In this week’s issue, Bill McKibben reviews Charles C. Mann’s new double biography of William Vogt and Norman Bourlag. In 1948, Robert C. Cook reviewed Vogt’s “Road to Survival,” an eloquent treatise on earth’s future that Mann argues birthed modern environmentalism. Read an excerpt below.
Any historian who survives to tell the tale will probably label this the age of the two chain reactions. One of these is no longer news — if the threat of sudden global extinction can ever cease to be bad news. But only a few experts realize that a biological chain reaction is tearing the soil from the five continents, draining the earth of life-giving groundwater devastating the forests on which our civilization, even our survival, depends. This is the subject of William Vogt’s disturbing “Road to Survival.”
As Bernard Baruch points out in his introduction, “This is no dry-as-dust study. It deals with the raw stuff of living, how more than two billion men and women, including you and me, are to be fed, sheltered, and clothed — and whether or not we will live in peace tomorrow, and next year, and in the year 1975.” “Road to Survival” pulls no punches. It is eloquent, sometimes grim, but always vivid. It combines literary excellence with sound scholarship. There are detailed references to the technical literature, and an excellent index. Vogt’s book is essentially an eloquent plea that we start using all of our senses to understand the complex, interrelated forces whose end product he calls “human ecology.”
Read “Road to Survival.” It will shock you, and it may infuriate you. But it is a preview of things to come as seen by a courageous, honest, competent scientist. He makes you actually feel the declining fertility of the land, the shrinking of our natural resources equated against that relentless explosive growth in human numbers. There might be room for quibbling as to whether S-day (S for starvation or for salvation — it all depends!) will fall in 1991 or 2048. But the handwriting is on the wall.
If we manage to meet those promissory notes, your children will bless you for reading “Road,” and Vogt for writing it, while there was still time for action.
Continue reading the main story