The wizard and the prophet: two groundbreaking scientists and their conflicting visions of the future of our planet - Brossura

Mann, Charles C.

Brossura

ISBN 10: 1509884173 ISBN 13: 9781509884179

Casa editrice: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018

Riassunto

In forty years, the population of the Earth will reach ten billion. Can our world support so many people? What kind of world will it be? In this unique, original and important book, Charles C. Mann illuminates the four great challenges we face – food, water, energy, climate change – through an exploration of the crucial work and wide-ranging influence of two little-known twentieth-century scientists, Norman Borlaug and William Vogt.

Vogt (the Prophet) was the intellectual forefather of the environmental movement, and believed that in our using more than the planet has to give, our prosperity will bring us to ruin. Borlaug’s research in the 1950s led to the development of modern high-yield crops that have saved millions from starvation. The Wizard of Mann’s title, he believed that science will continue to rise to the challenges we face.

Mann tells the stories of these scientists and their crucial influence on today’s debates as his story ranges from Mexico to India, across continents and oceans and from the past and the present to the future. Brilliantly original in concept, wryly observant and deeply researched, The Wizard and the Prophet is essential reading for readers of Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens or Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel, for anyone interested in how we got here and in the future of our species.

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In just three decades - by about 2050 - the human population of the Earth will reach ten billion. This will present fundamental, even elemental, problems: How to feed ten billion? How to provide ten billion with water? How to keep ten billion warm in the cold and cool in the heat? And how to do all this without irreparably harming our planet? To explore these challenges, Charles C. Mann goes back to the 1950s and 60s and vividly brings to life two individuals who established the distinct schools of thought that still dominate our ideas about these issues. On the one hand is `the Prophet', ecologist William Vogt. Crippled by childhood polio, Vogt spent years struggling through the remotest regions of Latin America - including, memorably, the hellishly beautiful guano islands of Peru - to assemble what became the basic ideas behind today's global environmental movement. Environmentalists who have followed Vogt's lead see the world as bound by immutable biological limits and our rising affluence as a threat. Unless humankind drastically reduces consumption, they argue, our growing numbers and appetite will overwhelm the planet's ecosystems. On the other hand is `the Wizard', Norman Borlaug, the legendary plant-breeder who in 1970 won the Nobel Peace Prize. Born into abject poverty, Borlaug became the primary figure in the `Green Revolution' of the 1960s, which used new agricultural technology to raise global grain harvests, helping to avert tens of millions of deaths from hunger. Today, he has become the emblem of `techno-optimism' - the view that science and technology, properly applied, can help us produce our way out of our difficulties. To those who take Borlaug's position, affluence is not the problem but the solution. Only by getting richer and smarter, they say, can humankind invent and apply the new discoveries that hold the key to a prosperous tomorrow. Can we bend nature to our will or are we, like all other species, bound by its inexorable laws? Mann tackles this crucial question with eloquence, clarity and evenhandedness, exploring Vogt and Borlaug's ideas before turning to the fundamental problems raised by rising human demands on our planet and the possible solutions that each approach would demand. Ranging from Mexico to India, across continents and the earth's oceans, from the past to the present and future, brilliantly original in concept, wryly observant and deeply researched, The Wizard and the Prophet is essential reading for readers of Noah Juval Harari's Sapiens or Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel, for anyone interested in how we got here and in the future of our species.

Dettagli dell'edizione

• Editore: Palgrave Macmillan
• Data di pubblicazione: 2018
• Lingua: Inglese
• ISBN 10: 1509884173
• ISBN 13: 9781509884179
• Rilegatura: Copertina flessibile
• Numero edizione: 1
• Numero di pagine: 616
• Contatto del produttore: non disponibile
• Persona responsabile: non disponibile