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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."
And probably now heralded by most 'green' supporters as some sort of horrific monster that messed with nature to create these crops.
A bit of an emendation:
That's what fundamentally made him a good recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize. He made high-yield new seeds, and encouraged farmers to use them, spread them, replant them in subsequent years, etc., giving them greater food security and freedom. He didn't, to the contrary, patent them, prohibit replanting seeds in subsequent years, and so on. That would have still increased crop yields, but would've made farmers dependent on Borlaug to buy seeds every year, which was the opposite of his intention.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Sooner or later you hit a limiting resource. Land, water, energy etc. A better investment would have birth control and birth control education.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
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.
That's 10,000,000 km^2 or larger than Canada, only Russia is larger.
That page mentions this: The total land area of the world is 148,940,000 km2 (57,510,000 sq mi)[3] (about 29.1% of the Earth's surface area).. In other words, what he did prevented the clearing of 6.7 percent of the Earth's surface for agriculture.
I find that figure a little difficult to believe, but I don't know that much about agriculture or what kind of impact deforestation for agriculture has. I did find this bit on forests though:
So what he did saved about 20% of the total forested areas from clearing.
Again, a bit difficult to believe, but whatever.
Why is this the first line of attack anytime the subject of overpopulation comes up? There are at least a few ways to try to reduce the number of humans expected to be inhabiting this planet years from now other than "offing people". Contraception in poorer areas? Raising the standard of living to statistically lower the number of offspring parents have? Just jumping to "OMG OVERPOPULATION KILL YOURSELF LOLROFL!!@#" doesn't add anything to the debate.
Then again, if they're advocating committing mass murder or genocide for the sake of conserving resources...
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.
Without his contribution, one billion people would have died of famine, and one billion hectares of forest would have been cleared. In other words, the ecosystem could only sustain one billion fewer people, and the existing population would have cleared one billions hectares of forest.
With his contribution, the ecosystem now sustains that additional 1 billion: the total number of mouths is 6 billion. There is now not a need to clear that additional billion hectares of forest.
However, the population continues to grow. It will reach such a size that famine will kill one billion people and that hunger will force the clearing of an additional billion hectares of forest.
Overpopulation is the root cause of many problems: energy shortage, famine, global warming, etc. The 4 horsemen of the apocalypse are approaching. We can already hear the hooves of the horses.
There is no such thing as overpopulation that can't be solved by re-engineering our cities/factories and changing our lifestyles. Yes, other species and ecosystems will be be strained and always have been by growing human populations but the idea that the earth can only sustain a certain amount of humans is both naive and absurd. The biomass during this epoch is far less than the Triassic and Jurassic periods when huge 20 ton monsters roamed the country eating a good part of their body weight per day. This went on for 10's of millions of years. Even Americans aren't that big yet. According to the 1970's chicken littles like yourself we should all be dead by now. Well, um that didn't happen because technology solved many of the problems that were emerging at the time and we will continue solving them contrary to naysayers like yourself.
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
There are more human ways to control overpopulation. Limited food supplies is the way it works in nature, but we humans should use our intelligence.
Dr. Borlaug himself was aware of the overpopulation problem, but that's something for politicians and religious leaders to solve, a scientist should do his best to alleviate human suffering, even if it should create other problems.
1. Borlaug's wheat wasn't GM. He was saving hundred of million of people in the 1960s. GM crops weren't developed for another 30 years.
2. Seeds aren't organic. It's what you do to the them after you plant them that makes food organic or conventional.
3. Ask any of the Indian cotton pickers, who despite living on less than a dollar a day won't pick non-GM cotton because of the huge amount of pesticides they're exposed to, if they don't want GM crops.
4. Not having anything to eat (called starvation) has been proven by scientists to be bad for your health. Borlaug's wheat wasn't more nutritious, it produced more food on the same land, so people who otherwise would have starved didn't.
5. Most of current GM crops don't increase yield (though there's really cool stuff coming out over the next five years). BT crops reduce the use of toxic insecticides. Herbicide resistance crops let us switch from more toxic herbicides like atrazine to less toxic ones like glyphosate and also promote no-till agriculture which reduces the erosion of the top soil we'll need if we ever want to feed our grandchildren.
In conclusion, you seem to know nothing about these topics (food and agriculture and genetic engineering). If you're interested, educate yourself, I wish more people were engaged. Otherwise don't be surprised if no one takes you seriously.
On a basic level you are right, but that is not the whole picture. Indeed, a misguided but well intentioned "caretaker" providing food for a feral cat colony will indeed be causing greater suffering than they alleviate as the queens are able to have more and larger litters. This leads to extreme levels of competition for all other resources and the rampant spread of disease. However, there are more nuanced features of population dynamics that have to be considered. When there is a low chance of offspring surviving to reproduction, organisms (including people) tend to have MORE offspring, rather than fewer. In fact, they will have tend to have offspring at a rate that is greater than that which is necessary to maintain population size, because otherwise in the long run you would likely become a genetic dead end. Having this increased birth rate leads to more population stress, leading to lowered rates of survival to breeding age, thus birth rate is increased via breeding earlier and more often. This leads to dramatic boom cycles, followed by bust cycles when the local environment's production capacity is temporally exceeded. These bust/boom cycles, in turn, lead to even higher birthrates per breeding female... and so on.
But, by altering the local environment to increase the chances of an individual offspring making it to adulthood, technological societies reduce the dependence on high birth rate to maintain a genetic lineage. Increased access to nutritional food, clean water, and basic health care will increase survivorship leading to a short lived population boom, but at this time the perceived value of an individual life is increased somewhat. The key here is allowing some level of self interest where a person can pursue goals which are not merely survival oriented, but for the long term betterment of themselves, and thus society.
Our ability to manipulate our environment such that a literally supernatural proportion of children survive to adulthood, and thus the care this affords us to put into each individual child, allows human beings to place an extraordinarily high value on an individual life: contrary to the opinion that many have of humans being a violent species, our rate of intraspecific killing is about 1/1000th that of the average animal. This lower rate of person on person killing of course leads to higher value of human life, so more care put into an individual child and therefore lower birth rates. As has been pointed out elsewhere, this is to the point that most Westernized societies actually have negative internal population growth (I.E. death rate minus birth rate) and population sizes are only increasing due to immigration from poorer places with higher population growth.
I'll never make that mistake again, reading the experts' opinions. - Feynman
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.
Despite all the great things about Green Revolution, reduced fertilizer use isn't one of them. The high-yield crops outperform the traditional crops under "certain conditions", and that certain conditions are: (1) high pesticide use, to counteract the possibility of widespread pest due to the monoculture nature of high-yield crops, (2) high fertilizer use, since just basic chemistry tells you that it would need more nutrients to produce more seeds, (3) high water use, for the same reason.
Green revolution may have helped reduce the overall use of these three things per capita and help concentrate the use to limited area of lands, but I wouldn't be so hasty to claim that without some proof somewhere—and since this is a case of what might have been, chances are, it's hard to prove it one way or another.
Touche. First time contributor, long time lurker. =D
Bolaug is one of two Americans and the only scientist to have won:
The Congressional Gold Medal
The Presidential Medal of Freedom
The Nobel Peace Prize
The other winners are Martin Luther King, Mother Teresa, Nelson Mandela and Elie Wiesel.
The following is a list of Norman E. Borlaug's major awards and honors:
- Nobel Peace Prize, 1970.
- Election to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, 1970 and nine Foreign Academies.
- Aztec Eagle, Government of Mexico, 1970.
- Outstanding Agricultural Achievement Award, World Farm Foundation (USA), 1971.
- Presidential Medal of Freedom (USA), 1977.
- Jefferson Award, American Institute for Public Service, 1980.
- Distinguished Achievement Award in Food and Agricultural Sciences, Council for Agricultural Science and Technology (USA), 1982.
- The Presidential World without Hunger Award: Educator/Scientist category (USA), 1985.
- The 1988 Americas Award, The Americas Foundation (USA).
- Jefferson Lifetime Achievement Award (USA), 1997.
- Altruistic Green Revolution Award, Indian Council of Agricultural Research, 1998.
- Recognition Award for Contributions to World Wheat and Maize Research and Production, Republic of El Salvador, 1999.
- Dedication of Norman E. Borlaug Center for Southern Crop Improvement, Texas A&M University, 1999.
- Vannevar Bush Award, National Science Foundation (USA), 2000.
- Memorial Centennial Medial of the N.I. Vavilov Research Institute of Plant Industry (Russia), 2000.
- Public Welfare Medal, National Academy of Sciences (USA), 2002.
- The 2002 Rotary International Award for World Understanding and Peace, Barcelona, Spain.
- The Philip Hauge Abelson Prize, American Association for the Advancement of Science, 2002.
- Award for Distinguished Achievements to Science and Medicine, American Council of Science and Health, 2003.
- National Medal of Science (USA), 2004.
- Padma Vibhushan in Science and Engineering, awarded by the Government of India, 2006.
- Norman Borlaug Institute for International Agriculture created as part of the Texas A&M University System, 2006.
- Congressional Gold Medal, 2006.
- Honorary Degrees:
Punjab Agricultural University (India), 1969
Royal Norwegian Agricultural College (Norway), 1970
Luther College (USA), 1970
Kanpur University (India), 1970
Uttar Pradesh Agricultural University (India), 1971
Michigan State University (USA), 1971
Universidad de la Plata (Argentina), 1971
University of Arizona (USA), 1972
University of Florida (USA), 1973
Universidad Católica de Chile (Chile), 1974
Universität Hohenheim (Germany), 1976
Punjab Agricultural University, (Pakistan), 1978
Columbia University, (USA), 1980
Ohio State University (USA), 1981
University of Minnesota (USA), 1982
University of Notre Dame (USA), 1987
Oregon State University (USA), 1988
University of Tulsa (USA), 1991
Washington State University (USA) 1995
Andhra Pradesh Agricultural University (India), 1996
Indian Agricultural Research Institute (India), 1996
De Montfort University, (United Kingdom), 1997
Emory University, (U.S.A) 1999
University of the Philippines, 1999
University of Missouri, (USA), 2002
Williams College, (USA), 2002
Wartburg College (USA), 2003
Dartmouth College (USA), 2005
Doctor of Agricultural Sciences:
University of Agricultural Sciences (Godollo, Hungary), 1980
Tokyo University of Agriculture (Japan), 1981
Doctor en Ciencias Agropecuarias Honoris Causa, Universidad Nacional Pedro Henríquez Turena, República Dominicana, 1983
Doctor en Ciencias, Honoris Causa Universidad Central del Este de la República Dominicana, 1983
Doctor Humane Letters:
Gustavus Adolphus College (USA), 1971
Iowa State University (USA), 1992
Cape Coast University (Ghana), 2000
Doctor of Law:
New Mexico State University (USA), 1973
Doctor of Agriculture:
You first then. If you really believe overpopulation is the problem, then how about you do what you can to solve it and off yourself? After all, the fact that you have Internet access and time to mess around on Slashdot shows that you are privileged, you live in an industrial nation and use more resources than many in the world, so you'll do more good.
Don't want to kill yourself? Then let's not hear how bad someone is who worked to keep others alive. If you think it is ok for you to stick around, you don't have the right to hate on others for wishing to do the same.
Then there's your idiotic GMO rant. Never mind that total factual inaccuracy (with corresponding lack of support) there is the fact that as Pauli said "That's not right. It's not even wrong." Borlaug's work did not start with GMOs, it was with cross breeding and the like, introducing new strains to harsh areas. If you oppose selective breeding too, well then you are going to find it hard to eat anything. Next to nothing we eat, not even "organic" foods haven't been engineered in that fashion. It has been going on for over a century in a systematic way, and long before that in a less precise way.
So tell you what, if you aren't interested in putting your money where your mouth is, so to speak, and removing yourself and your resource usage, how about you go and live in a developing country for a while. I don't mean visit one and stay in a hotel, I mean go live a subsistence lifestyle. Go live without power, running water and so on for a bit. Live where your ability to eat depends on what you can grow or kill. See how things are. Then see if maybe your opinion on people like Dr. Borlaug changes a bit.
I get more than a little annoyed with people who live privileged lives bitching about those trying to help people without. STFU and enjoy your nice life. That, or prove you are serious about overpopulation being the real problem and are willing to make the ultimate sacrifice in that regard. But don't hate on those that disagree with you, and just want to make things better for everyone.
On the one hand (and I'd say the bigger hand), the Green Revolution ushered in the world-wide use of many really good technologies for helping to feed the planet -- high-yield crops and better use of irrigation.
On the other hand, it also ushered in a world of heavy use of herbicides and pesticides (much of which is petroleum based) and nitrogen-fertilizers (which are made in a process that burns natural gas). Fertilizer run-off is killing huge swaths of the Gulf of Mexico due to algal blooms and anoxic zones, and pesticide use in some Midwestern states taints the groundwater and causes birth defects. The dependency on petroleum resources in our agriculture bodes ill because of climate change and dwindling oil supplies over the next century.
In the balance between the two, it's undeniable that the Green Revolution has saved far more lives than it has harmed, but a lot people in the environmental movement tend to less aware of the problems solved by the solutions of half a century ago than the problems they cause today. That latter fact tends to lead (as ANY political argument about ANYTHING does) to demonizing people responsible for the problems we face today, when we should view the Green Revolution as a great achievement with a few flaws here and there that can be improved upon with better science and with grassroots demand for cleaner, greener food (and not just cheap food). We can thank the Green Revolution for the luxury to demand that.
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