The Wizard and the Prophet2

by Charles C. Mann

  Vogt’s ideal society—a network of self-sufficient citizens guided by ecological precepts—harkens back to Thomas Jefferson, who saw virtue arising from agrarian villages, as opposed to the market and the city. It is not a criticism to say that these Jeffersonian views celebrate the rural over the urban, husbandry over industry, intense local connection over mobile liberty, thrifty independence over opulence and commerce. Nor is it a criticism to note that Vogt’s vision of the good life was much like the childhood idyll he lost when he moved to Brooklyn. But it is important to note that others believe that the goal of living well on the planet can be met in different, even opposing ways. Much as Alexander Hamilton opposed Jefferson’s beliefs as unsound, these people see the best way to live with nature as gathering into big cities (which are said to use less resources than spread-out local communities), increasing productivity (because fewer people directly work the land, maximizing output per person), and growing more prosperous (because affluence makes societies better able to clean up environmental mishaps).

  These arguments—the fundamental disputes between Wizard and Prophet—did not take form quickly, partly because Vogt’s life was as unstable as ever. While he wrote Road to Survival, Aldo Leopold made plans to hire him as an ecological economist—a newly created position at the University of Wisconsin, and possibly the first such position in the world. But in April 1948, a few months before Road was published, Leopold suffered a fatal heart attack while helping a neighbor fight a brush fire. A small part of the loss was Vogt’s job.

  Oxford University Press had just agreed to publish what would become Leopold’s masterpiece, A Sand County Almanac. Still mourning, Vogt went to New York to assure the firm that Leopold’s son Luna could and would edit the manuscript (Vogt also went through it). As intellectually indebted to Vogt as Vogt’s book had been to Leopold, A Sand County Almanac appeared with an enthusiastic blurb from Vogt on its cover. Despite Leopold’s elegant prose, the book attracted little initial attention, but in the 1960s it became an environmental scripture, selling hundreds of thousands of copies and introducing a new generation to Vogt’s message of carrying capacity and global limits.

  Two months after Leopold’s death, as part of the publicity push for Road to Survival, Vogt published an excerpt in Harper’s magazine. The article set off alarms in the Manhattan headquarters of the Rockefeller Foundation. In its pages was a veiled but unmistakable attack on the foundation’s Mexico project, work that would come to be associated with a man named Norman Borlaug.

  * * *

  *1 No previous environmental group was quite like what Vogt envisaged. The oldest, now called the Société Nationale de Protection de la Nature et d’Acclimatation de France, was founded in Paris in 1854. It tried to protect rare plants and animals, especially birds, as did similar societies in Sweden (established in 1869), Germany (1875), and Britain (1889). Other groups focused on individual landscapes, like the British National Trust (set up in 1895 to safeguard the Lake District) and the French Société pour la Protection des Paysages de France (1901). The biggest U.S. conservation organization in Vogt’s time, the Sierra Club, concentrated on outdoor recreation for upper-middle-class businesspeople.

  *2 Darwin and Wallace independently came up with the idea of evolution by natural selection, but Darwin today gets most of the credit, partly because he, unlike Wallace, laid out a detailed case for evolution in a long book.

  *3 In what the Yale historian Timothy Snyder describes as “an extreme articulation of the nineteenth-century commonplace that human activities could be understood as biology,” Hitler viewed our species as a group of genetically distinct races warring for survival. Echoing Malthus, Hitler insisted that “regardless of how [any race] raises the productivity of the land…, the disproportionate population in relation to the land…remains.” As a result, the duty of Hitler and every other racial leader was to “reestablish an acceptable ratio between population and land area”—that is, to feed their ever-growing races by seizing an ever-greater share of the planet’s finite resources.

  [ THREE ]

  The Wizard

  More

  Many years later, after he won the Nobel Prize, Norman Borlaug would look back on his first days in Mexico with incredulity. He was supposed to breed disease-resistant wheat in Mexico’s central highlands. Only after he arrived, in September 1944, did he grasp how unsuited he was for the task—almost as unqualified in his own way as Vogt had been when he set sail for Peru. He had never published an article in a peer-reviewed, professional journal. He had never worked with wheat or, for that matter, bred plants of any sort. In recent years he had not even been doing botanical research—since winning his Ph.D., he had spent his time testing chemicals and materials for industry. He had never been outside the United States and couldn’t speak Spanish.

  The work facilities were equally unprepossessing. Borlaug’s “laboratory” was a windowless tarpaper shack on 160 acres of dry, scrubby land on the campus of the Autonomous University of Chapingo. (“Autonomous” refers to the university’s legal authority to set its curriculum without government interference; Chapingo was the name of the village outside Mexico City where it was located.) And although Borlaug was sponsored by the wealthy Rockefeller Foundation, it could not provide him with scientific tools or machinery; during the Second World War, such equipment was reserved for the military.

  Borlaug had spent his childhood working in the fields of an impoverished family farm. He had regarded it as drudgery and wanted to get away. In Mexico he was back to hand tools and draft animals. During the day, the heat was unrelenting; at night, cold damp winds came from the hills. No hotels were near, so Borlaug slept on the shack’s dirt floor. Dinner was a can of stew heated over a fire made from corncobs. Flies were a constant irritant; mice ran over his sleeping bag in the dark. Water came from a bucket; he boiled it before drinking but was often sick.

  Worst of all was the consuming worry that he would prove unfit for the task—that he had, as he said later, “made a dreadful mistake” in coming to Mexico. He wanted through his work to help feed the hungry—a vision that been gathering slowly, almost without his knowing it, since adolescence. But he feared he would fail even to take the first step. Nothing he tried had worked. The plants were dying and he was at odds with his superiors. He had not felt so badly at sea since the first bewildering days after he left his family farm.

  Despite his forebodings, he succeeded. The work that sprang from this neglected patch of Mexico would reach across the world and change lives from Bolivia to Bangladesh. He would be celebrated and denounced, but even his enemies would credit him with fundamentally transforming the human prospect. His supporters would say that he saved a billion souls from starvation, though he always demurred at the total.

  The parallels between Borlaug and Vogt are inexact. Borlaug never wrote a manifesto and mostly declined the roles of theorist and exponent. Instead he became, by the example of his life, the emblem of a way of thought—the Wizard’s way. His success would show, at least to Wizards, that science and technology, properly applied, could allow humankind to produce its way into a prosperous future. To the question of how to survive, his work said: be smart, make more, share with everyone else. It said: we can build a world of gleaming richness for all. And the concomitants of this world—the giant installations, the whirring machinery in the garden, the glare of artificial light in the night sky—are to be embraced, not feared.

  Like any symbol, the image of Borlaug as an apostle of Science simplifies events and flattens ambiguities. But it still captures something about the man—his tenacity, his conviction that logic, knowledge, and hard work would pay off in the end. And it has been a rallying cry. I have met many people who have been inspired by him. When I asked these people about the future, they gave me diverse answers. But often they amounted to “What would Borlaug do?”

  Norm Boy

  In his long life Norman Borlaug would live in foreign lands for decades, but Iowa would
always be home. Armies of prairie grass there had been conquered by his ancestors’ plows. Here and there stood great isolated rocks, castoffs from ancient glaciers. Non-Indians came into the area in large numbers only in the mid-nineteenth century. Ole Olson Dÿbvig and his wife, Solveig Thomasdotter Rinde, emigrants from Norway, were among them. Ole, born in 1821, had grown up on a bend of Sognefjord, the second-longest fjord in the world, in a little cluster of farms too small to be called a village. The land there consisted of beautiful, rich fields above the placid water, but the Dÿbvigs didn’t have much of it and what they did have was wracked by potato blight. Solveig, four years younger, was from an equally poor family on a neighboring farm. In 1854, less than a fortnight after their wedding, the couple set off for the United States. Along the way, they changed their surname to Borlaug, which they hoped Americans would have less trouble pronouncing. It was the name of the home settlement they would never see again.

  After a short stay in Wisconsin, the Borlaugs moved west, to the banks of the Missouri River. The territory was contested by Indians—Dakota Sioux who had been cheated for years by both the U.S. Congress and the territorial government. In 1862 the Dakota lashed back. Enraged beyond measure, they killed hundreds of immigrants and defeated territorial militias in a series of battles before falling to the U.S. Army. Ole and Solveig Borlaug fled the slaughter, driving a covered wagon to Saude, in northeast Iowa.

  A cluster of perhaps forty farming families, Saude had a general store, a feed mill, a part-time blacksmith, a cooperative creamery, and two churches. There were more trees when the Borlaugs arrived than now, stands of oak and poplar, but the low slopes of the landscape still stretched to the horizon as they do today. Visiting the area when the light of the winter sunset was the color of ale, I could picture it as the Borlaugs must have, a landscape at once chillingly vacant and full of promise.

  The new arrivals built cabins from logs chinked with mud; grew clover, wheat, maize, and oats; pastured a few milk cows; let their dogs run free. Half of the area’s inhabitants were Norwegian; most of the rest were Czech—Bohemian, as people said then. Relations between the enclaves were friendly but distant. In Saude I talked to three older men who had grown up in its Norwegian half. All had been told by their parents not to date Bohemian girls.

  Each community gathered on Sundays in its church—Lutheran for Norwegians, Roman Catholic for Bohemians. In the Norwegian church men sat on one side, women on the other. Ministers wore white ruffs and black satin stoles. Services were in Norwegian until the early 1920s. At Christmas the congregation placed a tree in the church entrance, lighted candles tied to the branches. After the service everyone unwrapped presents together.

  The Borlaugs picked Saude for its close-knit Norwegian community rather than for the soil, which was shallow and poorly drained. The wet conditions fostered crop diseases; stem rust attacked wheat so often that most local farmers, the Borlaugs among them, gave up planting it. Poor soil translated into poverty for all and early death for many. The Norwegian church held thirty funerals in 1877 alone—9 percent of its membership. By the beginning of the twentieth century Saude was slowly losing population to Cresco, the biggest nearby town. The grandchildren of the original settlers were abandoning the land their forebears had labored over. Saude was too poor, too lonely, too far from markets.

  None of the Borlaugs ever left for long. For most of their lives all five of Ole and Solveig’s offspring lived within walking distance of their parents’ home. By the first years of the twentieth century, the middle child, Nels, had built up the biggest holding: 165 acres. In August 1913 his second son, Henry Oliver, became the first of his children to marry. Henry’s wife, Clara Vaala, had been raised a dozen farms away.

  Henry and Clara’s first child, Norman Ernest Borlaug, came into the world seven months later, on March 25, 1914. His parents were living in Nels’s home, sharing quarters with Henry’s two youngest siblings. At harvest time the whole family—all of Ole and Solveig’s children, all their offspring and their families—would work together, thirty or so Borlaugs singing Norwegian songs and wrestling with borrowed equipment in the fields. After sunset they gathered for dinner, tired and hungry, warming the house with their bodies. Potatoes from Nels’s patch, beef from their cattle, home-baked bread, hard-boiled eggs, pies with apples from Ole’s orchard. Everyone called the baby “Norm boy,” never Norman. It wasn’t until the boy was eight that his family—by then it included two younger sisters—moved into their own home, half a mile away. Purchased from a Sears, Roebuck catalogue, Modern Home No. 209 (price: $981.00) was built in a boxy, self-contained style—the “foursquare,” to architectural historians—intended to signify solid American values. There was no insulation or plumbing, but it kept out the wind.

  Saude was insular in a way that is hard to imagine now. The Norwegian families clung together so tightly that Norm boy’s parents spoke English with thick Norwegian accents although they had never set foot in Norway. There were no telephones, radio, or television, no mass media of any kind but Nels’s Cresco Plain Dealer, an eight-page weekly concerned almost exclusively with local doings. Sometimes on still winter nights Norm boy and his sisters would sit outside, wrapped in blankets, waiting to hear the Milwaukee train as it pulled into Cresco. “It was the one time we sensed we were part of a wider sphere,” he said. “Those sound waves were our sole connection to the world.” (This quote, like others to follow, are from oral history interviews with Borlaug.)

  A three-mile walk down Saude’s dirt roads was the community school, a one-room structure painted white. Built in 1865, it was lighted by oil lamps and heated by a potbellied stove. Facing the rows of worn desks was a slate blackboard; near it was a bookshelf with a dictionary, an encyclopedia, and a few old children’s books. Outside were two privies, one for boys and one for girls. Norm boy began his education in the fall of 1919; he quickly found his father’s initials scratched into a desk. A single teacher taught the entire school—eight grades, ten to twenty children in all, packed into one 28-by-24-foot space. All students were Caucasian; of the county’s almost fourteen thousand inhabitants, only four were African-American. Mornings began with a ritual bellow of the Iowa Corn Song:

  We’re from I-O-way, I-O-way

  State of all the land

  Joy on ev’ry hand

  We’re from I-O-way, I-O-way

  That’s where the tall corn grows!

  When snowstorms came students rushed home, trying to beat the gale. Once during Borlaug’s first winter a blizzard rose so fast that by the time the children put on their coats the snow and wind were like an assault. Arms shielding their faces, the oldest boys broke the path; five-year-old Norm boy followed.

  Ole and Solveig Borlaug immigrated to Iowa in 1854. Credit 19

  Their grandson Henry (on right) was married in a double-ring ceremony with his wife’s sister and her husband in 1913. Credit 18

  Seven months later, Norman (with his two sisters, Palma and Charlotte) came into the world. Credit 20

  Borlaug’s childhood world was focused on his home. Credit 23

  Bourlaug’s bedroom. Credit 22

  Borlaug’s church (Bourlaug family graves in foreground). Credit 21

  Bourlag’s school. The nearest town, Cresco, was thirteen miles away—far enough that it could be visited only once or twice a year. Credit 24

  We trudged through the swirling whiteness, leaning on the wind, blinded by the sleet and struggling against the clinging waist-deep snow. I was miserable. Icy drafts slipped through my clothes….Snow clung to my face, mittens, jacket. The melt inside my boots numbed my feet. I began stumbling. Soon it became too much to bear….There was just one thing to do: I lay down to cry myself to sleep in the soft white shroud nature had so conveniently provided. Then a hand yanked my scarf away, grabbed my hair, and jerked my head up. Above me was a face tight-lipped with anger and fright. It was my [twelve-year-old] cousin Sina. “Get up!” she screamed. “Get up!” She began slapping me over the
ears. “Get up! Get up!”

  Sobbing, the boy allowed Sina to lead him home. When Borlaug staggered through the door his grandmother had just pulled bread from the oven. Shamed by his display of weakness, he sat down. A slice of bread appeared in front of him, hot enough to melt butter. “No food was ever as sweet as those loaves Grandmother baked the day when I was five years old and nearly died.”

  When not in school the Borlaug children did chores, rising before dawn and working until after sunset. Boys hoed weeds, dug potatoes, milked cows, stacked hay, hauled wood and water, fed chicken, cattle, and horses. Girls tended the vegetable garden, worked the washboard, cleaned house, mended clothing, cooked meals. The toil never ended but complaint was rare. The Borlaugs were subsistence farmers, and if they wanted to eat there was no alternative.

  Norm boy worked dutifully but without enjoyment. He particularly detested harvesting maize. Every ear had to be sliced from the plant, husked on the spot, and flung into a wagon. The sharp leaves cut through gloves and clothes; the boy was scraped and bleeding by the end of the day. According to Noel Vietmeyer, a longtime co-worker who wrote a biography of Borlaug, an Iowa family with a forty-acre maize plot, typical for the time, hand-picked half a million ears every fall. It was, Borlaug told Vietmeyer, a “two-month horror.”*1

  Norm boy saw himself as a worker, not a scholar. But his grandfather Nels passionately believed in education. He had been able to attend school for only three years, but he had pushed his son Henry as far as the sixth grade. Now Nels insisted that his grandson get more. You must have an education! he told the boy. Your knowledge is the only protection you have in this world! Fill your head now to fill your belly later! Norm boy knew he would become a farmer like Henry and that education was unlikely to change this. Nonetheless, he did his homework.