Slashdot Mirror
Father of Green Revolution, Norman Borlaug, Dies at 95
countincognito writes "Norman Borlaug, a genuinely remarkable man and the father of the Green Revolution in agriculture, has died of cancer at his Dallas home aged 95. His life's work on developing high-yield, disease-resistant crops has been credited with having saved an estimated one billion people from famine, and one billion hectares of forest and rainforest from being cleared for agricultural production."
Just so slashdotters are aware, Norman Borlaug acted primarily as a humanitarian. His goals often intersected with common sense efforts in ecological preservation and education, but don't go off misinterpreting his "Green Revolution" as an environmental movement just because of the word Green. His greatest goals and achievements were the alleviation of human suffering and famine, and he typically pursued environmental goals as methods of achieving this, not as ends in themselves.
What you fail to appreciate is that he changed the rules of the game. Where using previous crops, the world could only support x number of people, using his enriched crops, the world could support X+Y people. He increased the efficiency of agriculture, and thereby bushed back the numeric threshold for 'overpopulation' considerably. And since you can get more crops from less land, there was less species depletion, more concentrated land impact, and less ag pollution because of reduced fertilizer needs.
Are there still problems? Yeah. But this guy was a giant, and too an overwhelming problem and made it a little less insurmountable.
The example of certain welfare states shows that this is true only for a time. Eventually, once the government makes it effortless to raise children, birthrates start going back up. There was an article in Helsingin Sanomat, Finland's biggest newspaper, a week or so ago about this. Finland provides clothes, meals, books and even a cradle for every child, and maternity leave is generous. Parents don't have to make many sacrifices at all to rear children here.
Absolutely. The best book I ever read on the subject of what genetic engineering is and isn't is "Mendel in the Kitchen" by Nina Federoff. If that one seems a little too heavy on biology OR if you're already interested in organic agriculture I'd recommend Tomorrow's Table which was written an organic farmer and his wife who's a plant biologist at UC Davis.
The best article I ever read about Norman Borlaug himself and his contribution to the Green revolution wasthis one.
For a better grounding of the problems faced by both conventional ag and conventual organic, read the first two sections of Michael Pollen's the Omnivores Dilemma (you can read the other two sections of the book if you like too, they're just not as relevant). His science and stats are sometimes off, and I don't always agree with his conclusions but it's a fun read.
There was a BBC documentary that came out last fall called "Jimmy's GM Food Fight" which, if you can track a copy down did about as good a job as possible of summing up the issue in 60 minutes.
If you're more interested in the history of agriculture than the recent Organic vs Conventional vs GM split, there's a lot of good background in Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond.
Hope this is helpful. I can cite blogs as well, but it's harder to find ones that are informative rather than pushing an position. Good luck and I wish more people were interested in the subject!