The second civilian was the man who had convened the gathering: Julian Huxley. Huxley was from a distinguished English family. His grandfather, T. H. Huxley, was famed for his bristling advocacy of evolution; his younger brother Aldous was the controversial author of Brave New World; and his younger half brother Andrew, a biophysicist, would go on to win a Nobel Prize. Julian himself had made major contributions to evolutionary theory, lectured across Europe and the United States, collaborated with H. G. Wells on best-selling books about biology, and filmed a natural-history documentary, possibly the world’s first, which won an Oscar. A prominent anti-racist, he was also a prominent advocate of removing “inferior” elements from the human gene pool. He was now the founding director general of UNESCO, the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization. And he was spoiling for a fight.
Urbane, domineering, and gossipy, Huxley regaled the others with detailed accounts of back-room maneuvering in Washington, London, and Paris. The maneuvering was about the shape of the postwar world. Years of conflict had laid waste to big swathes of Europe and East Asia and set off the dissolution of colonial empires. The victorious Allies were naturally intent on rebuilding. In the past, nations had been either colonizers or colonized, rulers or ruled, homelands or possessions. After global war the old hierarchies no longer seemed to apply. A different way of categorizing the world was required. In the new vision, all nations were on a single path from “underdeveloped” (like most of Africa) to “developed” (like Europe and the United States).
Before, the goal had been maximum political power for the imperial home, with colonies feeding it. Now the focus was maximum development for all: bustling industries, vibrant cities, affluent homes full of labor-saving appliances—the consumption-driven economic growth extolled by the economist John Maynard Keynes and his followers. Now the U.S. government was promising that it would “use all practicable means…to promote maximum employment, production, and purchasing power.”
This goal should not be restricted to the United States, believed President Harry S. Truman. Everyone on Earth should be able to live like middle-class Americans! Not only was this the moral objective for Western nations in setting up the postwar order, it would win over former colonies in the struggle against Communism. And the way to reach this idyllic state was by benevolently deploying the latest science and technology—the physics, chemistry, and engineering that had created the atom bomb—to guide growth and reconstruction.
Huxley was appalled. In his view, these ideas would license big corporations to use researchers’ discoveries to pillage what remained of the natural world. Like Truman, Huxley believed that scientific expertise could guide society into a more rational and prosperous form. But he thought it should do this by bringing nature and civilization into balance. Researchers could identify ecological limits, and teach governments how to live within them. Among the biggest obstacles to this biological reordering of the world, in Huxley’s view, were the blindly pro-growth policies of the U.S. government. From the officials in the Academy of Sciences boardroom, sympathetic despite their positions in the Truman administration, Huxley was seeking advice on how to create voices for nature in Washington. He wanted something in addition from Vogt: to know whether Vogt, from Huxley’s point of view a little-known but promising bureaucrat/ornithologist, was ready to step onto the world stage.
Julian Huxley, 1964 Credit 77
After the meeting Huxley and Vogt talked. Surely it was an exciting moment for Vogt. Speaking to Huxley, with his first-class Oxford degree, his links to scientists around the world, his string of best-selling books, was about as far from the Chincha Islands as it was possible to get. And Huxley had sought out Vogt, had questions for him, possible plans. No record exists of their conversation, though presumably Vogt talked about his forthcoming book, Road to Survival. Whatever the course of discussion, it is clear that Vogt satisfied Huxley. The two men kept in touch, sometimes by letter, sometimes through their mutual acquaintance, Vogt’s friendly rival Fairfield Osborn.
During the next year Huxley watched Road become an explosive best seller, making Vogt—and Osborn, who had published a competing book—a prominent advocate for reducing human demands on the world’s ecosystems by reducing human numbers. Huxley and his brother Aldous believed with equal passion in the same cause, but had had much less success in gaining an audience. Meanwhile, Vogt was poised to become a statesman of ecology.
Then it fell apart. Vogt was undone by the same traits that had brought him so far—his fervent ambition, his abrasive insistence on going his own way, his instinct for the sweeping, dramatic conclusion. He recovered, but a few years later was again brought down. This time there was an additional, more important cause: his inability to see the human species in other than biological terms. Vogt was doggedly convinced, Margulis-style, that people were not exceptions to biological rules. And when our species hit the edge of the petri dish, it would take much else with it.
“Forty Thousand Frightened People”
At least they let him resign. He was working for the Pan American Union, a diplomatic forum for the twenty-two independent American nations. It was one thing when he criticized these nations’ stewardship of their natural endowment in thickly footnoted memoranda for the union. It was an entirely different thing when he repeated those criticisms in the press for millions of readers.*1
Vogt’s first article, “A Continent Slides to Ruin,” published in Harper’s in June 1948, had arguably drawn more attention to the state of Latin American landscapes than all of his academic reports together. But its unsparing language had raised hackles in the Pan American Union. Vogt had attacked Chile, for instance, for not having “a single fire warden or forester in its employ,” despite having lost “a quarter of a million acres” to fire two years before. Loggers—“lumber exploiters,” to Vogt—were not replanting trees, leading to massive erosion and floods. In consequence, Vogt predicted, “the greater part” of Chile would become a desert “within one hundred years,” perhaps less.
Unsurprisingly, the Chilean government didn’t like public criticism from someone who was, technically speaking, one of its employees. The Chilean ambassador complained to the Pan American Union’s governing board. This was easy: the ambassador was a board member. Vogt, the ambassador said, had to make a choice: “Continue to propagandize or leave the Union.”
Union secretary general Alberto Lleras Camargo fended off the complaint. Lleras was the former president of Colombia, but he had begun his career by reporting for muckraking newspapers in Bogotá and Buenos Aires. He was reluctant to come anywhere near censorship. In addition, Vogt was a capable, industrious worker whose conservation reports had been useful to Mexico, Venezuela, Costa Rica, and other member nations; through his recommendation, Chile itself had established a national park in Tierra del Fuego. Trying to strike a balance, Lleras refused to fire Vogt but did ask for the rhetoric to be toned down.
Fairfield Osborn, 1960 Credit 78
Two months later, in August, Road to Survival appeared. Vogt had known that his focus on population control would be controversial. A few weeks before publication, he joked to a friend about its likely reception: “A lot people will feel that I should ring a bell and say, ‘Unclean.’ ” To his surprise, the book became what his publisher called “the most dramatic and widely-discussed book of the year.” The repercussions were international; years later, the noted French demographer Alfred Sauvy would recall that in Europe Road to Survival “set off a stir quite comparable to that raised in the beginning of the nineteenth century by Malthus’s Essay on the Principle of Population.”
At a stroke, Vogt and Osborn had put into public view concerns that had been building up for years in parts of the scientific community. Spurred by the war’s environmental destruction and consumption of natural resources, ecologists around the world were warning about pollution, deforestation, erosion, and soil degradation. “Man’s command over nature has grown more rapidly than
his mastery of himself,” the Yale botanist Edmund Sinnott claimed a month after Road’s publication. “Man, not nature, is the problem today.”
Sinnott was president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), then the world’s biggest and most influential scientific body. To scientists like him, Vogt and Osborn were simply affirming, loudly and publicly, what they already believed, and their books were all the more welcome for it. “Anyone with any technical knowledge understands that the dangers described in these books are real enough,” the prominent Yale ecologist G. Evelyn Hutchinson argued.
Hutchinson praised Vogt and Osborn at a special AAAS symposium led by Sinnott and attended by thousands of scientists. The theme and tone of the session were conveyed by its title: “What Hope for Man?” The audience in the great conference hall, according to The New Republic: “Forty Thousand Frightened People.” More than forty thousand, actually: Osborn’s speech was broadcast on a popular nationwide radio program, guaranteeing millions of listeners in those days before television and the Internet.
It wasn’t easy for a diplomatic organization like the Pan American Union to have an employee be the focus of an international uproar. Yet it wasn’t easy to dump him, either. At the same time that the clamor was mounting, Vogt was organizing a large international symposium for the union. Held in Denver in September 1948, the Inter-American Conference on Conservation of Renewable Natural Resources was addressed by President Truman and attended by many of the hemisphere’s conservation officials, including Vogt’s former boss at the guano company. During the thirteen days of the meeting, the 1,500 conferees traveled hundreds of miles to see U.S. conservation projects in the Rocky Mountains and Great Plains. Tucked into a suit as gray as his hair, his baritone rumbling beneath his lightly tinted protective glasses, his limp and cane making him instantly identifiable, Vogt presided over the gathering like a kindly but careworn deity. Delegates repeatedly rose to thank him for his work. Not one of the sections mentioned birth control or overpopulation—a nod to Vogt’s superiors at the Pan American Union. Giddy with success, Vogt said the conference “may well” come to be regarded “as one of the most important meetings of our decade, and even our century.”
In today’s world of cheap air travel and massive global symposia, Vogt’s enthusiasm seems overblown. But after the Second World War a dozen or so international congresses did, in fact, lay out much of what has been the world order ever since. One such meeting in June 1945 chartered the United Nations. Five months later a second set up UNESCO and chose Huxley as its head. These were preceded by an international meeting in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, that created the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, followed by the signing of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade at a conference in Geneva. Hashing out conservation required almost as many sessions as the others combined, partly because the issues were poorly understood—and partly because Julian Huxley was picking a fight.
Huxley had managed to slip protecting nature into UNESCO’s purview, even though it didn’t fit into the organization’s stated focus on education, science, and culture. But there was the vexed question of what, exactly, “protecting nature” meant. Huxley believed that the Truman administration’s view—protecting nature meant using it wisely for human benefit—would end up putting a shiny green gloss on the same old piggish way of doing things. Huxley instead wanted to preserve the world’s most beautiful places by fencing them inside parks and reserves—homelands for marvelous creatures like lions, tigers, elephants, and migratory birds. In these zones, industrial development would not be managed, it would be forbidden. And they would not be small, token efforts, but vast expanses—entire landscapes, permanently removed from human exploitation. An adroit politician, Huxley knew that these ideas would meet resistance.
It’s tempting but not quite accurate to call Huxley’s reaction to Truman a harbinger of the divide between Wizards and Prophets. At the time neither side had formulated its arguments. Vogt had written his book, but its message had not yet become common currency—Huxley, for instance, was trying to protect charismatic animals, rather than seeing himself, Prophet-style, as concerned with planetary ecological limits. Borlaug was still laboring in obscurity. Warren Weaver had not begun to think about hacking photosynthesis, still less to write his Wizardly manifesto about “usable energy.” J. I. Rodale had promised that “the Revolution has begun,” Albert Howard was thundering about the Law of Return, and Guy Callendar was warning about carbon dioxide, but few were paying attention. Truman was two years away from introducing the word “underdevelopment” to the world. Even further off—eight years—was the first commercial nuclear power plant, Calder Hall at Windscale, England.
Instead it might be better to posit that Huxley had unknowingly brought into the international realm a dispute that had been simmering for decades in the United States. The dispute was between John Muir and Gifford Pinchot, two of the more consequential figures in conservation history. Born in 1838, Muir was a Civil War draft dodger and college dropout who became a seer, a bearded, ragged mountain man who seemed to live on air and sleep on the stones of his beloved western peaks. When Muir was growing up, “wilderness” meant to most people wastelands full of dangerous creatures: places to be subdued. Muir came to view those unpeopled areas as spiritual homelands: places to be cherished and saved. “In God’s wildness,” he said, “lies the hope of the world—the great fresh unblighted, unredeemed wilderness.” True meaning, he thought, could not be found in the world’s increasingly crowded, noisy, and mechanized cities. Only in untouched nature could the spirit be redeemed. “Wildness is a necessity,” he said. “Mountain parks and reservations are useful not only as fountains of timber and irrigating rivers, but as fountains of life.” Muir’s relentless advocacy led to the creation of the world’s first national park, Yellowstone, in 1872, preserved largely to protect its geysers, hot springs, and other geological oddities, and the world’s first wilderness park, Yosemite, in 1890. Soon after, wilderness parks were established across the globe, many of them in European colonies; Tsitsikamma, in South Africa, as an example, was set aside a few months after Yosemite.
Pinchot was the first professional forester in the United States. He admired and respected Muir but on the whole regarded the other man’s mystic effusions as hooey. Instead of individual spiritual enlightenment, Pinchot sought the common material good—“the greatest good, for the greatest number, for the longest run.” Born in 1865 to a wealthy family, he was a shrewd self-promoter, clever with other people’s ideas, who cast himself as an avatar of Science (in fact, he had attended a year of forestry school in France, leaving before his professors thought he was ready). An inauthentic scientist but a visionary as authentic as Muir, he proclaimed that the world’s prosperity depended on sustaining its resources, especially renewable resources like timber, soil, and freshwater. He wanted to protect them not by leaving great swathes of terrain free from human influence but by managing forests and fields with an elite cadre of scientific mandarins. “The first principle of conservation is development,” he said. Development had to be conceived in the long term: “the welfare of this generation and afterwards the welfare of the generations to follow.” He said, “The human race controls the earth it lives upon.”
Although Muir and Pinchot agreed on many means, they disagreed about most ends, and became increasingly estranged. President Theodore Roosevelt, the first leader of any nation to place conservation at the heart of his agenda, had gone camping with Muir and thoroughly enjoyed his stories. But he chose to work with Pinchot, appointing him the nation’s chief forester. In this position, Pinchot said, his goal was “perpetuation by wise use.”
As it turned out, both Muir’s rapture over wild beauty and Pinchot’s thoughts of stewardship had a dark side: most of these “untouched” American landscapes in fact were inhabited by indigenous peoples. Yellowstone and Yosemite were turned into parks by expelling people who had been there for centuries. As th
e journalist Mark Dowie has documented, similar dispossessions in the name of Nature have taken place ever since. All too often, the results have been dreadful, both morally, because they involve tearing people from their homes, and practically, because these areas were molded in the shapes of their first inhabitants. The peoples of the U.S. West, for example, burned undergrowth frequently, to discourage insects and encourage the tender new growth that attracted animals. Eliminating fire in the name of forest protection has created a buildup of flammable material that in turn has led to devastating wildfires. Similarly, peoples in the Amazon forest reshaped their ecosystems by creating small clearings, which they filled with useful plants and fertilized with waste and charcoal. The results are some of the richest, most diverse areas in the forest—areas that now risk degradation without indigenous management.
“The Necessary Intellectual Scaffolding”
Following Pinchot’s suggestion, Roosevelt convened a conference on U.S. natural resources in 1908 that led, as I discussed earlier, to an oil panic. Believing that resources for the hungry human enterprise needed to be managed worldwide, Pinchot urged Roosevelt to convene the first-ever global conference on conservation. Roosevelt agreed, but when he left office his successor, William Howard Taft, canceled the scheme. Pinchot lost favor with Taft in an ill-considered political fight and resigned. He bided his time until Roosevelt’s distant cousin, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, became president. Badgered by Pinchot, the second Roosevelt agreed, like the first, to hold a global resources conference, though only after the war. He died while the war was still raging. The indefatigable Pinchot, then eighty-one and suffering from terminal leukemia, turned to Roosevelt’s successor, Harry Truman. In September 1946, one month before Pinchot’s death, Truman called for a conference.
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