The Wizard and the Prophet2

by Charles C. Mann

  Not quite Clementsian, not quite Eltonian, focused on practical landscape management rather than abstract science, a believer in hard data who also thought that morality and the spirit were essential to ecology, Leopold often felt that his colleagues could not understand him. In Vogt he was grateful to find a fellow thinker. The contrast between the two men was striking: Leopold soft-spoken and ruminative, unfailingly courteous, formal, and sometimes aloof, a physically adept man who hated to travel away from his five children (all of whom became biologists and conservationists); Vogt brash and theatrical, often acerbic, frequently disheveled but a bit of a dandy, ever struggling with his bad legs, a wanderer who gave no thought to having offspring. But on a deeper level they were colleagues, running toward the same goal. Of necessity, they had an epistolary friendship; letters flowed between Peru and Wisconsin. When Vogt returned from Peru, Leopold was both unsurprised and pleased to find that he and Vogt still “had identical views, even tho[ugh] we had hardly seen each other for years.” Vogt, he joked to a friend, “is the leading exponent of my thought.”

  Although Vogt wrote and signed the report to the guano firm, it reads like a collaboration between the two men. If the company wanted to maximize guano production, the report said, it should be very careful about interfering with natural processes—reducing the anchoveta population by fishing, for instance. Almost any drastic change would upset the existing network of ecological relations, lowering biotic potential. As a result, Vogt believed, the goal for Peru’s guano managers should be to keep the islands in the optimal, climax state. In practice, this meant that they should be returned as close as possible to the pristine wilderness that Vogt believed had existed before the arrival of Europeans.

  Despite great effort by Peru, the guano trade collapsed in the 1950s, undone by overharvesting and artificial fertilizers. Today all of Peru’s guano islands together house about 4 million birds, far fewer than the 60 million in the nineteenth century. As shown in these 2014 photographs by the artist Dinh Q. Lê (Central Chincha), the islands are mostly deserted today; the Peruvian government is leaving them alone in the hope that they will someday recover. Credit 13

  Despite great effort by Peru, the guano trade collapsed in the 1950s, undone by overharvesting and artificial fertilizers. Today all of Peru’s guano islands together house about 4 million birds, far fewer than the 60 million in the nineteenth century. As shown in these 2014 photographs by the artist Dinh Q. Lê (North Chincha), the islands are mostly deserted today; the Peruvian government is leaving them alone in the hope that they will someday recover. Credit 14

  For example, Vogt recommended that the Compañía Administradora del Guano eliminate the non-native rats, cats, and chickens on the islands; that it should stop killing native saltojo lizards, because they ate insects that attacked birds; and that it should ban low-flying aircraft, because their alien noise panicked the cormorants, which fled “so frantically that the rush is likely to expel eggs and chicks from their nests.” Because the islands’ surface had been flatter before mining, Vogt suggested that the company use explosives to re-level them, increasing potential nesting sites. And he thought that some artificial breeding zones could be created on the shore that would replace islands ruined by human activity.

  But about El Niños the company should do…nothing. During El Niños, cormorants left their nesting grounds and didn’t have offspring, reducing their population and thus their guano output. But these losses were not actually a problem, Vogt thought. They were natural changes, contained in scale and scope. They were a safety valve, not a risk—a feature, not a bug.

  In this world, death is as important as life. In the periods without [El Niños], the population of guano birds approximately doubles every year. If there were no way of limiting the population, there would in little time be no space or food on the west coast, and not only for the birds….To me it seems that this disorder is biologically necessary, even for the welfare of the birds themselves.

  Indeed, Vogt argued, trying to lift the cormorant population artificially beyond its climax level would lead only to higher death rates in the next El Niño. Guano output might increase for a while, but the long-term results would be worse than if humans had never inflated bird populations. In the end, Vogt told the Compañía Administradora del Guano, Peru could not “augment the increment of excrement.” It could only “help conserve the balance between species continually sought by Nature.” It would have to live within ecological limits.

  Living within ecological limits! Vogt glumly told Leopold he was certain he would have to “jam” this idea “down the throat” of his superiors. As it turned out, he would be doing this to many other people, too.

  Mosaic of Ruin

  Final report in hand, fortieth birthday approaching, Vogt had to make decisions about his life. As his research had progressed, he had hatched a scheme: he would use his still-incomplete guano-bird data to lever himself into a Ph.D., probably at the University of Wisconsin with Leopold, without having to attend classes (or taking as few as possible). The credential would gain him standing in his goal to mobilize forces for conservation, though writing the dissertation would take several years. Should he stay in Peru to complete his research or go directly to Wisconsin and start his Ph.D.? Vogt was gearing up to make some decisions when, in December 1941, Japanese planes bombed Pearl Harbor.

  A patriot, Vogt wanted to be of service in the coming war, but worried that he was too old and too lame. To his surprise, the U.S. State Department asked him to leave the guano company and use his scientific contacts and now-expert Spanish to travel through Chile, Colombia, and Ecuador, reporting on the level of sympathy there for Germany and Japan. Vogt immediately agreed. Juana was asked to snoop out Hitler’s fans on the embassy cocktail-party circuit. In the hunt for Nazis, Vogt gave talks at Latin American Rotary clubs, hobnobbed with Peruvian agricultural and trade officials, spoke to Ecuadorian academics, tramped through Chilean national parks, and attended countless soirées with Juana. Along the way, he decided he would study with Leopold in Wisconsin. Jubilant, Leopold obtained a fellowship for Vogt. Ready to resume studies, the Vogts returned to the United States on May 2, 1942.

  They spent a week briefing Washington on the “strategically placed Nazis” they had identified in Latin America. Impressed, Army Intelligence and the State Department asked the couple to do more intelligence work there. Vogt could not refuse. Two weeks after arriving in the United States, he and Juana returned to South America for a three-month tour. Vogt sadly wrote to Leopold that it would be impossible for him to go to Wisconsin.

  After another round of information gathering, a grateful State Department ensured Vogt’s appointment, in August 1943, as head of the newly created Conservation Section of the Pan American Union. Created in 1890 to promote cooperation in the hemisphere, the union was based in Washington, D.C. (After the war it was reconstituted as the Organization of American States, its current name.) Spurred by the Audubon Society, most of its members in 1940 had signed the Washington Convention, an agreement to protect endangered species. The treaty was a pioneering recognition of the value of biodiversity. It was also toothless—it required no particular actions, and there was no provision for enforcement of its terms. The Pan American Union established an office—the Conservation Section—to monitor whatever treaty-related events might occur. The U.S. State Department, which was bankrolling the Conservation Section, wanted a U.S. citizen to lead it, and Vogt was among the few U.S. ecologists with experience in Latin America and fluent Spanish. As a Nazi-hunter, Vogt had good anti-fascist credentials, a must-have in Washington in 1943. He was given the vague task of examining the relationship of climate, resources, and population to economic development.

  After studying seabirds on Peruvian islands, Vogt was being asked to move his purview to human beings across an entire hemisphere. But he didn’t see it as a huge shift. Ecology, he believed, provided a basic intellectual framework for understanding both birds on small islands an
d humans on big continents. It told him that both species were part of ecosystems ruled by biological law and shaped by their environment. Understand the rules and measure the environment, and you could comprehend the future. That is what he planned to do.

  During the next five years, Vogt visited all twenty-two independent nations in the hemisphere. Again and again, he flew to cities, ate in nice restaurants, stayed in lovely colonial hotels, then went outside the cities—to discover wreckage. Eroded foothills in Mexico. Poisoned rivers in Argentina. Devastated fisheries in Venezuela. Drained aquifers in El Salvador and Honduras. Perhaps worst was the deforestation. Forests were vanishing across the Americas, promoting erosion, which led to floods that ruined fields, which in turn pushed farmers to clear new land.

  In Vogt’s discussions with Leopold, he had absorbed the other man’s teaching that civilization depended on the health of its sustaining ecosystems, which in turn depended on the soil. A thin but immeasurably rich skin on Earth, the soil was quite literally the foundation of the human enterprise. As Vogt toured the Americas he saw this foundation eroding away everywhere, sliding down slopes in nation after nation, impoverishing ecosystems from the Mississippi headwaters to Patagonia. Soon, he believed, the destruction would be unfixable.

  Vogt spent ten months in Mexico, much of it with Juana, at the behest of the Mexican agricultural ministry, writing a guide to conservation for Mexican schoolchildren, and struggling with his cane and braces through twenty-six national parks. Although statistics showed that the country was Latin America’s wealthiest, its landscapes were enshrouded by suffering: impoverished subsistence farmers, scratching at depleted soils, taking down the last stands of timber for their cookstoves. “Unless land-use patterns are radically altered,” Vogt said, “most of Mexico will be virtually desert within a hundred years.” Vogt laid out his case in a “confidential memorandum” to the Mexican government in November 1944. It began bluntly:

  Mexico is a sick country. It is rapidly losing the soil on which its very existence depends….Its forests…are being destroyed far faster than they are being replaced….Its ecology—the inter-relationship of all the environmental factors—has been so thrown out of balance that many important land values are being wasted. As a result, living standards are constantly being depressed, and disaster lies ahead.

  The wreckage was not confined to Mexico. Vogt prepared reports on each country he visited. Guatemala, he testified, was just a smaller version of Mexico—“Here again, there is little ground for optimism.” Chile was a carnival of deforestation; “the point of view of many Chileans is that…the forest is an enemy to be got rid of by any possible means.” In Venezuela the situation was “daily growing worse.” Colombia was “in an equally bad situation.” From the air, Ecuador “looks as though it suffered from some horrible skin disease.”

  El Salvador was for Vogt the sharpest example of the problem, a harbinger of what lay in store for much of the world. The poorest, most densely inhabited country in the Americas, it was, Vogt believed, “face to face with a crisis” that other places were just approaching. In El Salvador, he insisted, a growing population was colliding with “the progressively rapid destruction of its natural resources, especially its cultivable land.” The country’s people and its resources were like trains racing toward each other on the same track. “El Salvador should act—and act at once.” If it did not, he said, a future of poverty, political violence, and environmental ruin was inevitable.

  What was driving the destruction in the hemisphere, Vogt thought, was consumption. Ceaselessly striving to satisfy their needs, people were stripping nature bare. The consumption had two causes. One was population growth—new mouths meant new demands on the land. Mexican couples, for instance, were having more than six children apiece, and the numbers were rising. The second, equally pernicious cause was the attempt to maximize economic growth.

  Although economists since Adam Smith had championed growth, governments had typically focused instead on promoting national security or economic stability. Indeed, some thinkers feared that untrammeled growth would lead to despotism by concentrating wealth; others argued that continued economic expansion was impossible in developed, mature economies like those in Europe and North America. During the Depression, many U.S. New Deal programs actually were anti-productivity; in the hope of driving up farm incomes by artificially creating shortages, farmers were paid to plow under millions of acres of cotton fields and slaughter huge numbers of pigs. Partly influenced by the British economist John Maynard Keynes, some officials fought back against “scarcity economics” (to use the term of the historian Robert M. Collins). The Second World War strengthened their hand, as the United States pursued all-out production in the name of victory. The Employment Act of 1946 formalized the shift, declaring that Washington was committed to “promot[ing] maximum employment, production, and purchasing power.” Galvanized by the example of the United States, other Western nations also embraced growth as an overriding social goal. “Government and business must work together constantly to achieve more and more jobs and more and more production,” proclaimed President Harry S. Truman.

  Vogt heard these pronouncements with horror. Ecological law was clear, he argued. The “books must balance.” Truman’s call for “more and more production” was intentionally unbalancing the books. “Growth-maniacs” were, Vogt said, warring against the natural systems that nourished them—a war they had no idea they were fighting.

  In May 1945 Vogt laid out his views publicly for the first time, writing an article, “Hunger at the Peace Table,” for the Saturday Evening Post, a popular weekly magazine. Published at the height of the Pacific campaign, “Hunger” was an unsparing look at a future that its author believed would be as dark as the present. It laid out the Prophet’s central tenet: humankind, though “apt to forget it, is a creature of the earth. ‘Dust thou art’ and ‘All flesh is grass’ were not said by scientists, but they are sound biology.” When lower creatures exhaust their resources, Vogt argued, bad things happen. Exactly the same is true for Homo sapiens. The article tallied example after example of overreaching, most drawn from Vogt’s travels in Latin America. But then, provocatively, he switched to the United States’ current enemy, Japan: “Many explanations have been offered for Japanese aggression,” he argued. But, he asked, “can anyone deny that population pressures set off the explosion?” Unless humankind controlled its appetites for procreation and consumption, Vogt said, “there can be no peace.” Disturbed by his message, a dozen U.S. senators asked to meet with Vogt. Interest in his ideas grew further after nuclear weapons were used on Japan in August 1945. The obliteration of whole cities made Vogt’s warning that humankind might destroy itself seem terrifyingly plausible.

  Few felt, then or now, the overriding importance of sustaining the land in the way Leopold and his disciples did. The knowledge made them feel both superior and isolated—the only people with eyes in a world of the willfully blind. All around them others were marching about their business as if the ground were not literally disappearing under their feet. So much folly! So much waste! They were as oblivious to the consequences of their actions as so many protozoa.

  One of the penalties of an ecological education [Leopold later wrote] is that one lives alone in a world of wounds. Much of the damage inflicted on land is quite invisible to laymen. An ecologist must either harden his shell or make believe that the consequences of science are none of his business, or he must be the doctor who sees the marks of death in a community that believes itself well and does not want to be told otherwise.

  How to ring the bell? That was the ever-urgent question. Vogt, Leopold, and their friends saw themselves as benign conspirators, working to awaken a world that was obliviously promoting its own destruction by its quest for growth. But their efforts had little impact. Their voices were small and tinny, drowned out in the roar of war and consumption. People were heedlessly flooding the world, a moronic tide rushing out to the edge of the petri
dish.

  Malthusian Interlude

  Vogt’s views have been called “Malthusian,” a term that has become a weapon of abuse. In its most neutral sense the word refers to ideas espoused by the Reverend Thomas Robert Malthus (1766–1834). Because Vogt shared some of Malthus’s beliefs, the claim that Vogt was a Malthusian is accurate. But it is not especially useful; Malthus’s perspective shifted over the years, and “Malthusian” only sometimes refers to anything he wrote.

  Robert—never Thomas—Malthus was a Cambridge-educated cleric, a dashing figure despite a pronounced speech impediment (he had a cleft palate, untreatable at the time). Born in 1766, he married late, had few children, and was never overburdened with money. He held the first university position in economics—that is, he was the first professional economist—in Britain, and probably the world. As a young man, he was hungry for distinction. He found little opportunity to acquire it at his home in rural Surrey until he took up an argument with his father. Daniel Malthus, something of a freethinker, believed humankind could create a Utopia. His son disagreed, at length. An Essay on the Principle of Population, as It Affects the Future Improvement of Society, published anonymously when its author was thirty-two, created a furor. Malthus followed with a second edition that was five times longer than the first. This edition was signed; Malthus had grown more confident.

  At bottom Malthus’s argument was simple:

  Human populations will reproduce beyond their means of subsistence unless they are held back by practices like celibacy, late marriage, or birth control. But the reproductive urge is so strong that people at some point will stop restricting births and have children willy-nilly. When this happens, populations inevitably grow too large to feed. Then disease, famine, or war step in and brutally reduce human numbers until they are again in balance with their means of subsistence—at which stage they will increase again, beginning the unhappy cycle anew.