What is the best approach to solving the climate crisis? Should we leverage science and technology to ‘produce’ our way out of the problem? Or aspire to live in Hobbiton and radically reduce our human footprint?

Charles C. Mann is the New York Times bestselling author behind 1491, 1493 and The Wizard and the Prophet and a regular correspondent for The Atlantic, WIRED and Science Magazine. Today, Charles joins Ross to discuss the two major schools of thought he identified in the environmental movement—wizards and prophets—and introduce us to the scientists he uses to represent each camp in his book.

Charles walks us through the fundamental differences between the two groups, describing their values, blind spots and radically different ways of seeing the world. Listen in for Charles’ insight on a third school of thought that dismisses both wizards and prophets and find out where he falls on the wizard-prophet spectrum in light of the current global health crisis.