The Wizard and the Prophet2

by Charles C. Mann

  The United Nations asked UNESCO to assist in preparing for the global summit, but Huxley was not inclined to play along with this Pinchot-inspired endeavor. In an amazing display of political legerdemain, Huxley managed in December 1947 to wrangle approval from the reluctant member nations of the United Nations to hold a second, competing global conference on resources. Paid for by the United Nations, like the first, but controlled exclusively by UNESCO, it would take place at exactly the same time and same place as the other conference. But it would trumpet a more Muir-like vision of the future, counteracting (or so Huxley hoped) the first conference. Approval in hand, the elated Huxley flew to Washington, D.C. That was when he met with Vogt and U.S. officials.

  In the boardroom of the National Academy of Sciences, Huxley described his plans. Not only did he want UNESCO to stage a parallel conference, he wanted to create a parallel environmental bureaucracy, independent of UNESCO but financially supported by it. As the new organization’s director later put it, it would “weld the tiny embryonic nucleus of European and American naturalists already converted to conservation into a powerful, constantly expanding, worldwide network of ‘conservationists’…from all walks of life: politicians, economists, civil servants, pioneer ecologists, field workers, lawyers, directors of NGOs, and so on.” Tens of thousands of people in Europe, North America, and their former colonies belonged to environmental groups, but these groups were separate from each other and had narrow agendas. If they were able to work together, share information, and expand their purview, Huxley believed, they could gather information on a global level and push back as a unified force against destruction wherever it occurred. UNESCO had been given the task of assembling the pure science necessary to understand ecosystems and landscapes. This new, parallel organization would undertake the applied science of conservation to safeguard natural systems against human depredation. Preliminary planning meetings had already occurred.

  Huxley was helping to create a new kind of establishment: a self-appointed network of powerful individuals on a mission. Representing bands of concerned citizens, the environmental establishment would wield some of the functions of government but have little government oversight, subverting what Huxley saw as political leaders’ destructive addiction to growth while benefiting from the clout acquired by that same addiction. Today the network’s members include the Sierra Club, the Nature Conservancy, Greenpeace, the Rainforest Alliance, the World Resources Institute, 350.org, Conservation International, and the Worldwide Fund for Nature (known as the World Wildlife Fund in North America), and hundreds of other groups, local, national, and international, as well as countless environmental foundations, environmental journalism groups, environmental scientists, and environmental government agencies. Despite frequent quarrels and funding crises, these diverse entities have worked together with remarkable effectiveness. (Similar networks have sprung up in the fields of health and development.)

  Over time, this loosely defined environmental establishment—British critics sometimes call it the “green blob”—would go on to lead campaigns against pollution, awaken the world to threats of extinction, acquire and set aside huge tracts of land, and play a prominent role in the sterilization of millions of women, under varying degrees of compulsion. These efforts have been both celebrated as profoundly democratic, in that they represent the views of voluntary groups, and attacked as profoundly undemocratic, in that citizens with opposing views have had little ability to check their actions. Either way, it has been a massive and unprecedented experiment in independent governance. Huxley’s work was a powerful impetus in its creation.

  Two days after the Denver conference finished, the meeting to establish this second organization began. Held in the former royal chateau of Fontainebleau, southeast of Paris, it brought together representatives of 23 governments, 126 nature groups, and 8 international organizations. The attendees—almost all of them white and male—met in the chateau’s ornate Salle des Colonnes, a long room lined by black marble columns topped by gilded capitals. Outside the great windows was a view of the private forest where royal personages had once harried pheasants. As delegates took their chairs on the parquet floor, Huxley laid out his priorities in his opening address. In U.S. terms, he acknowledged Pinchot, but he embraced Muir. Yes, Huxley said, the natural world was a resource for humanity, but it had a greater value entirely apart from its potential for use. And he extolled the extraordinary parade of the world’s creatures, which “are something in their own rights, are alien from us, give us new ideas of possibilities of life, can never be replaced if lost, nor substituted by products of human endeavor.” At the end of the meeting, most of the attendees signed the constitution for what was called the International Union for the Protection of Nature (IUPN).*2

  Vogt was at Fontainebleau as an observer for the Pan American Union. Getting to France had not been easy; Vogt’s immediate superior at the union, unwilling to give him an unsupervised public forum, had refused to let him attend. While Vogt was in Denver, Huxley reached out to union secretary general Alberto Lleras. Just nine days before Fontainebleau began, Lleras reversed the decision. Vogt hastily flew to France, arriving in time to lead the meeting’s second session. No text exists of his remarks, but a secretary summarized his conclusions, startlingly apocalyptic to some attendees but familiar to readers of Road to Survival. In every continent, he said, resources were

  being plundered, by the increasing number of consumers all trying to compensate for their previous economic failures by intensifying their methods of exploitation….Unless he adopted a rational concept of land use capabilities, recognizing that certain lands could produce certain things with ease which could not be extracted from others without risk of exhausting their resources, man must end by destroying himself on a sadly plundered planet.

  Education, Vogt said, was key. People had to learn that if all aspired to a Western standard of living, the pressure on ecosystems would be unbearable. They had to learn about carrying capacity and limits. To Vogt, IUPN’s most important task “would be to promote knowledge of human ecology.” He closed to applause. Vogt, the lead British representative said, “had gone to the root of the matter.” Huxley agreed. Humanity, he said, “was decidedly a scourge, of which he himself and Nature were the first victims.”

  Between sessions, the delegates haggled in the corridors about who would lead the new organization. The Swiss, who had done much of the preparatory work, wanted a Swiss president. Britain demurred; the leading Swiss candidate was vocally sympathetic to the Soviet Union. Equally concerned were the Dutch, who believed their nation’s long tradition of managing nature gave them the edge—hadn’t they kept back the sea for centuries? Huxley wanted someone from the United States, which was paying most of the bills for the U.N., UNESCO, and the other new international institutions. He believed, probably correctly, that having a U.S. citizen in charge would help ensure IUPN funding. To his mind, the best candidate was Vogt: a proven administrator, as shown by his Pan American Union work, a patriot who had spied on Nazis in Latin America. He was, unusually, an American who was already an international civil servant.

  Most important, Vogt was sympathetic to Huxley’s ideas. A few weeks before coming to UNESCO, Huxley had written a sixty-two-page philosophical manifesto for the organization. The kind of high-toned rumination rarely associated with international bureaucrats, it posited that UNESCO had a single mission: “to help the emergence of a single world culture.” Evolutionary biology, Huxley wrote, had given our species “the necessary intellectual scaffolding” for this great work. Guided by scientific authorities, humanity would control its own biological and social evolution, replacing random natural selection with purposeful human selection toward a peaceful, interconnected future. Two steps would be necessary to accomplish this “evolutionary progress,” he said: “world political unity” (to create species-wide rules), and global population control (to control human development). UNESCO, he said, should lay the foundation for bot
h. In this unified, self-controlled civilization, nature would be protected as a matter of course.

  Unsurprisingly, Huxley’s manifesto was criticized. U.N. member nations wanted no talk of world government; conservatives rejected his implicit advocacy of birth control; leftists loathed the notion of genetically molding humanity, which smacked of Nazi policies. Huxley officially backed off, though he remained convinced that society should be organized in light of biological principles—and that failing to do so could lead to environmental ruin.*3

  Vogt, for his part, was stirred by Huxley’s plans for the IUPN. In some ways the new organization was a global version of what Vogt had tried to create with the Audubon Society a decade before. But rather than being a citizens’ association, it was an elite corps of government-funded experts that would harness the efforts of volunteer groups. And it was focused on planning—something that interested Vogt, who had seen during the war the feats of mobilization that states could accomplish. To Huxley he suggested that the IUPN pick a Swiss director, but give him the position only until the two simultaneous United Nations conferences. Then Vogt could stand for office—backed, he hoped, by the Pan American Union, which might pay his salary. Huxley agreed to the short term of office, but chose a Belgian: Jean-Paul Harroy, secretary general of the Brussels Institut pour la Recherche Scientifique en Afrique Centrale and the former director of Belgium’s parks in the Congo. The new organization would be based in Brussels, in the same building as Harroy’s institute.

  As befit his newly raised status, Vogt returned to the United States in a first-class cabin on the RMS Queen Mary, a luxury transatlantic liner, arriving on October 14 in New York. Four days later he was a keynote speaker at yet another symposium, this one in the grand ballroom of the Waldorf Astoria hotel, an art deco landmark in Manhattan. With Vogt that day on the dais were, among others, Fairfield Osborn; Bernard Baruch, a long-term presidential adviser; the best-selling, Pulitzer-winning historian Bernard DeVoto; and the best-selling, Pulitzer-winning novelist and organic farmer Louis Bromfield. The discussion moderator was the chair of the House Agricultural Committee. Addressing the group was New York governor Thomas E. Dewey, the Republican candidate for president; the election was two weeks away. Some of the addresses, including the one by Vogt, were broadcast nationwide. When Vogt decried “the obliviousness everywhere in the United States,” he had the satisfaction of knowing that his words were being heard everywhere in the United States.

  Then, suddenly, he was back in his gray office in Washington, D.C. He bowed to his superiors’ pressure and spoke no more in public. While the capital city preoccupied itself with the quadrennial extravaganza of the election, Vogt spent his days on the drudgework of preparing the Denver conference proceedings for publication. Truman won the election by a convincing margin, astonishing political handicappers. In the subsequent weeks of celebration in Washington, Vogt worked, almost covertly, with Huxley and others on the UNESCO/IUPN symposium (the second, competing meeting). Presumably, he also reacquainted himself with his wife; Vogt had traveled solo to Denver, Fontainebleau, and New York City. He was quietly buoyed by the reaction to his book and speeches and the possibility that he might lever himself into the leadership of the IUPN while still keeping his salary from the Pan American Union. There would be a force to educate the world, and Vogt would help direct its efforts. Then, on January 20, 1949, he heard Harry S. Truman’s inaugural address.

  Point Four

  The speech was a call to arms in the battle against Communism. This struggle, Truman said, would have four major fronts, which he detailed in four “points.” The first point was “to give unfaltering support to the United Nations.” The second was to continue supporting Europe’s recovery from the war. The third was to forge with Europe “a joint agreement designed to strengthen the security of the North Atlantic area”—an effort that would lead to the formation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), an alliance against the Soviet Union.

  All of these were already part of U.S. policy. Point Four was something new, and Truman spent more time on it than on the others. “More than half the people of the world are living in conditions approaching misery,” he said.

  Their food is inadequate. They are victims of disease. Their economic life is primitive and stagnant. Their poverty is a handicap and a threat both to them and to more prosperous areas. For the first time in history, humanity possesses the knowledge and skill to relieve the suffering of these people….I believe that we should make available to peace-loving peoples the benefits of our store of technical knowledge in order to help them realize their aspirations for a better life….The old imperialism—exploitation for foreign profit—has no place in our plans. What we envisage is a program of development based on the concepts of democratic fair-dealing.

  Technology-driven economic growth was the way to a better world, Truman said. “Greater production is the key to prosperity and peace. And the key to greater production is a wider and more vigorous application of modern scientific and technical knowledge.”

  Truman’s Point Four, the historian Thomas Jundt has written, “was the opening salvo in the U.S. postwar mission to modernize former colonies through intensive economic and technological development.” Researchers, private groups, and federal officials would join hands to reshape the new nations into affluent Western-style democracies. “The goal was humanitarian—to improve the standard of living” in poor places. But, Jundt notes, “it was also strategic.” By helping former colonies, Truman hoped to prevent them from falling into the Soviet orbit.

  Point Four’s promise of science-driven development was electrifying. India, Pakistan, Egypt, Ghana, Brazil, Mexico—all embraced rapid economic growth as a national goal. Like the agricultural scientists in Mexico who wanted the newest hybrid maize, they wanted all the trappings of modernity: dams, highways, steel mills, power plants, cement factories, pulp and paper mills, universities crowded with STEM students, cities crowded with modernist cement-and-glass slabs. As an ultimate accolade for Point Four, the Soviet Union began promising its allies exactly the same kind of aid to help them reach exactly the same kind of affluence.

  To official Washington, Point Four was a complete surprise. Truman had not consulted a single member of his staff, including his secretary of state, before making this unprecedented commitment to promote the welfare of other nations. The result, Vogt chortled, “was like lifting a rock slab off an ants’ nest. Bewildered bureaucrats, caught with their ideas down, bumped into one another as they asked, ‘What does the president mean? What is new about this plan? Who is going to carry it out? What will it cost?’ ”

  Vogt’s tone was sarcastic but his point was wholly correct: the very fact that Point Four was unprecedented meant that nobody had any idea how to do it. Nobody knew whether aid was simply a matter of passing on scientific expertise or if it also involved transferring the civil norms—Western ideas about private property, limited government, and the rule of law—that had accompanied the rise of that expertise. Nobody was sure whether “development” should focus on agriculture, so former colonies could feed themselves, or industry, so that they could trade and grow wealthy. On top of that, Point Four had no budget, no personnel, no legislative authority—nothing but Truman’s conviction that economic growth had to happen fast for poor countries to prosper and fight Communism. The first post-inaugural meeting of State Department senior staff began with the words: “Well, gentlemen, what do you suppose the President meant?”

  To Truman, the way to accomplish Point Four was simple: put scientists and policymakers together in a remake of the Manhattan Project that had built the atomic bomb. (Warren Weaver, who had just written his Wizardly manifesto about “usable energy,” would have agreed.) And the opening step in this process was the United Nations conference on resources—“the first assault in a global campaign against want,” as The New York Times put it in an article describing the multinational “advance guard” of scientists preparing for the meeting. �
��Day by day these technical experts send an ever-increasing number of charts, graphs, maps, and blueprints to the headquarters of the United Nations, forging the scientific weapons with which the United Nations may carry out the President’s ‘bold new program’ of assistance to underdeveloped countries.”

  Scientific weapons! Vogt heard all this with horror, as did Huxley, Osborn, and the rest of the IUPN. Another dissenter, perhaps surprisingly, was Gifford Pinchot’s widow, Cornelia Pinchot. In a forceful note to Truman in May 1949, she told him that the conference plan had next to nothing about actual conservation; it “ignores the fundamental purpose for which it was called.” Osborn, too, wrote privately to Truman about his concerns. And he worked with Vogt and Huxley on UNESCO’s competing conference, scheduled, like the first, for August.

  Never one to avoid a megaphone, Vogt publicly lambasted Point Four in The Saturday Evening Post, the magazine that had excerpted his book four years before. The title—“Let’s Examine Our Santa Claus Complex”—indicates his tone. Truman wanted to help people who, though poor, were proudly independent, Vogt said. But “American ostentatiousness and discourtesy” abroad would make aid targets “resent our do-gooding to the point of violence.” Point Four would saddle poor nations with huge debts. Worst of all, it would lead to “destructive exploitation” of imperiled landscapes. “If Point Four results in speeding up soil erosion, raiding forests and land fertility, destroying watersheds, forcing down water tables, filling reservoirs [with dams]…and wiping out wildlife and other natural beauties, we shall be known not as beneficent collaborators, but as technological Vandals.”