Wizards and Prophets, Revisited
Exploring the tension between innovation and conservation and what it means for the future of food.
The seminal 2018 book, The Wizard and the Prophet, by Charles C. Mann tells the tale of two scientists trying to save people and planet in drastically different ways. The Wizard was an agronomist named Norman Borlaug, who started the Green Revolution with innovations such as high-yield, disease-resistant wheat varieties, fed with synthetic fertilizers which significantly increased global food production and arguably saved millions from starvation. The Prophet was an orinthologist and environmentalist named William Vogt, who wrote the 1948 book Road to Survival, which influenced the formation of the modern conservation movement and argued that the Earth's resources are finite, and humans must live within those limits or face catastrophe.
To be a Wizard means you believe the idea that science, technology, and human cleverness can propel us past any apparent limits or problems on our planet. To be a Prophet is to believe that we must heed nature's limits, respect the environment, and reduce our consumption to avoid disaster. Wizards and Prophets both want to ensure the longevity of the human race, yet have diametrically opposing views on how to do so.
Vogt and Bourlaug died in 1968 and 2009, respectively, but their schools of thought live on today in food and agriculture. The Wizards of our modern era include Big Food, Monsanto, and lab grown and plant-based meat companies, to name a few. They’ve collectively raised and earned billions of dollars over the last century and have built food technologies that bend the rhythms of nature to feed an ever growing population. Today’s Prophets include the organic, non-GMO, and regenerative agriculture movements and a rarified category of companies like Patagonia who all innovate by working alongside nature, not in spite of it.
Both Wizards and Prophets truly believe they’re doing good for the world, and both sides have made big contributions to how we feed the world in their own way. These two differing schools of thought collide with each other frequently. The glyphosate debate is one example that underscores this divergence in philosophies. Huge lawsuits have been won in favor of people who claim that they got cancer after coming into close contact with glyphosate. Monsanto, who patented glyphosate, remains steadfast that the chemical does no harm, and actually does good by increasing crop yields to feed more people. To Monsanto, they feel like they’re doing the right thing by promoting monoculture farming, fueled by their chemicals and proprietary seeds. But to Prophets, these industrially farmed, input-heavy monocultures are one of the roots of all evil in the food system. Prophets believe that while these crops grow fast and plentiful, they reduce biodiversity, soil health, pesticide and herbicide exposure, and lock farmers into a never-ending cycle of buying more proprietary GMO seeds and chemical inputs.
The debate on animal agriculture is another example. Prophets generally believe that farming animals more responsibly while also reducing meat consumption can provide a path toward more sustainable animal agriculture. Prophets who support animal agriculture preach that it can be done regeneratively with techniques like Holistic Planned Grazing that can actually help the planet. On the other hand, many Wizards believe that innovations like lab-grown and plant-based meats will enable everyone to keep eating as much meat as they like while making the cow and other food animals obsolete. One side embraces and tries to emulate the natural order of our ecosystems while the other attempts to bend nature to its will.
If your goal is to save a community from starvation without little regard for long term ecological effects, using high yield, Roundup Ready crops will probably solve that problem. It may not make the most nutrient dense or flavorful food and will create a farming system that is dependent on industrial agriculture inputs, but it will make calories as quickly as possible. If your goal is to enable long term food soverignty, biodiversity, and high quality nutrition, then establishing a biodiverse, low input, regenerative farming system is better suited for that. It won’t be as turnkey as planting Roundup Ready seeds and calling it a day, but it’s a more mindful way to feed people over the long term.
Traditional capitalist values make it much more lucrative to be a Wizard than a Prophet. Wizardry is about inventing things to overcome the natural resource limits so consumers can consume more and more each year. Investors and owners of almost every major food company expect that company’s revenues to grow at least 3-4% every year. But our stomachs don’t grow 3-4% every year, so how do food companies find a way to grow revenues?
Unlike items like clothing or electronics, which you can consume as much as your income will allow, you can only sell so much food to a person in a year. All other things being equal, a billionare and a person on welfare have the same appetite, yet the billionare can buy a seemingly limitless amount of sweaters or iPhones. So in order to meet growth expectations, food companies have three main ways to increase revenues: 1) find unclaimed stomachs, by entering new markets and winning new customers, 2) sell more premium priced foods to earn more money per calorie, or 3) reduce the costs of producing a calorie of food either through farming and processing effiencies or inventing cheaper calorie delivery systems like high fructose corn syrup or highly addictive, ultra-processed foods.
Consumption drives modern economies, not conservation. The financial rewards for Wizards to do wizardly things that encourage more consumption are far larger than what a Prophet can earn by convincing society to conserve finite resources. The future of food and our planet depends on rebalancing this dynamic so that consumption and conservation are celebrated more equally. Innovation is necessary for society to thrive, but that innovation needs to responsibly create things that have enduring, real value, rather than driving mindless consumerism.
We need to innovate like Wizards, but conserve like Prophets. It’s time to break down the walls between Wizards and Prophets and take the best of what each has to offer. With the innovative capability of Wizards focusing their efforts on the purposeful and responsible goals of Prophets, society can become better caretakers of our planet and the people living in it.
Footnotes
3 Recent posts from my Substack
3 Highlights from my current reading list
What we know about the health risks of ultra-processed foods by Maria Godoy - NPR
The Meat Paradox by Peter Singer - The Atlantic
On Natural Wine: as an existential threat by Alicia Kennedy - From the Desk of Alicia Kennedy
My email is mike@thefuturemarket.com for questions, comments, consulting, or speaking inquiries.