What is the best approach to solving the climate crisis? Should we leverage science and technology to ‘produce’ our way out of the problem? Or aspire to live in Hobbiton and radically reduce our human footprint?
Charles C. Mann is the New York Times bestselling author behind 1491, 1493 and The Wizard and the Prophet and a regular correspondent for The Atlantic, WIRED and Science Magazine. Today, Charles joins Ross to discuss the two major schools of thought he identified in the environmental movement—wizards and prophets—and introduce us to the scientists he uses to represent each camp in his book.
Charles walks us through the fundamental differences between the two groups, describing their values, blind spots and radically different ways of seeing the world. Listen in for Charles’ insight on a third school of thought that dismisses both wizards and prophets and find out where he falls on the wizard-prophet spectrum in light of the current global health crisis.
Connect with Ross
Subscribe to the show on Substack @ rosskenyon.com/subscribe.
I also write Carbon Removal Memes and curate Climate Workers Anonymous.
Resources
1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus
1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created
Road to Survival by William Vogt
‘The Call of Cthulhu’ by H.P. Lovecraft
Adam Smith’s Parable of the Poor Man’s Son
Full Transcript
Ross Kenyon: Hello and welcome to the Reversing Climate Change podcast. I’m Ross Kenyon. Today I have with me Charles C. Mann, journalist and author of 1491, 1493, and The Wizard and the Prophet. He’s also a correspondent for The Atlantic, Wired, and Science. Thanks for being here, Charles. It’s my pleasure. Your work comes up all the time and we recently did a Nori Patreon book club for The Wizard and the Prophet for the month of April. Generated a lot of discussion and debate. I think this is a great book and a great way to frame, I don’t know, various schools of thought within the environmental movement.
Why don’t you give us a nice little baseline here for what exactly are these camps? Who are the avatars of each that you feature in the book and how are you conceptualizing the split?
Charles C. Mann: Basically, I’m a journalist, as you said, and I’ve been reporting on environmental issues since the 1980s, since the late 1980s, and talking to activists, politicians, and above all, researchers. And over time, I came to realize that the answers that I was getting to my questions fell into two broad camps. Not always, but generally. And I thought of them as wizards and profits. And wizards essentially are the people who want what’s disparagingly called the techno fix. Their argument is, look, we have these technical challenges from the things that we want to do and the growth of our economies.
And so what we need to do is switch on the science and technology machine and essentially produce our way out of our dilemmas. The prophets, on the other hand, say that’s completely wrong. That’s exactly the wrong direction. It’s doing more of what’s gotten us into trouble in the past. And what we need to do is to conserve and radically cut back and reduce the human footprint. And a while ago, it suddenly dawned on me that these two approaches were kind of the opposite from each other and that many of the conflicts I saw Both within the environmental movement and between the environmental movement and society were expressions of the conflict between wizards and prophets.
And I thought, geez, I’d really like to read something about that. And then I didn’t. And so I decided that, well, OK, I’ll try and do it since nobody else is.
Ross Kenyon: And I think you do a very good job of being fair to both of these camps because they each have a part of the puzzle. And depending on the issue or the various application with inside of environmental concerns, you might find yourself leaning to one way or the other. And I think you do a very good job of steel manning for the listener opposite of straw manning. So I think you treat both of these schools of thought maybe even more fairly than you had to in order to write this book.
Charles C. Mann: Well, thank you very much. No, I think it’s important. And the reason is that it’s relatively important Soon in my research, it suddenly dawned on me that these differences were not just kind of pragmatic differences about, you know, how do you do this, but they expressed values. And they’re values that everybody shares in one proportion or another, and we just give different weights to them. So typically, profits value community and the idea that we’re all part of nature and that we are embedded in this much, much larger system in which we should play our assigned role.
And the wizards, on the contrary, are much more about individual liberty and freedom, which is the idea of maximizing human potential and people living in the best possible way that they can. And we all like both of these things in different amounts. It’s just that they come into conflict. And where you end up, which side of that conflict determines a lot about whether you’re appealed to by the wizards or the prophets.
Ross Kenyon: And then the book, you use a very interesting framing device. I saw your book described as a joint biography or some such. And so you have these two avatars of these two ways of being and thinking. Who are they and what are broadly their life arcs?
Charles C. Mann: Well, as I said, I’ve been a journalist for a long time. And over the years, I realized I’ve often heard this name, Norman Borlaug. And people who I later came to think of as wizards would say, I want to do for X what Borlaug did for wheat. And who Norman Borlaug was, he’s the main figure in what’s called the Green Revolution, which is the mix of high-yielding hybrid seeds, High intensity fertilizer and high volume irrigation that created what’s been called the Green Revolution, which doubled, tripled or even quadrupled global grain yields in the 1960s, 70s and 80s.
And it had a huge impact on our lives. And one way of putting it is that as far back as historians can go, The majority of humankind has faced hunger at some point or other in the year. When I graduated from high school, the UN, Food and Agriculture Organization, estimated that between 40% and 60% of the world’s population was malnourished. Now, those same people are estimating that it’s on the order of 8% to 10%. So you see this enormous and dramatic decline that the Green Revolution had a lot to do with.
And so people saw that and they took a very powerful lesson from it, which is that you switch on the science machine and you can have this dramatic impact on life. And they hope that they can do the same in whatever field that they’re in. So that’s the reason for looking at Borlaug. It’s a sort of prototypical wizard at about the same time. I realized that when I talked to especially older environmentalists, I heard this name. I would hear this name occasionally that I had certainly never heard in sort of public discourse, and that was a guy named William Vogt.
And essentially, he put together the ideas behind the modern environmental movement. He wrote the first modern we’re all going to hell book, if you know what I mean. That was back in 1948. It was called The Road to Survival. And if you read people like Jared Diamond or people... Paul Ehrlich or Bill McKibben, to some extent, Naomi Klein, all these kinds of people, their ideas directly trace back to Bill and William Vogt. And then I was fascinated to realize that they both got their ideas, which diametrically opposed to each other, at the same time from in the same place, which is rural central Mexico in the mid-1940s.
Yeah, I bet the journalists and you love that you found that nice little connection there. Oh, absolutely. He’s like, wait a minute. There’s a way you could actually tell this story. As the two people got their ideas at the same place in time, Matt had this immediate collision and never spoke to each other again.
Ross Kenyon: Wow. Yeah, I do do like that nice intersection there. I’m trying to think you just gave a great list of various other people who may qualify as profits that are currently operating might be some of the great wizards. I guess the first person that comes to mind is also an alumnus of this podcast, which is Ted Nordhaus of the Breakthrough Institute. Do you think that’s fair? And then who might who might be in his company?
Charles C. Mann: Sure. I mean, there’s lots of those kinds of people. And Hans Rosling, the guy who wrote Factfulness, would probably be another. Jesse Ausubel, lots of people with the resources for the future. And these are one of your guests. I guess Ramez Nam, a good friend of mine, would certainly count as one. He’s told me himself. I mean, you can find them all over. They’re the people who are boosting the idea of huge solar installations, all those huge wind installations. The people who want to do next generation nukes, the people who are arguing, I think Emma Maris recently argued in Wired that GMOs are necessary to save nature.
So that kind of approach is a wizard’s approach. And by the way, just by naming them, I’m not trying to sort of single them out or criticizing them. I’m just saying they’re exemplars of a kind of tendency that’s been around in the environmental movement since the very beginning. Norman Borlaug, the guy described as an agricultural scientist, also saw himself as an environmentalist because he believed that intensifying Production and having this much more, quote unquote, scientific method of agriculture would lead to increased yields and fewer demands on nature.
So you wouldn’t have hungry people going out into the forests and meadows and just sort of stripping them bare.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, absolutely. And it’s my intention not to name and shame these people either, because I think it’s very useful in learning to split ideas into their various camps. Like I like that there’s a wizard in a profit group and that I think that means each of them have Well, first, I should say that what I’m talking about is a kind of
Charles C. Mann: Mental model, you know, for how to sort things. And there’s a famous expression that all models are wrong, but some are useful. So the first thing to stipulate is that there’s tonnes of exceptions and caveats and so forth in this model. And the question is, is it a useful way to break things down? And I think it is. And one of the things that I think would be complexity is that, say, take Ted Nordhaus at the Breakthrough Institute. I think Ted would be Appalled if any of this were to be taken as somehow that his belief in technological solutions were taken to be a lack of love of nature and a lack of respect for the natural world.
And similarly, I think that prophets who are, say, in favor of organic farming and this kind of thing, embedding themselves in the community, are very upset at being taken for anti-science. You know, there’s a Guy, just down the road, I live in a small town in Massachusetts, and just down the road from me is a small organic farm. And they regard themselves as highly scientific because they see themselves as embedded into, you know, the ecosystems around them, and they have gone to considerable trouble to understand how these work.
So one way to put it would be that they both express different parts of a love of nature and different parts of a love of science.
Ross Kenyon: Okay, I think that’s useful. One of the various other axes that seems like it might map on to wizards and profits is to what degree do you believe in economies of scale versus decentralization?
Charles C. Mann: Yes, that’s exactly. The wizards typically not always look to centralized solutions and economies of scale. The profits regard those as brittle and tend to look for decentralized networks. And there’s a whole division about whether they are democratic or not.
Ross Kenyon: Okay. Yeah. Cause I could definitely think of counter examples too, especially with something like the potential of blockchain to be radically decentralizing in an important kind of way. So a lot of the people who are extremely wizardly about blockchains also are some of the most strong advocates I know of against centralized institutions. So that isn’t to say this doesn’t break the model, just maybe. Yeah.
Charles C. Mann: No, but you, for example, take solar power. I mean, there’s sort of two models of solar power and one is gigantic, You hear this sort of calculation, you cover X amount of the Arizona desert in solar panels, and that would be enough to power the entire country. And the idea is that, you know, on some level you should actually do that. We should have these huge places in the desert and then they would leave the rest for, and then pipe it around the country and, you know, leave the rest for nature.
And the prophets tend to viscerally react against that because they see this as creating a kind of a sacrifice zone. And what they like, the idea is of these immense networks of neighborhood solar, you know, lots and lots of rooftop and small scale installations all networked together, passing power back and forth. And they see that as under much more local control, much more decentralized, much more resilient in case of disaster. And so you get, you know, an identical technology, the PV panel thought of in two remarkably different ways.
Ross Kenyon: Do you think, okay, so another axis I’d like to plop on top of this and see if it maps at all. Do you see it fitting along partisan lines or even just political philosophy lines? Or is it more complicated than that?
Charles C. Mann: Well, it’s a little bit. You know, it is certainly the case that, you know, at various times, for instance, as we speak, there is a relatively recently a Michael Moore produced documentary that was Planet of the Humans.
Ross Kenyon: I saw this. Everyone’s been yelling about it. So let’s
Charles C. Mann: dig in. Well, in my opinion, it’s not particularly good. Let’s put it that way. But one of the things that it does is it calls various So environmentalists who have embraced larger scale solutions, which are typically wizards, it calls them corporate sellouts. And the implication is, you know, they’re sort of playing into the hands of the right and the capitalists and this kind of thing. So there’s a kind of gloss, a political gloss you can put on it. But I think at its bottom, it isn’t really like that so much because there are plenty of people on both sides who like the different values.
And so typically wizards are the ones who argue that technology will let everybody pack in together into these super dense cities where knowledge can be centralized and accumulated and passed on, better leaving the rest of the world for nature. And then the profits are typically are like small town type people, you know, who like the idea of these smaller scale communities and regard these kind of mega cities that are embraced by people like Ted at the Breakthrough Institute as, you know, kind of cesspools of corruption and inequality. And you’ll find people, you know, on the right and left on both sides of that debate.
Ross Kenyon: Absolutely, you can. And when I think about this, too, especially within the profit camp, I can think of many conservatives I know, thinkers I like, who prefer much smaller institutions that are much more local. And I also know a lot of people who are more in the permaculture, small farms movement that very well might end up neighbors and agreed on that one thing, even though their lives may look very different.
Charles C. Mann: Yes. Yeah. And so one of the, I mean, not really something I thought of when I first thought of one the things I was pleased to see is that it occurred to me that if I looked at things from this viewpoint, I might get a little past a kind of a partisan divide right now that has devolved into often a kind of score making that isn’t really particularly useful.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I suppose when you say something like that, it reminds me of, I think I got this from Nathaniel Johnson at Grist, but that fights over nuclear power are more symbolic of just a values divide more than actually the science of whether or not nuclear is good or not. Is that what you’re kind of hinting at?
Charles C. Mann: Yes. And the thing that I would slightly amend what you said is that Often they’re just about values and what you prefer and that’s said rather than about science and that’s said to dismiss the values. But I actually think the values are really, really important and that the discussion would be much more useful if it was actually about the values rather than the sort of pretend argument about the science.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. So there’s like a proxy war that’s way downstream that we’re fighting, but you want to go back and be like, what kind of world do you actually want to create? You think we should be talking on that level?
Charles C. Mann: Yeah, I mean, the reason that people, you know, that I know of at least don’t like nuclear power at bottom is not because of this or that radiation count or this or that, you know, environmental footprint. It’s because they see this as this giant facility that’s tinkering with things that people just should have a lot more humility about. Got it. Yeah, I think that’s a very fair point. And that’s not a bad argument to me. I mean, the idea that we need to think about our place in the order of creation and respect it, that’s not a terrible argument.
But people are afraid to make these kind of spiritual or religious or moral or whatever, ethical, whatever word you want to use type of arguments. And so instead, they drag in these proxies, as you pointed out, where they say, oh, it’s unsafe or something. When at bottom, even if somehow it was proven to be They just don’t want to go down that path. And very similar logic applies to GMOs.
Ross Kenyon: Oh, Charles, I remember that I wanted to do this, and I’m glad I recalled it. But I think I found basically the perfect summation of the profit way of thinking at its most extreme. And also, it fits very neatly in here. And I don’t know if you know this, but have you read The Call of Cthulhu by H.P. Lovecraft? Yeah. Well, that sentence did not end it up like I expected it to. Yes, I read it, but a long time ago. All right, check this out.
I love this paragraph. It’s beautiful and a bit terrifying. The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity and What do you think of that? That’s pretty close. That’s pretty close. Vintage HP Lovecraft, super overwritten, but onto something. Well, yeah, absolutely. There’s an ornateness there that is out of fashion, you could say, these days, among many other things that he thought.
Yeah.
Charles C. Mann: Yeah, no, I read that when I was 17 or 18, and it certainly, in general, left an impression, but obviously I didn’t remember that paragraph. Terrific. Thanks for sharing it.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, no problem. Sorry to just basically add a non-diegetic insert there just for my own edification. Yeah. Well, okay. I guess one thing I wanted us to get to is when I think about schools of thought or paradigms, I like to think of them kaleidoscopically. I like being able to flip through them and say, okay, if I think about a problem this way, it illuminates this thing, but it also has its own blind spot in this way. And I think one of the signs of intelligence that I look for, which because I value this, I’m sort of placing myself...
It’s like that aside, I think that the more of those that you can hold, oftentimes the better off you are in being able to understand problems. So if we’re able to treat the wizard and the prophet paradigms like kaleidoscopically, treat them kaleidoscopically, what do you think they are showing us and what do you think they are obscuring?
Charles C. Mann: Interesting. So you’re saying that, you know, a point of view is, I guess I would think of it this way, is like a spotlight. It casts intense light, but also dark shadows. Yes, exactly. And In this particular case, I would say that one of the things that wizards often do is make a kind of pragmatic case that this is the way to go because these features of the profit’s worldview are counterproductive or don’t make any sense or will make things worse. So you see all the times or calculations like if all farming products We’re organic.
We would produce much less and much more land, and it would be an environmental disaster. I’m sure you’ve read things like that. And I want to say to them that what’s missing here and missing from many of these things is that the current type of farming we have is a social arrangement. It’s been carefully designed. But it depends on an entire body of institutions and laws and practices and so forth that have largely been created since the 1940s and 1950s. There’s nothing inevitable about that.
So one of the exercises I did is I went to Northwest Illinois and I met this guy who is kind of a model profit farmer. And his neighbor is a kind of a model wizard farmer. And I got them to write down all the subsidies of various types that they were eligible for. And essentially, the wizard farmer produced an entire page of different programs that were devoted to helping his kind of farm go. And the profit type farmer had nothing. He didn’t exist as far as the state, local, and federal governments existed.
And the wizard farmer cheerfully confessed that without all these federal and state and local initiatives that he was embedded in, his farm would collapse. So it’s very, very difficult to make that kind of comparison because they exist in such different worlds. And often the wizards kind of forget About the sort of social, legal, historical, cultural, etc. aspects of this. The profits, meanwhile, are often quite strong. The sort of potential risks, they’re much less good, in my view, at understanding the kind of nitty-gritty social changes that would be required to achieve their vision.
Again, to talk about the same... The fundamental difference, as far as I could see, between the organic farm and the farm that was next to it, which was all GMOs with corn and soy, was not what they were growing, but the different labor amounts that were in it. The smaller scale, much more complicated farm needed many, many more workers. The one was 1,200 acres, and it had two workers and $2 million worth of equipment. And the other one had 1,000 different crops and was recreating natural ecosystems.
It was an amazing place, but it had 30 different workers. And so the need to pay those workers meant that his prices were very high, that he couldn’t charge cheap for this. And the reason for that is that there’s a zillion subsidies for agricultural equipment, but there’s zero subsidies for farm labor. And, you know, the fundamental difference between them was social. And I typically think that people who are very embracing of these don’t see how contingent their successes would be on these social, historical, and cultural arrangements.
Ross Kenyon: That’s an interesting angle. I hadn’t thought about it in that way. Yeah, when I guess when I do think about prophets, their sort of aesthetic ideal strikes me very much like the Shire, and they would like to recreate that.
Charles C. Mann: Yeah. And the thing is that the Shire presumably had a whole bunch of institutions that, I don’t know what Tolkien was thinking of, presumably are similar to the ones that existed in the English countryside in the 1920s. But there’s hundreds of years of history that underlay the fact that the English countryside worked in the 1920s. So I think it’s very easy for both sides to dismiss the others as not being likely to exist for pragmatic reasons. When the real reasons have to do with institutions, there’s no particular reason that we couldn’t, if we wanted to, subsidize farm labor.
For example, we subsidize labor all the time. For example, recently Amazon, last year I think it was, wanted to create its secondary headquarters. And states and cities competed for it. And they offered Amazon millions of dollars. And what they were essentially doing was subsidizing the labor of Amazon workers. So New York offered several billion dollars and in return would get 50,000 jobs. That’s subsidizing labor. And we do that all the time. For labor that we consider to be valuable. It’s just the reason that we don’t do it for agricultural labor is we don’t consider it to be valuable.
But that doesn’t mean that it couldn’t be done. And if you subsidize the hiring of labor, the prices from these kind of small scale farms would drop dramatically and much poorer people could afford the produce from them.
Ross Kenyon: That’s a fascinating point. What do you call this when there’s just a tendency of the human mind to view whatever is around us that we are acculturated into to be natural, quote unquote? What is the name for this way of seeing that is clearly blinding us to how constructed our reality actually is?
Charles C. Mann: Yeah, I don’t know what it is. I guess there’s possibly is related to what the historians call presentism, which is judging by the past, by the standards of the present and something you should avoid. But there is this idea that these things that are around us are, quote unquote, natural, but in fact, they’ve often been constructed. That doesn’t mean they’re bad, but it does mean that they can be changed if we want to. So note, I’m not advocating that we should subsidize farm labor, that’s not the point of the argument.
The point of the argument is that people who are saying that this or that is inherently less productive or inherently less affordable Are missing the point that there’s reasons underneath what they do that have nothing to do with some imagined agricultural productivity.
Ross Kenyon: Oh, sure. I’ve seen arguments like that all over the place. Perhaps most famously against Norman Borlaug is Vandana Shiva’s work saying like, like if you take into all the ecological costs and the subsidies, is this actually feeding the world? Is this actually cheaper? Answer, probably not.
Charles C. Mann: Yeah. And I would take her calculations like all these calculations with a grain of salt because it’s very difficult to imagine, you know, what the actual cost would be in some completely different social arrangement.
Ross Kenyon: Oh, sure. I think that’s perfectly fair. I’m not sure. I don’t have the chops necessary to evaluate these competing, highly technical claims either. So I read these things and go, hmm, seems plausible.
Charles C. Mann: I just think you should be skeptical of them. You know, to take the sort of Vandana Shiva argument about industrial agriculture, what she’s essentially saying is that there’s environmental costs and the environmental costs are so high that they wipe out all the gains. And you can say, well, there’s an entire literature of economics about how to do those kinds of external costs are called externalities. You know, the first textbook on externalities is written back in 1918. And so there is a whole lot of things that you could do that would dramatically reduce it.
For instance, there’s all kinds of reasons right now that farmers way overuse fertilizer because it’s cheap and cheap because it’s subsidized in all kinds of different ways. If it was less cheap, Possibly people might look at using it more sparingly or using it in ways that are less likely to cause washout into rivers and streams or might be formulated different or, you know, and you can list a whole variety of things. There’s nothing inherent in We’re talking about the way that we do fertilizer right now, which is one of the main costs, right?
Because the fertilizer goes into the streams and goes into the rivers and ends up in the ocean, causes fertilizer in the ocean is still fertilizer, causes these immense blooms of Algae and other aquatic plants, they die, they drop down to the bottom, bacteria eat them, the bacteria multiply in such a frenzy, they suck all the oxygen, and you get these dead spots. There’s one in the Gulf of Mexico that’s about the size of New Jersey, there’s one in the Bay of Bengal, it’s three times bigger than that, and that’s a huge environmental cost.
So Vandana Shiva is totally right about drawing our attention to that, because when we eat our We’re not thinking about the fact that producing that wonder bread led to this gigantic dead spot in the Gulf of Mexico. She’s dead right about that. But there’s nothing inherent about using fertilizer that automatically gets you there.
Ross Kenyon: Okay, yeah, this is great nuance and thank you for bringing it here. Charles, I’m going to reveal my bias here and then maybe you can tell me what I’m missing, which is that Nori as a whole, the company’s premised around the idea that technology can help us solve environmental crises, notably climate. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Because I had to because everyone was yelling and saying not to watch this movie. So of course, I had to watch it immediately. And because that’s just the way that the brain works.
And there’s a line in there that always bothers me, which is paraphrasing here, that the same way of thinking that got us into this Right, right. Like there’s already a certain amount of warming that’s locked in. We have to start pulling carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. We can’t just retreat and then go to Hobbiton and do our, you know, like live our little permaculture lives. That’s a great thing to do. But we also need like large scale technology to make that sort of profits lifestyle even possible at this point.
What am I missing?
Charles C. Mann: So first, I’m not going to argue with you what’s wrong about the argument that, you know, the same technology is not the same technology. You know, the kind of things that you’re talking about, carbonating and photovoltaic panels and windmills and, you know, power lines that don’t waste 50% of their power and resistance and all that, that’s not the technology that got us into the problem. The technology that got us into the problem is coal-fired power plants, and we’re dramatically reducing their number. So, to me, it’s like you’re saying, like, You’re allergic to apples, so therefore you shouldn’t be eating oranges.
You know, it’s a nonsensical statement. So that part, I’m not going to disagree with you. What I would argue is both sides involve that this living in Hobbiton in a modern sense involves all kinds of technology and it’s just different kinds of technology. Right now, if you put solar panels on all the roofs and little ones in the backyards and you made them much more efficient and you develop methods of localized storage, which are the sort of idea that Elon Musk talks about when you say that you would store in his batteries, I just don’t think we know how much that could do.
Right now, the most efficient solar panels are on the order of, I think, about 48% is the incident radiation coming in right now. They’re very, very expensive because we don’t choose to subsidize them. You know, there are lots and lots of things in our society that we choose to subsidize. If we wanted to, we could choose to subsidize that. We could kick up a lot more on the research into how to switch power back and forth. We could kick out, we could subsidize this. And, you know, we could get a lot of the way towards Hobbiton.
If we wanted to, it would be difficult, but all paths are going to be difficult. Doing the other kind of path, you know, where we construct large-scale centralized installations and somehow send the power all around, like, you know, the square mile and the In the Sonoran Desert, that’s also extremely difficult. So I just feel that we just don’t know. And one of the things that I, if you don’t mind me, I’m going to give this a little bit of a tangent. Is okay if I go on it?
Please do. Okay. I feel that the role of ignorance is insufficiently appreciated. There are lots of things we simply don’t know whether we can do. And that means we don’t know that they’re not possible or they don’t know if there is possible. All we can really say is that we could actually go quite a bit of the ways towards Hobbiton if we wanted to do that, or we could go quite a bit in the opposite direction if we wanted to do that. And we don’t really know because we can’t predict the future what the fundamental consequences would be.
And so I tend to get upset or annoyed when I hear people saying with great confidence this or that is not possible because I think the answer is we just simply don’t know. And it all comes back to that gigantic Lovecraft quote that I forced into this episode. Great.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I think humility is underappreciated all over the place. And we try to do that. Like basically the number of things that I hold with any degree of certainty shrinks as I get older. Are you that way too?
Charles C. Mann: Yeah. I mean, you know, one of the things that this also tells me though, is that because we don’t appreciate, understand, you know, we’re very lousy at predicting the future. We should maybe, both sides should be a little bit less dogmatic, and we should investigate what you can do with very, very small-scale nukes, for example. I don’t think we know the consequences well enough for either side to, similarly, we should look at what GMOs can do. We should also try to see, well, how much can we get with neighborhood solar?
Why not really kick it up and run some serious demonstrations of the best neighborhood solar technology we can and see what we get?
Ross Kenyon: I think that’s a fine way to go. I think we need all the experiments and all the best we can. Right.
Charles C. Mann: And it wouldn’t be so hard. My wife is an architect and designer, and she’s very interested in sustainability. And so she’s been building these small scale near net zero energy homes. There should be some way for her to, you know, programs she could apply to, to convert them into totally neighborhood, locally powered and see how that worked. Seems fine to me. You know, to build a little version of Hobbiton and look at it.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. Charles, one of the applications of your ideas that we played with in the Nori Patreon Book Club is to what degree does this apply on to how one lives one’s personal life? And I ended up seizing upon a passage I really like. It’s the most famous passage from Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments. It’s called The Poor Man’s Son. Are you familiar with that? I read the book in college. So the answer is I should be more familiar with it than I actually am.
Yeah, it might be worth revisiting this section. It’s definitely the most famous and it’s beautiful. It starts with the poor man’s son whom heaven in its anger has visited with ambition, which I think is such a powerful opening. But Adam Smith sees ambition and his desire to get rich as a form of a curse. Granted, the person in the process of trying to get rich develops many instruments and technological advances that makes our lives better. But this sort of burden of ambition doesn’t necessarily produce the most livable or life, one could say.
For instance, I don’t personally want to be Elon Musk. I don’t want to live that. I was just thinking the same name. It’s funny. Oh, yeah. Well, you know, I’m glad he’s a father now. And that’s great. Him and Grimes have bad ability I saw. But he’s also got like six other kids. Jeez Louise. Oh, and that too, I guess. Yeah, yeah. I guess someone just caught my imagination. But yeah, that life seems is so demanding. Like basically, I’m relatively prophet-esque.
I don’t expect to be remembered very long, especially not by people very far removed from my own family. I’m relatively okay with that. I think the most important thing most people will do is raise children that are halfway decent, compassionate, kind people. I think that’s great. And I have the same ambitions myself. Anything I get above that is just sort of happenstance. But I am so glad that there are Elon Musk out there because it’s a form of human sacrifice. Ambition is this sort of like wizardly developing new things that we need that.
But I think they lay themselves at the altar for the benefit of humanity. By their own curse of this ambition. Does that halfway make sense to you?
Charles C. Mann: Yeah. I should, I guess, in fitting to their theme, point out that on the opposite side, Bill McKibben has sort of wrecked his life to lead 350.org. I know him very slightly, and I can tell you, he does not enjoy being a public and political figure. It’s not fun for him. He’s doing it because he believes it. By the way, that documentary that we were talking about, that was... Something that really annoyed me about it, the idea that Bill is a corporate sellout.
I’ve disagreed with him plenty. Sometimes he’s been so mad at me we haven’t spoken. But geez, the idea that he’s not a figure of huge integrity is completely ridiculous. You know, he’s kind of sacrificed his life in exactly the same way to try to create a political movement for fighting climate change. And I think that’s an, you know, again, with a theme of social and political arrangements, that’s absolutely necessary. No politician is going to stick their neck out to do it unless there’s a lot of constituents who are behind it.
And they have to show it. And organizations like 350.org are for that.
Ross Kenyon: That’s great. That’s a great additional example, too, from a totally different angle. So, yeah, I don’t know that I would want to change places with any of those people. It sounds very stressful. Everyone scrutinizes everything you do and calls you a bad person. It doesn’t sound fun.
Charles C. Mann: You know, people call McKibben, you know, you know, if his ideas were for the, we would all die and this sort of thing, right? That can’t be pleasant.
Ross Kenyon: No, no. Well, I guess one thing that’s comforting in the darkest of ways is your relationship with Lynn Margulis. That’s one thing that we haven’t even gotten here. But what is, what was that like? And then also, does this wizard and prophet dynamic even make sense in the face of her insights, which, what even were they?
Charles C. Mann: No. So that was part of the reason I included her because she’s like a critic of the entire thing. I wanted to incorporate the idea that there’s perspectives from which everything I’m talking about just is stupid and isn’t even worth considering. So her point of view is Lynn Margulis is this famous biologist, right? Famous especially for her contributions to understanding the micro world of bacteria and viruses and protists and all these other different tiny creatures. And from her point of view, which is pretty justifiable, they’re what’s important about life on Earth.
They’re 99% of the biomass, 99% of the evolutionary creativity in terms of the genetic variability. They’re just amazing. And so people are like this epiphenomena. And the point of view is they’re just a species like any other. They’re like protozoa, not fundamentally different. And she argued that this was Darwin’s key insight. You know, Darwin talked about evolution, but before you could talk about evolution, you had to have the idea that there is a single set of laws that applied to everything, no exceptions. You know, it’s not like dogs have special rules that apply only to them.
Evolution applies to everything, including us. We’re just part of nature, just another species among all the others. And one of the other rules is that species that are inordinately successful don’t live very long. Because they either wipe themselves out or they drown in their own wastes, they exhaust their own resources, or all three. So she saw that as happening to humans. And the idea of both wizards and prophets are arguing about ways to save us. If you don’t think that you can be saved because the laws of nature say no, then it’s sort of stupid to have an argument between them.
Ross Kenyon: On the one hand, I like that she just out-pessimists the prophets in the most serious of ways, but also I find it kind of comforting to feel like it takes the pressure off the human race a little bit. You’re like, whenever you zoom out and think deep time, it really calms me.
Charles C. Mann: She regarded me as a sort of a sentimental sap, you know, reading books about polar bears and the like, right? And she thought that We were completely deluded if we thought that we were special. She liked to say this. I mean, I didn’t know her well, but she knew me well enough to prick my bubble whenever she could. And she’d say, oh, you think we’re special? Somehow a different species from everybody else. How nice it must be to be you. You know, that kind of thing.
And if you look at it her way, you can say, well, we’re conducting this gigantic experiment now to find out if we’re just a species like everything else or if we are actually capable of changing in ways that no other species can. She would say, as a betting person, she would say the odds are very definitely they were not special. Right. And, uh, I think, though, that if she were around and we were talking now, that even she would say that if we were successful, that really would mean we were special.
That would be an astounding thing. It totally would be. It would be really cool, right? You know, if success is not given, then to actually be successful would be just awesome.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I think so. Well, Charles, we didn’t even get to talk to your other books in 1491 and 1493, which I have read in the last year. I read both of them. Made a really big impression too. I like this focus on... Well, one thing that’s come up quite a lot inside of Nori and also in the book club is this idea that Native Americans are this sort of noble savage, this romantic idea of them as interacting with this primeval force and not changing it.
And now, of course, we know and your work has documented that agree to which humans have, and indigenous people in particular, have shaped these environments. So I think that’s a really cool insight. But I’m wondering, like, bigger than that, is there some connection between your work on indigenous peoples and the Columbian Exchange and also Wizards and Prophets? Like, what is the connection?
Charles C. Mann: Well, I thought of these two books mentally. I mean, I should first say I’m kind of embarrassed to talk about this. And I was hoping you wouldn’t bring it up because... You thought I’d forget, huh?...Is going to... Sound really pretentious. And the reason it’s going to sound pretentious is that it actually is pretentious. Oh, no. I got to know what this is. So I apologize in advance. I thought of these books as a trilogy. Already bad. Why is that bad?
That is not necessarily bad. Oh yeah, right. Just everybody wants to read a trilogy. The first one in their past, present, and future, you know, sort of the past represented by 1491 about the world that was created The present being the 1493, which is this ricocheting of environmental consequences around the world. And then the future, which is how we’re going to get out of the situation that we’re in, which is what’s discussed in The Wizard and the Prophet. But unlike normal trilogies, they don’t say one, two, and three, and you can read them all in any order.
Ross Kenyon: That’s cool. So, okay, I guess that makes sense to me because you’re saying that the world that we live in from 1493 and the Columbian Exchange, when you have various organisms crossing giant barriers that had never previously been superseded in a large way, that’s still the world we’re living in right now.
Charles C. Mann: Right, right. And it’s a world of globalization. So one of the funny things is that, you know, there’s these various protests against globalization. I’m sort of thinking, man, you’re locking the door in like 500 years after that particular horse has been stolen. You know, we’re living in a globalized world and the current president, you know, trying to stop that. Just, you know, who are you kidding?
Ross Kenyon: Fair enough. And then so our choices for the future is whether we follow a wizardly or a prophetess kind of path or maybe some hybrid. What is the choice that we have in front of us?
Charles C. Mann: Oh, you know, we can decide. I mean, there’s nothing – because these are all human arrangements, there’s nothing that says that you couldn’t combine parts of the wizards and the proper fusion. It’s not like we’re dealing with laws of physics. You know, I can certainly invent scenarios of more, you know, greater or lesser plausibility that would combine them. But, you know, people seem to typically fall onto one end or another of this particular spectrum. But it could be different. And, you know, I guess a little bit in the back of my mind, I hoped that reading it all sort of black and white in my book would inspire the reader to think about ways of escaping that particular paradigm.
How are you feeling, you personally, yourself, Charles C. Mann? Are you feeling more wizardly or more like a prophet these days? Oh, boy. I guess in a certain way, I’m feeling both because you’re seeing in the current crisis with the coronavirus, the necessity for both science and community. In the sense that we really need to come up with some scientific advances and test them properly and rapidly disseminate them. And that’s going to be very difficult to do without some kinds of centralized controls. But then while we’re doing that, we also need to have functioning communities in which we all look out for each other.
So here’s a case in which both are needed. People sort of splitting into this kind of funny thing where people are focusing either on the community measures or saying there’s going to be treatments and vaccines and so we don’t have to worry.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I suppose so. And it appears that the wizard and the prophet as a set of paradigms for understanding these decisions goes far beyond just environmental ones. It just seems like maybe this is much broader than that.
Charles C. Mann: I think so. I mean, these are, you know, you can find echoes of this, you know, Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson’s famous arguments about whether the real part of the country is located in the city or the country, right? Yeah, sure. Yeah, I could see that. And Locke versus, and Voltaire versus Rousseau. You know, these are modern versions of philosophical disputes that have been going on for centuries.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I love that. I think this is such a good way to teach these concepts and to play with them. And I think this is, if I was trying to bring someone into like the environmental space, I think this is a very useful rubric and also a heuristic for testing how people like what their inbuilt assumptions and values are. I think it’s a great tool for doing so. Kudos for that. Well, thank you. Yeah, my pleasure. Well, Charles, if someone wanted to keep up with your work, obviously they should read your masterpiece, your trilogy, your pretentious trilogy.
It’s not that bad. That wasn’t the most grandiose thing I’ve ever heard on this show. I probably said worse myself, so don’t be too hard on yourself. Okay. How should someone keep up with your work? Oh, I don’t know. I’m working on another book, and when it comes out, you can buy it. Buy it in the hardcover, people. Really, really help this guy out.
Charles C. Mann: Yeah, exactly. Apparently now what they want you to do is buy it all the first week so that it rockets up the bestseller list. I was told by my publisher recently that I hadn’t really thought about it, but pre-orders on Amazon, he said, are gold.
Ross Kenyon: Is that right? That’s good to know. Are you able to tease us a little bit with what it might be about?
Charles C. Mann: Yeah, it’s a personal thing for me. Related to the stuff I’d done before, but personal. When I wrote 1491, it was originally supposed to have another final chapter about the North American West. That’s where I grew up. It’s an area that has, you know, obviously special personal meaning to me, kind of about the deep history of the West. And when I outlined it, the outline for the chapter was longer than all the other chapters. It would be unwritten, and I tried to cut it down, and it just didn’t work.
So I ended up cutting it out completely and papering together an end. If you look very carefully at the end of 1491, you can still see the sutures and the scars where I sort of lashed together an end. And it’s been sticking in my mind, and I finally thought, well, I’ll see what I got. And last year, I wrote out a lengthy outline, and I realized, wait, this actually is a book of its own. And it’s about trying to consider the West in terms of its The future is part of its ancient history.
What we know about the West, without going into too much prediction, is that it’s going to be hotter and drier than it is today. We know that it’s going to be roughly 40% Hispanic and something like 8% Asian. And we know that water issues are going to be really, really important. And we also know, this is probably the most, quote unquote, controversial, that the 274 federally recognized tribes in the West are going to gain more and more sovereignty. I mean, that’s the trajectory they’ve been on since the 1960s.
And so in 2050 or something like that, there will be essentially almost 300 small nations in the West. In this time of environmental convulsion and tremendous mixing. So the conventional history of the West, which involves the frontier and people coming in from the East and nature being tamed and the West essentially disappearing, just doesn’t seem very relevant to that. And so it’s a history of what the West might be in the future.
Ross Kenyon: I love it. I want you back on the show to talk about it. We can even time it so it helps with your publisher. Oh, geez. Thanks. I’m from Arizona and have a lot of affection for the Southwest, spend so much time out there. I am very interested in this. I can’t wait. When might this come out? Well, I’m hoping it would be next year sometime, probably a year and a half from now. Yeah, book publishing with their long lead times.
Charles C. Mann: Well, this is actually good, though, because if you think about it, what it means is it forces you to try and imagine something and to write something that will have some value beyond the immediate. That’s a good point. Yeah, that makes me feel better about it. I’m hoping that I wrote 1491. It was published in 2005. And I was kind of tickled to hear that you read it last year and had some value to you. I thought, oh, wow. It’s sticking around a little bit.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, that thing holds up as far as I can tell. It’s great. And then you’re also on Twitter. I see that. Yeah. What is your handle there? Charles C. Mann. All of these links will be in the show notes if you’d like to buy Charles' books or follow him on Twitter. Is there a website too?
Charles C. Mann: It’s actually down. And then while I was down, I was tinkering around with it. My website expired for, I don’t know, an hour. And the Domain Snatcher got it up. So I have to deal with that, which I will do as soon as I finish this chunk of the book.
Ross Kenyon: Okay. Yeah, good advice. Good luck. I’ll keep my eyes peeled. This is what happens when you are just a person and you’re fighting algorithms. Yeah. Oh, wow. There’s the man versus technology. There you go. Very unsuccessfully versus technology. Yeah. Yeah. You lost. You got skynetted. Oops. Well, thanks for being here, Charles. That was a lot of fun. I learned a lot. And thanks for stimulating my mind. And also the Patreon book group is grateful for giving us such fruitful terrain for which to march over.
So thank you.
Charles C. Mann: Oh, it’s my pleasure. That’s what I wrote the book in the hopes it would do. And so thank you very much for the kind words.
Ross Kenyon: My pleasure. And if you like the show, please rate and review us on iTunes or Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Podbean, wherever you listen to shows. And thank you so much for listening. Well, thank you so much for listening. If you like the show, please rate and review it in Apple Podcasts and or Stitcher. It really helps us a lot to get this content to a wider audience. If you think what we’re doing is useful, interesting, fun, hopefully all three, we’d certainly appreciate your rating and review.
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