Nobel Prize winner, science pioneer, famine fighter Norman Borlaug, R.I.P.
Eco-charlatans like Van Jones claim to represent the poor and pose as saviors of the planet.
Norman Borlaug, Nobel Prize-winning agricultural scientist, was a real global famine fighter and science pioneer who literally saved billions around the world. He died today at the age of 95:
Nobel Prize-winning agricultural scientist Norman Borlaug has died in Texas at age 95.
Known as the father of the “green revolution,” Borlaug won the Nobel Peace Prize for his role in combating world hunger.
Texas A&M University spokeswoman Kathleen Phillips said Borlaug died just before 11 p.m. Saturday at his home in Dallas.
The Nobel committee honored Borlaug in 1970 for contributions to high-yield crops and other agricultural innovations in the developing world. Many experts credit his green revolution with averting global famine during the second half of the 20th century.
CEI’s Fran Smith wrote in 2007:
Has there been anyone else in history credited with saving a billion people? Yesterday Norman Borlaug received the Congressional Gold Medal, America’s highest civilian award. This humble and unpretentious microbiologist and plant breeder is credited with saving over a billion lives through the “Green Revolution.” Dr. Borlaug has spent his professional life introducing crop breeding methods to developing countries that dramatically increased crop yields and saved over a billion people from starvation.
Gregg Easterbrook excoriated American ignorance about this scientific giant when he received the Congressional Gold Medal:
Do you know Borlaug’s achievement? Would you recognize him if he sat on your lap? Norman Borlaug WON THE NOBEL PEACE PRIZE, yet is anonymous in the land of his birth.
Born 1914 in Cresco, Iowa, Borlaug has saved more lives than anyone else who has ever lived. A plant breeder, in the 1940s he moved to Mexico to study how to adopt high-yield crops to feed impoverished nations. Through the 1940s and 1950s, Borlaug developed high-yield wheat strains, then patiently taught the new science of Green Revolution agriculture to poor farmers of Mexico and nations to its south. When famine struck India and Pakistan in the mid-1960s, Borlaug and a team of Mexican assistants raced to the Subcontinent and, often working within sight of artillery flashes from the Indo-Pakistani War of 1965, sowed the first high-yield cereal crop in that region; in a decade, India’s food production increased sevenfold, saving the Subcontinent from predicted Malthusian catastrophes. Borlaug moved on to working in South America. Every nation his green thumb touched has known dramatic food production increases plus falling fertility rates (as the transition from subsistence to high-tech farm production makes knowledge more important than brawn), higher girls’ education rates (as girls and young women become seen as carriers of knowledge rather than water) and rising living standards for average people. Last fall, Borlaug crowned his magnificent career by persuading the Ford, Rockefeller and Bill & Melinda Gates foundations to begin a major push for high-yield farming in Africa, the one place the Green Revolution has not reached.
Yet Borlaug is unknown in the United States, and if my unscientific survey of tonight’s major newscasts is reliable, television tonight ignored his receipt of the Congressional Gold Medal, America’s highest civilian award. I clicked around to ABC, CBS and NBC and heard no mention of Borlaug; no piece about him is posted on these networks’ evening news websites; CBS Evening News did have time for video of a bicycle hitting a dog. (I am not making that up.)
Please teach your children about Borlaug. This is what a true environmental hero looks like.
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Well, he’s obviously not as important as Al Franken, Van Jones, or Jesse Jackson.
Leftists are only worthy of reknown.
Bu…bu… but, he had nothing to publicly say about global warming or endangered species.
Of course the MSM ignored him. In today’s progressive world we are told that the best thing you can do for the environment is to not have children. To save a billion people would be a crime against the planet. They were probably horrified that he got any credit at all.
Eternal rest grant unto him O Lord,
And let perpetual Light shine upon him.
May his Soul
And the Souls of all the faithful departed
Through the Mercy of God
Rest in peace.
Amen.
Blessings to his family. He was a patriot.
Progressives don’t want to save starving people. They want to save the planet and promote their religion of environmentalism. Some of my liberal friends think it would be great if one third of the population died, thus making room for animals who are endangered due to encroachment on their habitats. I always ask which third and who decides?
There was no greater Iowan.
Obama has no clue what “service” means. Norman Borlaug did.
Now this is a real Green revolutionary, not one of those pretentious fairtrade/organic maroons.
Compare the results of a relatively unknown environmental and human rights hero like Norman Borlaug with those of a “champion” of the left like Rachel Carson…and you will discover a glaring example of why today’s liberal-environmental movement is so dangerous to human rights…especially in the Third World.
Here was a man who saved millions, unlike Rachel Carson, who killed millions. Yes, I knew who you were, Mr. Borlaug, and your passing is sad. Rest in peace.
That was back when the Nobel Peace Prize used to mean something.
R.I.P. to another unsung researcher/scientist who _really_ make major differences every day. Borlaug was gutsy enough to admit even DDT had a place for saving lives, unlike today’s fanatical “greens”.
Our “true heroes quotient” is rather pathetic here, even for the most historic achievements; Don’t ask a New York City college kid (forget high school!) who’s Neil Armstrong. Like asking one where’s West Point. Can’t believe the guesses! You gotta cry.
James Greenidge
Queens, NY
So true.
The so-called environmental movement honors only the junk science of idiots such as Al Gore, while the organic farming crowd conveniently ignores those billion saved from starvation by real scientists such as Gorlaug.
“Better living through chemistry” is not just an evil capitalist marketing slogan.
I suppose our Sage-in-Residence lgm will want to tell us the many crimes against humanity that Borlag committed by forestalling the purportedly “inevitable” Malthusian collapse.
To moral imbeciles like Paul Ehrlich, Zeke Emanuel and John Holdren, Borlag was a monster who allowed billions of human beings to live healthy abnd productive lives, instead of doing the decent thing by dying early from starvation due to famine.
The ELF and Earth First! types, who seek to reduce population to a hundred million (all ELF and Firsters, of course), saw him as being as malignant and dangerous as the Palpatine Emperor.
Borlag’s “Green Revolution”, you see, was not the kind of green movement they had in mind.
So perhaps it’s no wonder that his death is being virtually ignored by the radical left and the MSM.
Wow! He saved almost as many people as the left has murdered!!!
Don’t worry, they are at work right now trying to correct that “mistake”! They’ve got a little list and we’ll never be missed!
An amazing man. Thanks Michelle.
May he rest in peace.
He was a worthy and accomplished man, but improving agricultural efficiency only delays the inevitable time when agriculture cannot feed all of the world’s growing population. When that happens, we won’t have his work to fall back on.
Increasing population + dimishing supplies of viable farmland & water + environment weakening from pollution & other abuse = inevitable disaster.
Amen!
I agree! Used to be people like Thomas Edison, The Wright Brothers, et.al. were taught in school and held up as role models.
Now, it’s Hollyweird actors, singers, and unsportsmanlike sports stars.
No wonder America is losing it’s competitive edge.
David Malthus was unavailable for comment.
Stunning illogic.
BEFORE Borlaug, India and China underwent frequent famines killing tens of millions, which were used by Malthusians to “prove” their Doomsday predictions were finally coming true.
Now the claim is made that EVEN THOUGH Borlaug “improved agricultural efficiency” (actually he developed disease-resistant and hardier strains of rice and other grains) all he did was postpone the inevitable day…!!!
LOL!! I suppose someone should have discouraged him from trying.
On top of that, the writer commits the fallacy that begins “if present trends continue”.
But Borlaug is proof positive that present trends do NOT inevitably continue.
Borlaug’s work will always be with us, and there is no reason to assume that others will not build on it to continue the development of new and improved food resources– just as there’s no reason to assume the world’s population will continue its growth rates.
The parts of the world undergoing the greatest population growth are the poorest and least developed.
How, one asks, will the rich nations of the world, ask the poor to reduce their populations, when they can see the consequences in countries like Japan, which is now experiencing demographic senility and its consequent economic decline?
Finally, how does greenlibertarian square his political philosophy with the draconian government intrusion into poor people’s lives which would be called for by population control?
Is he like Tom Friedman, who admires the Chinese government for its ability to just force its citizens to do what it wants??? Like the “one child” policy that has resulted in millions of girl babies being killed, or a second child being forcibly taken from its loving parents?
How about some solutions, greenlibertarian: what would YOU do??
I just got a Tweet from Comic Book Guy:
Dumbest.
Statement.
Ever.
He may be “green”, but he’s not a libertarian. Wanna bet Greenlibertarian supports the House health care bill? Population control through euthanasia and abortion – the socialist dream.
Hmm, thinking that a finite ecosystem can support an infinite of people is ’stunningly illogical’. Unfortunately the sneerers and name-callers here, or their descendents, may have to discover that the hard way. An ounce of prevention …
I do think most countries should adopt a one-child policy until populations are reduced to a sustainable level. I would rather see a steady sustainable population last billions of years until the Sun fails, or longer if we attain light-speed space travel, than see a larger number last perhaps a hundred years: in the former scenario many more people will have lived, and live better, than the latter one.
Who made such a case? Not I.
And who says we are headed to an “infinite” population? Not anyone but you, and the facts are not on your side. NO organisms ever achieve such a growth rate.
You are no different from Paul Ehrlich, who predicted that hundreds of millions of humans would die beginning in 1970. Forty years later and you are still predicting the same thing. don’t you folks ever learn?
AS I SAID, almost all countries with large population growth are poor countries.
I ASKED you to provide solutions, but all you did was offer hortatory suggestions, such as countries should “adopt” one-child population policies, even though I TOLD YOU how that has led to infanticide and parents having their children taken away from them.
Apparently, such horrors present you with no moral qualms.
Do you have any frackin idea how bizarre you sound, given that Borlaug’s work sustained and improved the lives of a billion people?
Seems to me that Borlaug’s solution, which helps create and sustain human life, holds far more promise than your “ounce” of prevention, which destroys it.
Then you dodge my point, since your cure creates huge economic problems for those who survive the cut. China, for example, will economically implode in the next fifteen years precisely because it adopted a one-child policy that will leave it with too few younger workers.
Again I ask: how can a libertarian be suggesting that governments impose population control? What libery is there in forcing people not to procreate?
You’re a solid-gold fraud. We can easily tell that you are not Indian, Chinese or a member of a third-world nation that has benefited mightily from borlaug’s work.
Are you an Earth Firster? Burn any SUVs lately? Topple any microwave towers recently?
Oh and one more parting shot, mr. libertarian: aside from India, virtually NONE of the high-population growth countries is a democracy.
So when you speak of countries “adopting” one-child population policies you are unwittingly calling for some of the most anti-libertarian regimes on the planet to FORCE their citizens to toe the line, in perpetuity aka bilions of years.
What a shallow frackwit you are.
geddoudaheah!!!
Everyone will inevitably die, so I guess we may as well stop trying to advance medicine and technology too. In fact, why bother living at all? We ought to just commit mass suicide. Why delay the inevitable, right?
Knuckleheads like you have been warning of this inevitable disaster for hundreds of years. Fortunately for us, while you waste time complaining about how hopeless it all is people like Borlaug actually work to make things better.
And if that ounce of prevention means trampling on basic freedoms or murdering a few million infants, well… omlettes and eggs, right?
Bless him and his family for the tremendous good he did for the people of Earth.
But, but, they’re professionals…
blockquote>Norman Borlaug, Nobel Prize-winning agricultural scientist, was a real global famine fighter and science pioneer who literally saved billions around the world.
RIP. What a legacy.
If I may, I’d like to quote the rest of the Easterbrook story (ESPN’s Tuesday Morning Quarterback BTW):