Solutionism, part 1

Chapter 5 of The Techno-Humanist Manifesto

Previously: The Life Well-Lived, part 2.

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On September 7, 1898, at a theater in Bristol, a distinguished English scientist gave a speech to an audience of thousands of men and women in formal dress.¹ The scientist was Sir William Crookes—physicist, chemist, discoverer of the element thallium, and inventor of the Crookes tube. It was the annual meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, and Crookes was its incoming president. Traditionally, the president’s inaugural speech focused on the accomplishments of the previous year—and so the audience was unprepared for what they were about to hear. Knowing that the speech would be publicized in the press, Crookes had a different agenda for the evening. He used his platform to issue a dire warning:

England, he said, and all Europe, was at risk of running out of food.

Europe’s population was growing rapidly, and agriculture had to grow rapidly to feed it. In previous decades, that growth had come from a large expansion of the land under cultivation, especially in the great American prairies. But land is finite, and Crookes saw it running out. The world had been explored and all the arable lands discovered. Britain itself depended on imports for most of its grain, but the grain exporters of the world would soon require all they could produce just to keep up with their own population growth. Crookes devoted a large part of his argument to surveying every major wheat-growing region of the world for its capacity to expand; he apologized to the audience in advance for boring them with statistics. If all of them maxed out their wheat-growing capacity, given the average yield at the time of 12.7 bushels per acre, population growth would outpace wheat after 1931.

Other than land, the only hope to increase production was through greater yields. If wheat yields could be raised to 20 bushels/acre, that alone would feed another thirty years of population growth. And yield could be increased with fertilizer: citing experiments with sodium nitrate on wheat fields, he calculated that the requisite increase would be 12 million tons annually.

But this only pushed the problem back one step, because nitrates, like land, were a limited resource. Crookes surveyed all potential sources of nitrogen fertilizer: coal distillation, seabird guano, Chilean saltpeter, even human sewage (it was an “unspeakable,” “barbaric” waste, he said, to flush all that good manure out to sea). Only the Chilean nitrate fields could supply fertilizer on a global scale, and at the time the exports were only 1.2 million tons, one-tenth of Crookes’s target figure. Worse, the Chilean fields were due to be exhausted within a few decades, as had already happened to the guano deposits on nearby islands. If fertilizer consumption were expanded on the scale Crookes proposed, those fields would run out in years.

Crookes did not mince words: Europe was in “deadly peril.” Wheat was a “colossal problem,” an “impending catastrophe,” and a “life-and-death question.” He said up front that people might find him “alarmist.” The speech, later expanded into a book, created a sensation, and Crookes was “assailed with criticism.”² “There has been much experience of these discussions since the time of Malthus,” complained one weary critic, but the predicted crises do not materialize. Resource limits are too distant and uncertain, he said; we should avoid making precise forecasts about them.³ Critics pointed out that wheat isn’t our only food, that land use could be reallocated, and that farmers could better adapt their methods to the soil and the climate, especially in America.⁴ But Crookes insisted that his argument was “founded on stubborn facts.” He didn’t claim that his predictions were precise, or that synthetic fertilizer was the only solution. But the magnitude of the problem demanded more than marginal land reallocation or farming improvements.

In some ways, Crookes sounded like a modern environmentalist. He chided the world for depending on markets and taking growth for granted, when arable land is “strictly limited.” He criticized the “culpably extravagant” use of fertilizer, warning that humanity was “drawing on the earth’s capital, and our drafts will not perpetually be honored.” If he had sounded his alarm in the 1960s, the moral would have been the risks of “overpopulation” and the “limits to growth.” The call to action would have been to slow growth and reduce consumption.

But this was the Victorian era, the height of Enlightenment optimism for science and technology, and Crookes had no such plans. He had intended his speech to take “the form of a warning rather than of a prophecy.”⁵ In the face of a crisis, he called not for retreat or surrender, but for a vigorous advance. He called for solutions.

“It is the chemist who must come to the rescue,” he said. “It is through the laboratory that starvation may ultimately be turned into plenty. … Before we are in the grip of actual dearth the chemist will step in and postpone the day of famine to so distant a period that we and our sons and grandsons may legitimately live without undue solicitude for the future.”

The nitrogen that crops need, he pointed out, is abundant in the atmosphere. The only problem is that plants can’t use nitrogen gas (N₂). For plant metabolism, nitrogen has to be converted into other forms, such as nitrate salts or ammonia, a process called “fixation.” This happens in nature, but only very slowly, which limits wild plant growth.

Crookes called on the chemists of the world to develop artificial nitrogen fixation, essentially to synthesize fertilizer from air. He even outlined an approach to the problem using electricity. Given the price of electricity at the time, with sufficient economies of scale, he estimated that artificial fertilizer would be cheaper than natural fertilizer imported from Chile. And the new hydroelectric power plant at Niagara alone, he thought, would suffice to produce the required volumes.

Crookes painted an inspiring picture of an ambitious goal, a scientific grand challenge: “one of the great discoveries awaiting the ingenuity of chemists,” and one which was not merely of academic interest, but “vital to the progress of civilized humanity.” And he thought the solution was “clearly within view.” His alarmism was a contingent one, based on the facts of the situation; when the facts changed, the alarm could end.

This wouldn’t solve the problem forever, but Crookes was content that “[t]he future can take care of itself.” If we could stave it off for a generation or two, then “we may safely leave our successors to grapple” with the food problem when it arises again. He said this not with the evasive shame that comes from kicking the can down the road, but with the confidence of a man who believed in progress. He was sure that in a generation’s time we would have even more scientific knowledge, technological infrastructure, and surplus wealth to deal with any problems that arise.

The world managed to stave off the wheat problem for some time. 1931, the year Crookes thought might see the first wheat shortage, produced a record crop—and it happened for reasons neither Crookes nor his critics foresaw. It was partly from an increase in yields, but even more from what Crookes thought unlikely: an increase in acreage. This was due in part to new varieties of wheat with improvements such as drought resistance. It was also due to mechanization using the internal combustion engine, which brought powered tractors into the fields in large numbers for the first time. When fields become cheaper to work, it becomes profitable to bring marginally-yielding fields under cultivation, increasing effective land area for agriculture.⁶

But even though his forecast was inexact, Crookes was essentially correct—about both the problem and the solution. The world was running out of fertilizer, and desperately needed an alternative. And the solution was, in fact, artificial nitrogen fixation. By 1913 the chemist Fritz Haber and the industrialist Carl Bosch had developed an industrial-scale process to use nitrogen and hydrogen gas to synthesize ammonia, a precursor of fertilizer. By 1925, the Haber-Bosch process was already creating 36% of the world’s nitrogen fertilizer; today that share is over 99%.⁷ It is now one of the world’s most crucial industrial processes, consuming around 1% of total world energy usage; without it, billions of those alive today would starve.⁸ The chemist, as Crookes foretold, did come to the rescue.

So, was Crookes an optimist or a pessimist?

He was pessimistic, even “alarmist,” about the problem—but he was optimistic about the solution. One might argue that he was realistic about the problem, since he was correct. But by the same logic, he was realistic about the solution, too.

One observer captured the paradox by commenting that “the Briton … constantly predicts disaster and never believes in it. He is a confirmed pessimist in words, and an inveterate optimist in deeds.”⁹ Or, as another writer put it in a different context, Crookes combined “pessimism of the intellect” with “optimism of the will.”¹⁰

One lesson of the wheat problem is that optimism vs. pessimism can be a false dichotomy. We need to fully acknowledge problems, while vigorously pursuing solutions. Call it “solutionism.”

Both optimism and pessimism can be blind. Blind optimism becomes complacency, a denial that problems even exist. Blind pessimism becomes defeatism, a denial that solutions are possible. Both types of blindness encourage passivity, when what is needed is action.

In Crookes’s day, there were plenty of complacent optimists, such as the gentleman who hand-waved away the problem, saying that we simply shouldn’t attempt precise forecasts, and called it “unfortunate” that Crookes's suggestion of atmospheric nitrogen fixation, which was of purely scientific interest, “should have been appended to an alarmist statistical paper.”¹¹ At the time, there were far fewer defeatist pessimists. But two generations later, the wheat problem would return with a vengeance. This time, it would arrive in a very different and much more defeatist cultural atmosphere. But once again, it would show that the dichotomy is false and the solutionists are right.

In the 1960s, world population growth hit a peak of 2.3%.¹² Mortality rates, especially among children, had been drastically reduced by humanity’s triumph over infectious disease. But birth rates had not yet declined, and so the population grew—as did fears of “overpopulation.” Many observers feared that world agricultural production would not keep up. Some of the most famous alarmists (whom we already met briefly in Chapter 3, but who are worth a closer examination now), were Paul and Anne Erhlich, with their 1968 book The Population Bomb.

Picturing a baby as a literal deadly weapon is about the most anti-natalist imagery I can imagine.

The defeatism was on display from the very first sentence:

The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate…¹³

Since they saw no solutions to feed the growing population, the drastic measures were required to curtail it:

We must have population control at home, hopefully through a system of incentives and penalties, but by compulsion if voluntary methods fail. We must use our political power to push other countries into programs which combine agricultural development and population control.¹⁴ [emphasis added]

They proposed a Department of Population and Environment which “should be set up with the power to take whatever steps are necessary to establish a reasonable population size in the United States.”¹⁵ What steps? “One plan often mentioned involves the addition of temporary sterilants to water supplies or staple food.”¹⁶ But if you're appalled by this, “rest easy… The option isn't even open to us, thanks to the criminal inadequacy of biomedical research in this area.” In other words, what the Ehrlichs thought was criminal was not the act of adding sterilants to the water supply, but the fact that we don't yet have the technology to do so.

Another book, Famine 1975! (complete with exclamation point in the title), similarly warned: “Catastrophe is foredoomed. … The famines are inevitable.”¹⁷ Frustrated with what they saw as an irresponsible lack of population control in some poor countries, the authors proposed a system of “triage” to avoid the “aimless frittering away” of our food on countries that “can’t be saved,” such as India, Haiti, and Egypt.¹⁸ The Ehrlichs endorsed this idea,¹⁹ again, even to the point of oppressive measures:

When [Indian PM Chandrasekhar] suggested sterilizing all Indian males with three or more children, we should have applied pressure on the Indian government to go ahead with the plan.… Coercion? Perhaps, but coercion in a good cause.²⁰

Charles Mann describes what happened next:

The results of the campaigns were ghastly. Millions of women were sterilized, often coercively, sometimes illegally, frequently in unsafe conditions, in Mexico, Bolivia, Peru, Indonesia, Bangladesh, and, especially, India. In the 1970s and 1980s the Indian government, then led by Indira Gandhi and her son Sanjay, embraced policies that in many states required sterilization for men and women to obtain water, electricity, ration cards, medical care, and pay raises. Teachers could expel students from school if their parents weren’t sterilized. More than 8 million men and women were sterilized in 1975 alone. (“At long last,” World Bank head Robert McNamara remarked, “India is moving to effectively address its population problem.”) All the while, the same programs were pushing birth control with equal vigor. In Egypt, Tunisia, Pakistan, South Korea, and Taiwan, health workers’ salaries were, in a system that invited abuse, dictated by the number of IUDs they inserted into women.²¹

And China, of course, adopted the one-child policy in 1980:

Tens of millions—possibly 100 million—of coerced abortions occurred, often in poor conditions that led to infection, sterility, and even death. Millions more women were forced to insert IUDs or be sterilized.²²

None of it could ever be enough for Paul Ehrlich. He had decided up front that the battle is lost, that solutions are impossible. In 1970, he said:

When you reach a point where you realize further efforts will be futile, you may as well look after yourself and your friends and enjoy what little time you have left. That point for me is 1972.²³

But the battle was not lost. Catastrophe had not been foredoomed. The “inevitable” famines did not strike. And not because of falling birth rates, which made only a small difference to the population trajectory of countries like India and Pakistan in those decades.²⁴ As in 1898, so in 1968: the solutionist approach to a fast-growing population is to increase agricultural productivity.

By the 1960s, the fertilizer problem had been solved, by Haber-Bosch. But other problems remained. One was stem rust, a fungus that plagues wheat and can destroy entire harvests. There was no way to immunize crops against rust, no way to prevent its spread once it had taken hold, and no cure: the onset of rust was a death sentence for wheat. But sometimes, here and there in a rust outbreak, a plant would be unaffected, seemingly immune. And so there was the glimmer of a strategy: find these plants and use them to breed rust-resistant varieties.

A program to do this for Mexico, funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, was run by the intrepid researcher Norman Borlaug. He began with little funding, almost no equipment or staff, and not much support from management. He and a few assistants worked tirelessly, planting and inspecting hundreds of thousands of stalks from tens of thousands of varieties of wheat.²⁵ They cross-bred plants with promising characteristics, working without modern genetic tools, collecting and distributing pollen by hand in order to mate the plants.²⁶

Eventually, they created a promising handful of varieties. Not only were they resistant to multiple strains of rust, they were also relatively insensitive to daylight, a rare quality that let them grow at any latitude. This meant that the seeds could be distributed to many regions, allowing the program to scale. Further, the new breeds grew vigorously given large amounts of fertilizer.²⁷

In fact, they were too vigorous: the stalks grew so tall, and the heads so large, that the plants began to topple over, a problem known to farmers as “lodging.” So Borlaug and his team kept working, cross-breeding their wheat with varieties that had shorter stalks. This not only prevented lodging, but increased grain yield, since less of the plant’s energy and nutrients went into creating straw: a kilogram of nitrogen fertilizer produced only an additional 10 kg of grain in the old tall-strawed varieties, but 20–25 kg in the new ones.²⁸ They kept adding resistance to new strains of rust that were just emerging. And when their highly productive, short-stalked, disease-resistant plants turned out to have shriveled, low-protein seeds that made bad flour, they bred for better flour quality too.²⁹

By 1968, the year of the Ehrlichs’ Population Bomb, Borlaug could report that Mexican wheat yields had more than tripled, from 760 pounds per acre to almost 2,500.³⁰ It was also succeeding in India and Pakistan. “The first season they grew so much wheat they had no place to store it all,” reported one journalist after interviewing farmers in India. “They closed the schools early and filled them full of grain.” One farmer told another reporter, “This was a miracle. It totally changed our lives.”³¹ From 1968 to today, daily calorie supply per person has increased 20% in Pakistan and 28% in India, even as their combined population has almost tripled.³² Borlaug’s work is estimated to have saved hundreds of millions of people from famine; even if that estimate is off by a factor of ten, he would still be one of humanity’s greatest benefactors.³³ He won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970.

Borlaug was never satisfied, knowing that even if we can always find solutions, all solutions are temporary. In his Nobel speech, he acknowledged that the revolution he brought about “has not transformed the world into Utopia,” and when we consider that half the world was still undernourished, “no room is left for complacency.” Eternal vigilance, it seems, is the price of progress. He warned: “Most people still fail to comprehend the magnitude and menace of the ‘Population Monster.’” Still, he advocated an inspiring, ambitious goal, a grand challenge: to eradicate hunger. And he remained “optimistic for the future of mankind.”³⁴

Ehrlich, in contrast, remains defeatist to this day. Unlike Crookes, whose alarmism was contingent, Ehrlich’s alarmism is based on his view of the universe and of human nature, and thus impervious to facts. In a 2009 retrospective on his book, he only barely manages to admit that it got anything wrong: “Perhaps the most serious flaw in The Bomb was that it was much too optimistic about the future.”³⁵ (!) And in a 50th-anniversary interview, he became an apologist for China's “one child” policy, saying it “was not as coercive as it was painted over here.”³⁶

The contrast is stark. Ehrlich’s defeatism spread hysteria and encouraged authoritarian oppression. Crookes’s and Borlaug’s solutionism created wealth out of poverty and saved lives.

To be continued in part 2.

I previously told a version of this story in an article for the MIT Technology Review. Some of the description of overpopulation doomerism was adapted from this thread.

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For more about The Techno-Humanist Manifesto, including the table of contents, see the announcement. For full citations, see the bibliography.

1. Crookes, “Address of the President;” Hager, The Alchemy of Air, 3. Unless otherwise cited, all quotations from Crookes are taken from this speech.

2. “Science and Food Supply;” Atkinson, “The Wheat Problem Again;” Crookes, The Wheat Problem, Preface, vi.

3. Giffen, “The Wheat Problem.”

4. Review of Crookes, “The Wheat Problem, Revised.”

5. Crookes, The Wheat Problem, Preface, xi.

6. Enfield, “The World’s Wheat Situation.”

7. Smil, Enriching the Earth, 245.

8. Hager, The Alchemy of Air, 271.

9. Crookes, The Wheat Problem, 82.

10. These phrases originated with Romain Rolland and were popularized by Antonio Gramsci. Fisher, Romain Rolland and the Politics of Intellectual Engagement, 88.

11. Giffen, “Wheat Problem.”

12. “Population Growth Rate.”

13. Ehrlich, The Population Bomb, xi.

14. Population Bomb, xi.

15. Population Bomb, 138.

16. Population Bomb, 135.

17. Paddock, Famine 1975!, 9.

18. Famine 1975!, 205, 222.

19. Population Bomb, 161.

20. Population Bomb, 166.

21. Mann, The Wizard and the Prophet, 399.

22. Wizard and Prophet, 400.

23. Look Magazine, 1970, quoted in Commoner, “Response.”

24. For example: India’s birth rate fell from 42.9 per 1000 in 1960 to 32.6 in 1990. If it had stayed constant at the 1960 level for those three decades, India’s total population in 1990 would have been 956 million, only 10% higher than the actual figure of 865 million. My calculations are in this spreadsheet, based on input data from Our World in Data’s Population and Demography Data Explorer. Pakistan had similarly modest declines in population growth rate, as did many other countries mentioned in the excerpt from Mann, with the possible exception of China.

25. Wizard and Prophet, 129.

26. Wizard and Prophet, 138.

27. Wizard and Prophet, 145.

28. Borlaug, “The Green Revolution, Peace, and Humanity.”

29. Wizard and Prophet, 150.

30. Wizard and Prophet, 154.

31. Wizard and Prophet, 438.

32. “Daily Supply of Calories per Person;” “Population.”

33. Easterbrook, “Forgotten Benefactor of Humanity.”

34. Borlaug, “Green Revolution.”

35. Ehrlich, Paul and Ann, “The Population Bomb Revisited.”

36. Paul Ehrlich, interview by Greg Dalton, “The Population Bomb, 50 Years Later.”