The Wizard and the Prophet2 Read online

  Here is Malthus’s argument in more detail:

  Today, Malthus said, British farmers produce a given amount of grain every year—X million tons, let us say. If the nation transformed its remaining forests into farmland and used fertilizer more effectively, Malthus posited, it might double its harvests in twenty-five years—that is, Britain would grow 2X million tons of grain. But even with heroic efforts, Malthus wrote, “it is impossible to suppose” that the harvest then could be doubled again, to 4X million, in another twenty-five years. “The very utmost we can conceive, is, that the increase in the second twenty-five years might equal the present produce”—that is, production could go from 2X to 3X million tons. If Britain kept steadily increasing its harvests by X million tons every 25 years, it would produce 4X million in 75 years, 5X million in 100 years, 6X million in 125 years, and so on. In mathematics, this kind of regular increase, from 1 to 2 to 3 to 4 to 5 and beyond, is called arithmetic or linear.

  Next Malthus examined the rate at which the human species could increase. The most rapidly growing society he knew of was the United States. The best demographic thinker there was Benjamin Franklin, a Pennsylvania polymath. Back in 1755, Franklin had studied the population of what was then England’s North American colonies. As Malthus put it, Franklin argued that the population there “has been found to double itself, for above a century and a half successively, in less than twenty-five years.” In other words, if the U.S. population today were Y million, it would be about 2Y million in 25 years, 4Y million in 50 years, 8Y million in 75, and so on. This kind of increase, from 1 to 2 to 4 to 8 to 16 and beyond, is called geometric.

  Simple mathematics dictates that geometric increases (1–2–4–8–16) always outpace arithmetic increases (1–2–3–4–5). Human reproduction is geometric, Malthus said; all else is arithmetic. Populations, if allowed to grow freely, always overwhelm their food supply.

  People can avoid reproducing at the maximum rate, Malthus admitted, by using what he called “preventive checks”—practices that lower birth rates. Among these are celibacy, birth control, delayed marriage, reduced wages (so would-be parents can’t afford children), and increased education (which Malthus thought would make couples aware of the risks of reproduction). But because preventive checks are difficult, costly, and unpopular, people inevitably stop using them. Population booms.

  When that happens, “positive checks” kick in. Positive checks are the opposite of preventive checks; rather than lowering birth rates, they raise death rates. Positive checks begin with social violence and go on to “epidemics, pestilence, and plague.” Should these fail to reduce numbers enough, “gigantic inevitable famine stalks in the rear, and with one mighty blow, levels the population with the food of the world.”

  Humanity, Malthus thought, will always be one breath from calamity. Permanent victory over deprivation is impossible; prosperity, fleeting, is doomed to vanish. “Misery and the fear of misery,” he said, are “the necessary and inevitable results of the laws of nature.” No matter how good-willed, charity cannot help; aiding the poor leads only to more babies and more hunger. The rules of biology cannot be defeated by ingenuity or virtue. “We cannot lower the waters of misery by pressing them down in different places, which must necessarily make them rise somewhere else.”

  The Essay was a jolt. Unflinchingly logical, elegantly mordant, it seemed to show that hopes for a better future were delusional. Previous thinkers had anticipated these ideas. But Malthus had the luck to publish at an opportune moment. England had been beset in the 1790s by bad harvests, which led to food riots. Rebellion was flaring in Ireland and India, the army was losing a war in Haiti, and neighboring France was undergoing a reign of terror and the rise of a megalomaniac dictator. Malthus’s gloomy book suited its gloomy time.

  As the British economy recovered and the empire expanded, Malthus stood in the way of celebrating the good times, prophesying that they couldn’t last. Progressives, conservatives, nationalists—none liked his message. Inevitably, the attacks moved from Malthus’s ideas to Malthus himself. The poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge dismissed him as “so contemptible a wretch.” Robert Southey, a future poet laureate, called him a “fool” and a “booby”; Malthus’s supporters, he jeered, were “voiders of menstrual pollution.” Oddly, Marx called Malthus a “master of plagiarism.” Equally oddly, Percy Bysshe Shelley described him as “a eunuch and a tyrant.” “From the inmost Soul I abhor them,” Coleridge said of Malthus’s beliefs. “[W]ith all the energies of my Heart, Mind, and Spirit, I defy them!”

  Malthus’s argument is often summarized in a graph, with food production rising linearly and population rising geometrically. Eventually the two lines cross, and the horsemen of the apocalypse pay a call. Credit 15

  Nonetheless, they endured, most notably in biology, where they inspired both Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace, co-creators of the theory of evolution.*2 If populations always threaten to exceed resources, Darwin and Wallace separately realized, their members must be locked into “perpetual struggle, species against species, individual against individual.” In this “struggle for existence,” not every organism has an equal chance; the less fit are more likely to fail. The victors of this natural war will be, in general, the best adapted. Over time, species will change to become ever more suited to their conditions; they will evolve.

  Overstating the impact of Darwin, Wallace, and Malthus is not easy. Their ideas passed rapidly beyond economics and biology to become models for society. Some thinkers viewed evolution as a process of competition leading to progress, and viewed it as justifying an unfettered market. Others saw the races of humanity fighting for resources, and sought victory for their group; foreign peoples, spilling over their borders, had to be choked back.

  In the late nineteenth century, Europeans and North Americans watched their societies acquire colonies all over the world. Conscripting Darwin and Malthus, many people in these places concluded that these triumphs reflected the white race’s innate superiority. All human groups had distinct, heritable physical and mental characters, they said. Some were better than others, and groups with better characters had won the struggle for existence. Racial superiority, these people claimed, was why Europe had colonized Asia and Africa, and not the other way around.

  But this lofty reasoning did not bring ease of mind. Perched atop their empires, Europeans and Americans feared losing their thrones to swarming mobs of inferiors. Voices shouted that rich nations, torpid with prosperity, were allowing lesser races to overwhelm them by unfettered breeding. So low were European and U.S. rates of reproduction that the West was said to be committing “race suicide.”

  Among the most influential of these voices was Lothrop Stoddard, author of The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy, a big hit in 1920. Stoddard’s father was a famous photographer who introduced millions of middle-class Americans to images of people from faraway places. Stoddard himself became a fierce anti-immigration advocate, demanding that the United States close its borders to people from faraway places. “If the present drift be not changed, we whites are all ultimately doomed,” he wrote in Rising Tide. The disappearance of Caucasians “would mean that the race obviously endowed with the greatest creative ability, the race which had achieved most in the past and which gave the richer promise for the future, had passed away, carrying with it to the grave those potencies upon which the realization of man’s highest hopes depends.” Civilization (by which Stoddard meant white civilization) must “either fully adapt or finally perish.”

  Rising Tide was only one alarm. After the First World War, warnings about overpopulation poured off the presses, selling briskly across Europe and North America: The Passing of the Great Race (1916), by Madison Grant; Birth-Rate and Empire (1917), by the Reverend James Marchant; Uncontrolled Breeding, or Fecundity Versus Civilization (1917), by Adelyne More; Mankind at the Crossroads (1923), by Edward Murray East; Standing Room Only? (1927), by Edward Alsworth Ross; Danger Spots in Wor
ld Population (1929), by Warren S. Thompson; Asia’s Teeming Millions and Its Problems for the West (1931), by Étienne Dennery.

  Lothrop Stoddard, 1921 Credit 16

  Strikingly, this jubilee of dismay was led by prominent intellectuals. East was a Harvard plant geneticist; Thompson, director of the world’s first demographic research center; Dennery, an economist at the respected Paris Institute of Political Studies. Grant, a well-known New York lawyer, was close to President Theodore Roosevelt. Adelyne More (“add-a-line more”) was the flippant pen name of the English linguist-philosopher Charles Kay Ogden. Marchant, head of the British National Council of Public Morals, was famed for his campaign against impure thoughts. Ross was a sociologist at the University of Wisconsin (he had been fired from Stanford for urging the U.S. Navy to blow up “every vessel bringing Japanese to our shores rather than to permit them to land”). Even Stoddard, a mere freelance journalist, had a Harvard Ph.D.

  More striking still, many of the racial alarmists were also leaders in the nation’s new conservation movement. The blue-blooded toffs who feared that the noble and superior white race was menaced by unwashed rabble also saw wild landscapes as noble and superior wildernesses menaced by the same rabble. Prizing the expert governance of resources, they found little difference between protecting forests and cleaning up the human gene pool.

  Madison Grant was an example. Born into a patrician New England family and raised in a turreted mansion, Grant co-founded the Bronx Zoo, organized the preservation of the California redwoods, helped create the national park system, played a central role in saving bison from extinction, and wrote ecological texts that anticipated Aldo Leopold. He also spent decades trying to protect his privileged cohort from the rising lower classes—indeed, he wrote The Passing of the Great Race to decry “the transfer of power from the higher to the lower races.” Among Grant’s most zealous fans was Adolf Hitler, who (Grant boasted) sent him a fan letter; The Passing of the Great Race was the first foreign book published by the Nazis after they took power.*3

  Madison Grant, ca. 1925 Credit 17

  So ineradicable was the elitist mark on conservation that for decades afterward many on the left scoffed at ecological issues as right-wing distractions. As late as 1970, the radical Students for a Democratic Society protested the first Earth Day as Wall Street flimflam meant to divert public attention from class warfare and the Vietnam War; the left-wing journalist I. F. Stone called the nationwide marches a “snow job.”

  Vogt, Leopold, Murphy, and many of their associates were not truly in this company; in fact, they helped begin the transformation in which environmental issues switched from being a cause of the right to one of the left. Nonetheless, they shared much of the racial alarmists’ intellectual framework and often dismissed nonwhites in terms that read uncomfortably today. Vogt, for instance, was loudly scornful of the “unchecked spawning” and “untrammeled copulation” of “backward populations”—people in India, he sneered, breed with “the irresponsibility of codfish.” But this second wave of conservationists rarely claimed that one race or culture was intrinsically superior to another. Vogt, again, is an example. No apologist for his own stock, he reserved special ire for “American vandals abroad,” the “despoilers” and “parasites” who ruin foreign landscapes and exploited foreign people in the name of “that sacred cow Free Enterprise.” In his view, “we be of one blood.”

  Most important, Vogt and his friends—like Stoddard, like East, like Hitler—viewed people as biological units, ruled by the same laws as bacteria and fruit flies. (“Nature is inexorable,” wrote Stoddard. “No living being stands above her law; and protozoan or demigod, if they transgress, alike must die.”) Like cormorants and anchovetas, like dovekies, willets, and mosquitoes, humans are evolutionary actors, packets of genetic drives, their courses in the world fixed by environmental limits. And these ideas—different from those of the race theorists, but equally based on a view of people as biologically fated—lurked in Vogt’s mental background, formed part of his intellectual toolkit, as he shifted focus from birds to humanity.

  Road to Survival

  In the summer of 1945 Vogt’s life changed dramatically. He was presented with a new chance to be heard, and he acquired a new traveling companion. The chance to be heard was the opportunity to write a book. The companion was his second wife, Marjorie Elizabeth Wallace. Vogt’s book would set down, for the first time, the intellectual framework of today’s green movement—ideas now so pervasive that many people don’t even recognize them as ideas, or that people didn’t always think them. None of this, he said, would have been possible without his new wife.

  Born in 1916 to a British father and an American mother, Marjorie Wallace was raised in San Mateo, California. Like Juana, she attended Berkeley, where she caught the eye of George Devereux, a young, brilliant, mercurial European sociologist. The couple married after Marjorie’s graduation in 1938, then moved to a mental hospital in Worcester, Massachusetts, where Devereux researched insanity, wrote studies of the Mojave Indians, and had affairs; Marjorie produced a master’s thesis at Boston University.

  In 1943 Devereux got a job in Wyoming, closer to his research subjects. Marjorie instead went home to California, where she apparently met Vogt, fourteen years her senior, who was futilely trying to convince Walt Disney to make an animated movie about soil. It seems evident that they began a relationship. Juana had spent much of the previous two years alone in Latin America, trolling the embassy circuit for Nazi gossip. In June 1945 the couple rendezvoused in California. The marriage collapsed. Two months later Juana went to Reno, Nevada, to obtain one of the city’s famous quick divorces. Early in 1946 Marjorie also went to Reno, and for the same reason. Marjorie filed for divorce from Devereux, appeared before the court, received her decree, and married Bill on the same day: April 4, 1946.

  The newlyweds flew to Mexico City, where, among other things, Vogt visited a new agricultural project backed by the Rockefeller Foundation—Borlaug’s project. Few records survive of the trip. What we do know is that Vogt was aghast. He agreed with Rockefeller that it was important to “use our enormous capacity to produce food as a means of getting the world back on its feet.” But it was “imperative,” as he later put it, “that we recognize this as an emergency measure and do not try to put a million pairs of feet under our dinner table.” In funding Borlaug’s project, Vogt believed, Rockefeller was going exactly the wrong way.

  The day after their visit to the Rockefeller project, Marjorie and Bill flew to Guatemala for a month-long honeymoon. Then, as if to make up for the idleness, the couple pressed on to Central and South America, presenting environmental reports to skeptical government officials. When Vogt wasn’t meeting bureaucrats, he was taking long expeditions up rutted roads into the country, a constant strain for his bad legs and weak chest. In the evening, fatigued, Vogt fell into bed, dictating notes and letters to Marjorie far into the night. Among them was a letter to the Rockefeller Foundation, asking them to change course. In El Salvador his hotel mail contained a book contract. A New York publisher had asked him to write an environmental book for a “whopping big advance.” Despite his exhaustion, Vogt was jubilant. He had been thinking about writing a book since the mid-1930s—indeed, he had been offered a contract by a publisher who had attended one of his talks—but had always been overwhelmed by work and travel. Now the Pan American Union looked like it might give him enough time. He was finally going to be able to make a loud, public noise.

  Vogt’s publisher was William M. Sloane, a science fiction writer who had been an editor at the Henry Holt publishing company until March 1946, when he and four other Holt staffers left to launch a new firm, William Sloane Associates. Housed in a single room on the third floor of a walkup building, it had limited funds; Sloane himself was so deep in debt that he despaired of paying his grocery bills. Vogt had never written a book before and was unknown to the public. He was constantly traveling, was overburdened with his day job, and had the sort
of prickly, imperious personality that resists editing. Nonetheless, Sloane bet heavily on him. Vogt’s book would be among the first his company released.

  To Vogt’s surprise, he found himself in friendly book-writing competition with one of his associates: Fairfield Osborn. Unlike Vogt, Osborn was one of the old-school, upper-crust conservationists. His father, a wealthy paleontologist, had been president of both the American Museum of Natural History and the New York Zoological Society; his uncle was president of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The two brothers were happy bigots; Osborn’s father wrote a glowing preface to The Passing of the Great Race. After sixteen years on Wall Street, Osborn retired and switched his focus to conservation. Like his father, he was president of the New York Zoological Society. His main task was operating the Bronx Zoo, which he did with theatrical flair; often he brought a sparrow hawk to speaking engagements, released a cageful of moths, and set the bird to picking off the insects above the audience.

  Both the First and Second World Wars, Osborn believed, were set off by environmental degradation—they were, at bottom, resource wars. In those days, he liked to say, humankind “was involved in two major conflicts—not only the one that was in every headline. The other war…contains potentialities of disaster greater even than would follow the misuse of atomic power. This other war is man’s conflict with nature.” Hoping to forestall further destruction, Osborn worked with Leopold and Vogt in 1948 to create the first global ecological organization: the Conservation Foundation. At the same time, he began writing a book “to show that mankind is a part of the earth’s biological system and is not a form of genii that can successfully provide substitutes for the processes of nature.”