Garvey urged Black Americans to see themselves as part of a global struggle and encouraged them to lean on their communities rather than on unreliable governments, establishing local economies and infrastructure, for example. The elder Littles were outspoken community leaders and subscribed to Garveyism, the school of thought influenced by the Pan-African activist Marcus Garvey. Malcolm X was born in 1925 in Omaha, Nebraska, and Blood Brothers, to its credit, refreshingly frames his early years around the impact his parents, Earl and Louise Helen Little, had on his understanding of the world. Through interviews with surviving family members - Malcolm X’s daughter Ilyasah Shabazz, Ali’s brother Rahman and daughters Maryum and Hana - Clarke contextualizes their intellectual roots and provides required biographical details about the two men, particularly what led them both to Elijah Muhammad’s teachings.
The documentary, which is based on the book of the same name by Randy Roberts and Johnny Smith, starts with an overview of its subjects’ formative years. You want to hear less about how you should feel and see more that makes you feel. You begin to crave different ones, deeper anecdotes, more critical probing here and there. But as the film unfolds, meandering through their respective biographies before, with great speed, chronicling their three-year friendship, the nouns start to ring hollow. At first the words, a testament to the influence and deep meaning of the pair’s connection, sound beautiful. Maybe it was the combination.The interviewees in Blood Brothers: Malcolm X & Muhammad Ali generously use words like “destiny,” “fate” and “prophecy” to describe the friendship between the two iconic civil rights activists at the center of this documentary. Wizards say that clever labor-saving machinery did it. How? Prophets say that morally committed abolitionists did it. The question continues: How do we best manage our world Petri dish? Restraint? Or innovation?Ĭan humanity change its behavior at planet scale? Mann ended by pointing out that in 1800 slavery was universal in the world and had been throughout history. The Prophets-versus-Wizards debate keeps on raging-artisanal organic farming versus factory-like mega-farms distributed solar energy versus centralized fossil fuel refineries and nuclear power plants dealing with climate change by planting a zillion trees versus geoengineering with aerosols in the stratosphere. The birds were, Vogt declared, subject to an inescapable “carrying capacity.“ That became the foundational idea of the environmental movement, later expressed in terms such as “limits to growth,” “ecological overshoot,” and “planetary boundaries.” Vogt spelled out the worldview in his powerful 1948 book, The Road to Survival. He discovered that periodic massive bird die-offs on the islands were caused by the El Niño cycle pushing the Humboldt Current with its huge load of anchovetas away from the coast and starving the birds. William Vogt, who Mann calls “the Prophet,” was a poor city kid who followed his interest in birds to become an isolated researcher on the revolting guano islands of Peru. Agriculture industrialized at increasing scale, and displaced smallhold farmers fled to urban slums. The resulting package of hybrid seeds, synthetic fertilizer, and irrigation became the Green Revolution that ended most of hunger throughout the world for the first time in history. First he invented high-volume crossbreeding, then shuttle breeding (between winter wheat and spring wheat), and then semi-dwarf wheat.
In 1944 he found himself in impoverished Mexico with an impossible task-solve the ancient fungal killer of wheat, rust.
Norman Borlaug, the one Mann calls “the Wizard,” was a farm kid trained as a forester. Their solutions were so persuasive that their impassioned argument continues 70 years later to dominate how we think about dealing with the still-exacerbating exponential impacts.
How to save humanity? Opposing grand approaches emerged from two remarkable scientists in the mid-20th century who fought each other their entire lives. Mann titled his talk “The Edge of the Petri Dish.” He explained, “If you drop a couple protozoa in a Petri dish filled with nutrient goo, they will multiply until they run out of resources or drown in their own wastes.” Humans in the world Petri dish appear to be similarly doomed, judging by our exponential increases in population, energy use, water use, income, and greenhouse gases.