Norman Borlaug arguably the greatest American of the 20th century died late Saturday after 95 richly accomplished years. The very personification of human goodness, Borlaug saved more lives than anyone who has ever lived. He was America's Albert Schweitzer: a brilliant man who forsook privilege and riches in order to help the dispossessed of distant lands. That this great man and benefactor to humanity died little-known in his own country speaks volumes about the superficiality of modern American culture...
In the mid-1960s, India and Pakistan were exceptions to the trend toward more efficient food production; subsistence cultivation of rice remained the rule, and famine struck. In 1965, Borlaug arranged for a convoy of 35 trucks to carry high-yield seeds from CIMMYT to a Los Angeles dock for shipment to India and Pakistan. He and a coterie of Mexican assistants accompanied the seeds. They arrived to discover that war had broken out between the two nations. Sometimes working within sight of artillery flashes, Borlaug and his assistants sowed the Subcontinent's first crop of high-yield grain. Paul Ehrlich gained celebrity for his 1968 book "The Population Bomb," in which he claimed that global starvation was inevitable for the 1970s and it was "a fantasy" that India would "ever" feed itself. Instead, within three years of Borlaug's arrival, Pakistan was self-sufficient in wheat production; within six years, India was self-sufficient in the production of all cereals.
After his triumph in India and Pakistan and his Nobel Peace Prize, Borlaug turned to raising crop yields in other poor nations especially in Africa, the one place in the world where population is rising faster than farm production and the last outpost of subsistence agriculture. At that point, Borlaug became the target of critics who denounced him because Green Revolution farming requires some pesticide and lots of fertilizer. Trendy environmentalism was catching on, and affluent environmentalists began to say it was "inappropriate" for Africans to have tractors or use modern farming techniques. Borlaug told me a decade ago that most Western environmentalists "have never experienced the physical sensation of hunger. They do their lobbying from comfortable office suites in Washington or Brussels. If they lived just one month amid the misery of the developing world, as I have for 50 years, they'd be crying out for tractors and fertilizer and irrigation canals and be outraged that fashionable elitists in wealthy nations were trying to deny them these things."
Real environmentalism does not oppose the green revolution, it seeks to continuously improve it. The overwhelmingly beneficial effects of the green revolution are not perfect: there are costs as well as benefits. The remaining work is to lower the costs and continue to increase the benefits.
We really do need to emerge from under the nonsensical aesthetic of paleo-environmentalism. These aren't the good guys. These aren't the folks who actually work to conserve and improve the environment. They are more like a religious cult with patently absurd ideas fervently held in spite of the evidence against them. We should name and shame them, and not forget their crimes in future when they try to reinvent themselves, be born again as is so often the case with social criminals, and infect future efforts at real progress.
They are the cautionary example that can be used in education. They claim good intentions but their actions prove the lie. They are merely extremists who chose the environment as their cause, something to be extreme about, and it was the extremism that fired them rather than environmental improvement. These are the type of people that degrade any effort and they really do need to be identified and contained so that real progress can be made.
Borlaug, OTOH, is the real deal.
Ehrlich is another one of those Malthusians who cry about some huge disaster some indefinite time in the future and hope that we forget them when that disaster never materializes.
I challenge any Malthusian to show a correct prediction. They are always wrong.
Posted by DaveH at September 18, 2009 2:01 PM