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."
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
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.
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.
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
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.