Wizards, Prophets & the Fate of the Earth

Jan 11, 2019, 05:30 AM

We're pretty clever, we humans, but we ignore unintended consequences at our peril -- like climate change, after a couple of centuries of fossil fuel-driven growth and innovation. Can we innovate our way out of that growing crisis, or must we cut back and conserve if we want a habitable planet? Or both? In this episode, science journalist and author Charles Mann, author of 1491, 1493 and The Wizard & the Prophet, tells the tale of these two competing approaches to the world's biggest problems through the lives of two men -- the 'wizard,' Norman Borlaug, father of the Green Revolution, and the 'prophet,' William Vogt, early ecologist and author of the hugely impactful 1948 book, Road to Survival