, thank you very much for coming. Well, survival. That is the big topic that we are here to talk about this evening as mankind looks to the future we certainly do face some very big survival challenges, and basically come down to how to provide food, clean water and energy to an evergrowing population on a planet undergoing Climate Change. Charles mann has written an engrossing book about these challenges, but not with the purpose of providing his answer on how we all should go, rather he has very engagingly and hopefully framed the debate by writing about to 20th century scientists who though not particularly well known were exceptionally influential. Charles says the two were largely responsible for creating, quote, the basic intellectual blueprint for understanding our environmental dilemma. Now, these two didnt agree. In fact, they took radically different approaches to the issue of survival. One was norman borlaug, a nobel prizewinning developed varieties and agricultural techniques that led to the green revolution vastly increasing the world food production. The other was william vogt, and ornithologist who studied the relationship between resources and population and wrote the 1948 best seller road to survival founding document of environmentalism that predicted trends that would lead to mass hunger. Borlaug and vogt represent two sides of the dispute of what charles called the wizards who believe science and technology will enable humans to continue prospering and prophet who warned of disaster unless we accept the resources as limited and cut back accordingly. Now, charles is a journalist and correspondent for the atlantic science is focused on the science, technology and commerce and as a journalist, he doesnt appear to side with either of his biographical subjects. But he is a skilled storyteller as he has a shown i shown in a f his previous books 1491 and then in the companion volume 1493 that the age of columbus immediately before and after the discovery of the americas. In reviews of his new book, the wizard and prophet have praised not only his lively narrative style that also his ability to make complicated subjects accessible. Bill mckibben, the prominent environmentalist wrote in the New York Times review that his book will provide details enough and simplicity enough that anyone struggling with these puzzles will be enlightened and informed and entertained, which given the subject matter is no small feat. Charles will be in conversation with the editor of the atlantic, a magazine that was first joined in 1992. Scott also is the author of a biography and bestselling by the age of anxiety which was spoken about here three years ago. Ladies and gentlemen, please join me in welcoming charles scott. Plus [applause] [inaudible conversations] thank you all for coming and thank you, charles for coming tonight. Im taking off my jacket because i am a heavy sweater and this is a heavy topic, survival of the species. But i wanted to come and let me ive been a reader and a fan of charles van for 35 years at this point so it is a privilege and a pleasure to sit here and talk with you all about the book and how to excerpt the book and im going to give a little plug for the atlantic in the Current Issue that we published in a very nice extract. This will not translate well on tv but trust me this reward is a wheres waldo quality for the close scrutiny and without further ado but we start writing. So, you begin the book as you begin the excerpt of the article by talking about an anecdote when your daughter was born some couple of decades ago. You walk out and have certain thoughts. Talk about that. You know there is this entire industry that exists so they make you go to these classes and then theres a whole platoon of people that tell you how important it is that you are there and how vital you are to what is going on. And at the end after the child is born, they throw you out. So inevitably this is at 3 00 in the morning and this was february and massachusetts standing in the parking lot blown away by what had happened and they thought pops into my head when my daughter was born there were 10 billion people in the world. Im sorry, when my daughter became my age to be about 10 billion people in the world. And i think that centuries from now. The biggest they will talk about as historians is hundreds of millions of people in asia and latin america and to lesser extent africa pulled himself out of destitution like the middleclass. At one point i was going to call the book [inaudible] [laughter] i thought it was a great title. So then they would want all this stuff. How are we going to provide it. How would that work. I mention i mentioned im a sce journalist and from time to time after that when i talk to people, we would hit it off. In 2050, and i would explai expn that little idea, what are we going to do. And after a while i realized the answer is they were selling me on these broad categories and they kept mentioning the stains borlaug and vogt, who i vaguely heard of so i thought somebody should write a book. I have to point out did you really actually almost call this book toblerone for 200 . [laughter] the reason i wanted to ask is it because it is a silly title, but it would be cryptic. One of the core themes of your book is one of the factual basis is not that long from now there will be 10 Million People in the world, and it is a significantly larger number and percentage of them that will be middleclass. They want to be at the manner in which they are accustomed to and why wouldnt they. So talk about this is kind of the core thrust of your book. How are we going to do this . Is one thing to keep telling [inaudible] is environmental books on this subject obviously they appeal to a certain number of people but for an awful lot of people itst sort of seems like homework. It seems like exactly what you dont want to read so here i am with a big fat subject that is going to be mostly things people dont want to read but i i callt something silly, maybe it might be interesting if people might think it is a book about chocolate distribution. Which i think that would be good. I wrote the book 1941 new revelations and the subtitle i went to my editor and said im worried people will think that this is a spiritually related book. He said and your point is . Of ththe somatic point of thk the wizard and th the prophet, f yoprophet, ifyou have a specifin each case. Who are the wizards, who is the actual wizard and who are the profits and why should we care . What these guys did basically i would talk to them and realize the answers fell into these broad categories when the stains came out and one of them is more norman borlaug, the primary man in the revolution which is a combination of high yielding seeds, fertilizer and radiation that quadrupled across the world in the 1970s and 1980s and if you were around in the 1960s it was quite common we believe that there would be massive starvation, hundreds of billionmillions of people wouldf famine and that didnt happen and one good reason for that was the green revolution within an enormous increase, so hes become the emblem for the idea that would allow us to produce a lot of these questions. The harness these and simply cruise on as we have been doing. The prophet is william vogt, a much more obscure figure who put together the fundamental ideas of the movement. Keep them in this book the road to survival which is the first we are all going to help out if you know what i mean. So if you read silent spring or alcors first book the population or any of these kind of classics that many of us had to read in college all of their ideas stem from and he is a guy that first took a concept that has been floating around for a few years at the plate called carinthat point calledcaring cat an individual environment can only support so much so if you have a meadow will b only a cern number can either photographs and then it wont be productive anymore. He said the earth has this capacity gets under a different name for an ecological limits for planetary boundaries. So the basic idea is Natural Cycles and resources and if we consume too much of them, they will be very bad consequences to follow from that. If you think about these, they are kind of the opposite of one another. One assist makes more in a smart way and the other is so everybody can win. No, you hunker down and conserve otherwise everyone will lose. This is part of what makes the book such a brilliantly explanatory framework for understanding these things, but here is what i keep coming back to. You are assiduously careful in the book not to come down on one side or the other. We want to be fai fair to feel e of our grandchildren to be able to eat so which side is right . In a certain way the answer is i dont know because that involves predicting the future. And if there is one thing that ive learned im terrible at his predicting the future. Everything that has happened in the last 20 years of american politics, nope. Donald trump is going to be president , not. I predicted it was going to be wrong. So i have been burned by this and there are these two alternative approaches both of them involve big leaps into the unknown and both of them are fundamentally based on the bottom rather than a practical consideration. They have centralized facilities with Nuclear Power and give you all these sort of impractical reasons for it. You have everything concentrated in one place in only a small number of people have to be involved in it and insert maximizes the personal liberty for everybody involved. They see this as a much more democratic way of living. But when the discussions lead to you dont know how to deal with the waste into their way to expensive they would say it is so complicated and we dont know how to do this. Theres a good answer im going to cuba that could keep coming back again and again. Maybe the reason is in the value systems. The profits would say we need value system adjustments and lifetime adjustments to live differently and we cannot continue to live as we have been and expect the earth will survive and we will survive. They say it again and again technology has come to the rescue. There will be a breakthrough. We will have some Technological Breakthroughs and we will all be fine. Guest theres no law of physics that its interesting that these people come fighting for decades but it just hasnt shown up. So it is a little bit like saying to republicans and democrats cant we all just get along and yes of course we can, but it just doesnt seem likely to happen. You divide the dwindling challenges and i think for categories and they are more than that but if you have water, food, energy and Climate Change [inaudible] air, fire and water, agriculture, water, fresh water, Energy Supplies and Climate Change. Rank the order of those in terms of the threat that they pose to the planet and to your and my hand all of our grandchildren and their generational peers in particular where all these people are going to be coming from in africa and asia in terms of their ability not just to survive but thrive. They have been on different scales. Cape town is literally running out of water and a lot of that has to do with stupid management and issues we can talk about that is actually quite immedia immediate. Thats the most immediate. Its also in the media problem and i would say food comes after that in terms of scale and time so it depends on ten you are asking. They are not worried about Climate Change right now. Its happening in the next month when they believe it will literally run out of water. On each side there are these solutions in the excerpt that we published in the atlantic and its ability to photosynthesize but on both sides one of the most radical solutions, technological manhattan projects on the side wher but do we thine could do to change so we can be assured our children and grandchildren theres a bunch of them. It is an attempt to change the way that it works and this is serious genetic engineering. Its just gently inserting them into another organism and a classic example is roundup ready soybeans which there is a gene from bacteria from a weight upon in louisiana. That is typical genetic engineering. It has the same semblance to the with just an enormously grander thing where they are doing it to sell their roundup and this is to be given away. Its based on this Organization Called the National Research institute and directed by people in oxford that was an offshoot of the work done in the 1950s and 1960s. What they are trying to do is take probably 30 or 40 genes that are sleeping and wake them up and change the way it grabs Carbon Dioxide out of the air to make it more efficient synthesis tinkering in the heart of life and if you are the sort of person who doesnt like genetically modified organisms, this is going to be exactly opposite direction. This is genetic modification squared. Is that a bad thing or a good thing or how do we think about this . This . Guest people that dont like genetic modification they dont like agriculture and the kind we have with the huge expenses of single crops tended by huge machines and empty countryside they just dont like the whole thing they see as a problem and its caused enormous environmental problems, so for them the idea of trying to prolong it and extend and make it grander is like trying to put out a fire by putting gasoline on it, the wrong thing to do so the profits they instead why dont we have farms that mimic that ecosystem that are much more productive and reconfigure the way that we can agriculture in a way that doesnt cause the environmental problems. They say that is a complete recipe for going backwards. We wont be able to grow enough food comics which were complicated that he wants to work on farms with affordable work. Ivar romanticizing agriculture isnt fun and so on so there is a difference of opinion about what is desirable here. The only way that it will work is if we now hav have like 2. 5 f the americans working on a farm house in the look i compare them sidebyside as the wizards farm implements the profits farm that grows genetically modified corn and wheat and is 1200 acres and has one and a half people working on it and two or 3 million worth of farming equipment. The government has 527 with different varieties and its incredibly complicated systems with 11 fulltime employees and 30 plus parttime employees. The people with masters degrees and if you want to go here you have to convince people to live here and that the have to raise prices somehow it either subsidize the labor or do something so that it makes it attractive for people that come here. With farm a leading the meete wizards into the other profits farm, which produces more of this . It is incredibly complicated. This is what the study and people fight about because for instance in terms of just sheer pounds with profit farm produces more, but you have a lot more water in them to do you count the water if you count the water they probably produce widespread use fewer pharma chemicals, so the input dont count as will it be a classy rouge in so it turns out you can spend a lot of time fighting about this and that is exactly what numerous academics have done it did is we dont know. To expand either one on the scale necessary to beat the 10 billion is a leap in the dark. Said told the story you have an anecdote in your book about being in a coffee shop when a great vikings lead biologist comes in and she lived in my Town Committee davis microbiologist and she told that story. She basically thought i was a sentimental sap. So, i was reading the book about Climate Change and finally got around to reading it and she taps the on the shoulder and i sort of crouch down because i think she likes the book also like to watch me squirm and apparently you do to [laughter] you are very good at laying out the positions and then sort of existing between the two of them. So she taps the on the shoulder and grabs the book and doesnt say anything about has an eloquent look on her face and i say what, the way that you would. It is a picture o of light and endangered over. She sort of rolls her eyes like mammals. [laughter] the reason she thought this, shes a microbiologist and those that lg and fungi makeup give 90 of the biomass and in mammals like u this from the pot of view she thought its cute but not actually important. Are you all worked up about endangered species. [laughter] so i tried to defend myself and said dont you think that it would be sad if she said its debate of every species. What she meant was if you think about it, what the rules are, the place to everything. The same rules. We are just one species in all of the rules apply to us. We are not especially if you put a bunch of protozoa in a petri dish consists of predator or anything keeping them in check, they will just eat index and then hit the edge of the petri dish and then bad things will happen. Either they will drown in their own waste or run out of resources or both. And that is what a simple species do. The expand and expand and become 99 of the mass. Its not like we are going to run out of food we should stop reproducing so fast. So people are going to do the same thing and we should just stop whining about it. There are many ideas and they all shot down. I am enjoying the chance to feebly attack you. [laughter] to kind of take it to a higher in most biological level but a theological evolutionary level, i know that in the book you have forthcoming darwin and huxley between the sort of religion and the idea that man is in some ways distinct. Its the stuff of platforms and zebras and giraffes which are all beautiful in their own way. I may be garbling this, but i think they said if you buy this argument arent we just saying that men and women are just a bunch of overachieving mushrooms . [laughter] if you take a biology 101 and hear about this six or seven months after they published the origin of species and there is a meeting of the association for the advance of science at oxford and the prominent english bishop at the time and huxley this one of the most dogged defenders clashed. Then you read about it and nonetheless its when science and religion again and if you read the account, christopher hitchens, the famous atheist who would write about how huxley dispatched him that he was saying that if you buy this and he put it in terms of a soul, you dont have to put it religiously, you can say do we have a special spark to do things others dont. If you are a conservationist hoping we dont have the edge of a petri dish. It was illusory because they are both saying that we are special. To say they are going to save our souls through conservation, the point of saving ourselves, we are claiming w they are specl and we are not in their point of view. I was shook up by this. What is the evidence that we are special. If my obituary said he was in overachieving mushroom, i would be okay with that. [laughter] lin died in 2011 so i didnt have the chance to argue this. What could i say that would be not just elicit the response you are saying we are special, its going to help us survive. I can just hear that. She was pretty remorseless. So here is the best answer i could have given which is cast your mind back to 1800, the world looks politically different but in other ways it is a different in ways that is hard for us to imagine. In 1800, slavery exists down the entire world as far as we know in fact the oldest record on what is about other human beings comes of i it is a foundational institution for everywhere in the world its important from everywhere in the world ever has been since finance memorial and then in a few decades, according to this historian i think it is two out of three people in the world in his estimate are not free in one way or another. They are in bonded labor. So he says no, then in less than 100 years, this institution that dominated Human Society for as long as we know, it disappears. The International Labor organizations is 25 million of them or Something Like that but nowhere in the world is it illegal. Women cant vote anywhere and dont own property. They cant dump their husbands anywhere committee cant participate in a public sphere. Its easier to list the things they can do then they cant do because it is a shorter. In the 20th century this changes dramatically. Obviously neither of them fully happen but it is enormously different right now half of the people in this audience are women and it just would not have been the case in 1800. And the subjugation of women by men is also this profoundly foundational institution and yet it is changed, so people can change enormously. And i guess my feeling now is by answering the question, if we can do all this, what a drag it would be if the blue Climate Change. All that progress had been just run out. I think you have language in there that does sound like the perspective for the investment of the success do not guarantee future progress. The erosion wasnt just a blip you are putting a lot of weight on the last couple of hundred years of history as opposed to the previous ten alien. Obviously you are right that could be a drag. Who could predict the future. But that would be the evidence that we have done these changes in the past. And another one is the decline in violence cause of this is a sum of the argument, but the basic idea but over the last few thousand years, violence between the nations and cultures have really fallen off a cliff since the Second World War but every institute of peace and so forth believes it to be true. The last time i will ask you a version of this question given what you just said about the hopeful note about the slavery and subjugation of women, this is old to start guide you to one side or another or is that a sort of specious jump and if you had to test your lot with one of the other as a betting man on your children and grandchildren and greatgrandchildren who would you cast, which is forces would be the best . That is a good question. At the moment im generally for the wizards. That doesnt mean it has to be that way, but that is where the momentum generally has been. Im just stating the facts. Another way of phrasing this, the earth is finite. Theres only so many molecules. At some point the limits kick in but its whether they are relevant. If the limits kick in, one of the things i have fun with in the early process was very involved in the theory of information and quite a remarkable guy. He said what people need is what he called Usable Energy so they calculated how much falls on the earth and then he said there is room for 800 billion people in the United States based on that. Obviously nobody wanted to live like that so the point is if there is a limit but it is irrelevant for the concern. And what is striking to me about these debates is how little effort has been made establishing what those limits are so i would be much more comfortable answering your question if there is some group of researchers who really get it. People have begun doing that but its really shaky stuff. Please come up and line up at the microphone here and we will take questions. Whwhile we wait for people to le up, let me ask you youve written about a lot of technological and scientific stuff. Is there any imaginable scenario which the answer is migration to mars or any other planet . Did the solution to the finite resources explain the population . You cant actually live on mars, you realize that. I realized there was a penny on mars, somebody dropped it. [laughter] no. So your analogy on the petri dish i forget the exact but does a man and womans consciousness do away with the usual species as far as justice and awareness of selfdetermination . Are you asking me . Clearly we possess a type of consciousness from anywhere else but the question is whether that will make a difference. Almost every species is unique at something. We are also uniquely good at throwing but that unique attribute probably will not deceive us. Save us. So the question is something our childrens generations find out whether that does make us special and i have a feeling that if we made it out in the last century we were not just a bunch of overachieving mushrooms. [laughter] i appreciate the agnostic position that you take on the structure of the prophet. So in that vein, i havent read the book through enough to know the answer but certainly one of the things that is expected to have been in the decades coming to claim it, Climate Change will be a very severe problem as well perhaps with population growth and other resource limitations. Another thing that is expected is through technology and artificial intelligence, kind of the need for work maybe even very substantially. So one hypothesis is with more people and time on their hands that would support whatever unit of production versus 1. 5 especially if there are other advantages that have the 11 farmers. The profit side of things, so you deal with this in the book and then the smaller number of people can do so much is a good thing and what you are suggesting is that there isnt enough work, then having a farm like this with many, many people if they can get decent jobs one of the things that is striking is to most other places in the world to subsidize the replace bit of people by machinery and so this is a kind of social engineering that has occurred around the world and we could be reversed. I am curious if you could comment on the negative impact of immigration and i was shocked to hear one of the problems we face. If someone moves to el salvador to the United States or germany is a huge increase in the demand of resources from those populations because the standard of living is over a very short period of time, so ironically reducing immigration consumes resources which is a kind of surprising thing. The second thing i want to ask you is in places like the United States and western europe where people have achieved a fairly successful and stable middleclass lifestyle, the birth rate has gone down substantially separatist and some hope that as the rest of the world as the opportunity to a lifestyle of that sort that the demand or some portion of the demand increased population growth will be reduced by the reduction and multiple child that occurs, so no that does not outweigh the demand of the middleclass, so i am just kind of curious how you look at those two issues. The birth rate has declined all around the world except in a few places like parts of the middle east. Asia, latin america they have really fallen and they are quite comparable to the birthrate of the United States. So, there are pictures that have had the developed world been updated by the last 20 or 30 years. It is also true that the nations are rapidly industrializing. The difference in mexico city when i first saw it in 82 and then a couple of years ago absolutely extraordinary. Asia, china, india absolutely incredible. It is true a person who comes from a poor country and goes to a rich country, they are getting wealthy so much faster that will not be true for much longer. When you say both of these paths potentially theoretically have successful paths to where we are now is there a risk in the fight and not to choose to plateau where we are taking them into the future and we just kind of crash on the current consumption rates . Almost anything can happen in the ability to mess things up. One thing i was complaining about is the governmen the goveg anything about Climate Change. [laughter] i am a scientist at the university of maryland and i debate a lot of these things with my colleagues. What i find to be most true among the scientists is we dont see it as a dichotomy. We say we need both. Are you for or against gm zero and ie and mos i had most of mys say we need organic so im just wondering i think borlaug got his masters in forestry. How did that influenc that implk on Environmental Issues . He went to the university of minnesota and what they wanted was for people told them how to maximize production. He took almost no ecology classes at all which is strange because red cross over there in wisconsin said he had an incredible narrow education and then they narrowed it down even further. He pointed to central mexico where he did his most important work and saw a desperate policy, extraordinarily poor. We have a hard time imagining because it just doesnt exist. Two thirds of the people in mexico at the time, two out of three people, just terrible. He looked a at the this and sole these eroded landscapes and he said we need to give these People Better tools. You are absolutely right we can do both. Its interesting because in the nondiscretionary and been on the fence, usda gets about 4 billion. So you just wonder if we were back up to 11 , what could we do in agriculture that you could win on both sides, so that is i think the sense among myself and my colleagues we dont have any money to get the budget back up. It is quite commonly estimated to grow twice as much food to feed everybody at the level. Theres a lot of arguments and back and forth and its really hard to imagine why it is a good idea to cut the funds available. Listening to you ive become even more pessimistic than i was when i walked out the door. [laughter] that is just life. My reaction, and i havent read your book, but what youve described is faced with what i consider a real crisis you have people that are far less than arrested in figuring out how to solve that crisis then how to win over their opponents the issue of what society they would like. It does seem to me each of the different schools as flaws and virtues and yet the whole weight of the discussion has been crafted is pick a side and figure out which side you are on. Neither of them are slam dunks and both have complementary flaws that the other would have advantages to in different circumstances, and it does seem to me that as an outsider, both are necessary and it sounds like from your description that is not the way that anybody is thinking about it in your book is thinking about it in a way tt this discussion has gone. Thank you. Nice of you to respond. You will see when people have to take Nuclear Power, they typically immediately go on to trash nuclear solar. So there are these fights if theyve gone on for a long time and even though researchers say these are not necessary, im talking about the public. Is the discussion to break that down rather than to pick a side . This is what is going on. We have a few people lined up but we are running out of time. Thanks very much. I just wanted to ask whom would you consider to be the most knowledgeable, honest and open intellectual to doctor borlaug and mr. Vogt . [laughter] bill gates. Theres a whole school of people that are like him and equally influential and i would argue a profit you could pick people like bill mckibben. Theres quite a few people in that realm. Thinking of any kind of middle ground. Working on the middle ground. Charles mann. [laughter] on that note, thank you. [applause]