Okay, so who’s Norman Borlaug?
In yesterday’s post about the results of the “most admired man and woman” Gallup poll, I was intrigued by the fact that two commenters mentioned Norman Borlaug as their most admired man.
I admit it; I’d never even heard of the guy. So of course I had to look him up, and I must say I’m impressed. If he’s not the most admired man in the world, he most certainly should be a contender—or at the very least a household word.
Borlaug’s relative obscurity is somewhat puzzling. He’s the father of the Green Revolution that has allowed many third-world countries such as India to feed their people far more effectively, and made famine a sometime thing rather than a regular occurrence.
For this he has received countless honors. He’s also been excoriated by the Left, a group you’d think would applaud his work on behalf of the starving people of the Third World. Environmentalists in particular have been up in arms:
Of environmental lobbyists [Borlaug] has stated, “some of the environmental lobbyists of the Western nations are the salt of the earth, but many of them are elitists. They’ve 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 fifty years, they’d be crying out for tractors and fertilizer and irrigation canals and be outraged that fashionable elitists back home were trying to deny them these things.”
Not the least of Borlaug’s achievements is a marriage that lasted sixty-nine years, ended only by the death of his 95-year old wife last year after a fall. Borlaug had married an older woman, by the way; he’s a mere ninety-four.
Thank you for this recognition of an amazing man, though only one of the thousands whose work has made the world so well fed now, and of whom so little is known by our “educated elite.”
If one were to ask the ordinary 50-year old “where does your food come from?” I wonder how many would have the least idea of the answer, how different it is from, say, 150 years ago, and how important the USA has been to the story, particularly since WWII. We’ve been a pretty decent bunch.
Yes, hooray for Norman Borlaug!
Borlaug’s relative obscurity is somewhat puzzling.
Unfortunately, he turns upside down the standard narrative of Westerners oppressing, exploiting, and killing the Third World with technology. Many refuse to believe that a Westerner or technology could grant such boons to the Third World.
Also, his name is hard to remember….
Thank you for helping to introduce people to one of the great men of our times. I would point out that the numerous honors Professor Borlaug has received have been awarded by elite institutions, the members of which are fully aware of his importance. The problem is not with elites as such, but with specific elites — left-wing ideologues who are wedded to an anti-Western narrative [as Huxley notes], environmentalists who pursue an anti-human agenda and a popular press that is obsessively focused on politics and entertainment.
I enjoy your writing very much — keep up the good work.
For this he has received countless honors. He’s also been excoriated by the Left, a group you’d think would applaud his work on behalf of the starving people of the Third World. Environmentalists in particular have been up in arms:
If nobody was starving, Neo, then how could the Left call upon the rest of us to make sacrifices for the greater good of feeding starving children?
Power needs an excuse for it to be exercised, if it has no underlying authority or legitimacy in the eyes of the populace.
I hadn’t heard of Norman Borlaug either, but given what he’s done am hardly surprised that the envirocrazies hate him. They are a bunch of ideologies who have a Garden of Eden view of the earth before man came along. As such, we are evil and and a harm to the earth. Therefore, our lives are less important than saving the earth.
I hadn’t heard of him either.
We have alot of pot growers here (Humboldt County, Northern CA), and back in the 70s, most of ’em were young college students, many were botany majors. They spent their time trying to perfect the growing of pot, cultivating the female plants, and much ‘scientific’ discussion and nurturing went into it.
I remember thinking how sad it was that all this effort and brain power was going into this, and what a difference it would make if they were working on growing better tomatoes – or like this guy, wheat. You could feed the world and end huger forever.
He did it. And look at what he accomplished. Wow.
The growers here have become more militant and demanding – some say one in three houses (some say one in five) in Arcata are growhouses now. And, for the most part they are firmly in that anti-human, chicken-little shut-everything-down Left that he is talking about.
It’s still sad.
But it is good to hear about this guy. It’s amazing! And he even got a Nobel Prize before the world went mad. 🙂
To the Left, humanity definitely suffers from Original Sin. In that respect, they are no different than the fundamental reactionaries that so called “progressive” members decry. Then again, the Left tends to create their own bogeymen, like the Palestinians. All too often their strawmen are an exact mirror image of their own identities and methods.
Unfortunately, he turns upside down the standard narrative of Westerners oppressing, exploiting, and killing the Third World with technology. Many refuse to believe that a Westerner or technology could grant such boons to the Third World.
It is also incredibly inconvenient. How do you raise money for anti-imperialist causes when an imperialist himself has shown that he can actually solve people’s problems?
How is somebody like Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton going to get funds and influence if racism and the perception of racism disappeared in America? They couldn’t. Thus, they need to sustain the problem so that they can endlessly offer “solutions” to it.
So long as imperialism exists, in terms of one superior culture or nation having more power, influence, and prosperity than another culture/nation, the anti-imperialists will always have a cause to sustain their hatred and their bank accounts. But if the inequality between the haves and the have nots started shrinking… then bad things will happen to the cause of the anti-imperialists.
There is a lot of pain in getting surprised by the loss of your income and your faith at the same time, and to many people in the West, hate of technology and human progress is both their religion as well as their employer.
Sad, but true. Still, America didn’t get to where she is by following anti-imperialist platforms. She got where she is by either annexing or accepting the admission of new territories and new states. If the New England colonies had treated Mississippi, Colorado, California, Louisiana, New Mexico, Texas, and so forth the way the Western elites currently treat Arabs and Africans, California would be at about the same economic state as Cuba: good for only its naval bases.
But some people hate the idea of foreigners prospering so much that they insist that today it is different. Today these foreigners are different and need to be given access to benefits that will give them equality and it just so happens that none of these benefits were the cause of the Western elite’s own power and success, well… we won’t have to mention that annoying little detail. I suppose if you have enough power and wealth then you will naturally feel that you have a right to control the way other weaker nations and cultures develop, but there is a great difference between using power and wealth responsibly and using it irresponsibly. That difference is lost on many of the elites of the Western world, however. Oh, they don’t do the dirty work, of course. That gets left to the missionaries, the “peace keepers”, and the numerous Peace Corps members and NGOs. The rich blokes just fund it and feel better about themselves. If that inevitably results in a Rwanda or Darfur, which hasn’t happened in America on any scale period and never in Europe after America stabilized it, then that is the acceptable price for those living lives of luxury in America and Europe and Australia.
Nobody cares. And why should they? The people in Africa can’t vote for American representatives, and if you can’t vote for American representatives, why should America give a damn about you? If Texas hadn’t been admitted as a state to the union and never had 2 Senators in the Senate and reps in the House of Representatives, do you think the other States wouldn’t have rode all over the resources of Texas and its “people”?
In case people hadn’t noticed by now, if you are not citizens of a nation, that nation is not guaranteed to care about your “human rights” cause 1. you aren’t a citizen and 2. you could be labeled an enemy of the state. Even people who complain about Gitmo can understand that point in their tiny compartmentalized heads. It is why they want terrorists treated as American citizens, because they understand the benefit of America laws and protections for American citizens. But that only underscores the Left’s total disregard for treating Iraqis, Africans, Somalians, and various other red, black, brown necked people as equals. Sub-human scum is more accurate a term for the Left saw our allies in Vietnam and our allies in Iraq now.
Mr Borlaug is apparently old school. That kind of goodness is foreign to modern educated narcissist who think empathy is blessing the world with their mere specialness.
Three cheers to such a man.
(Hopefully the links will work properly.)
Mr. Borlaug helped create the World Food Prize, “recognizing — without regard to race, religion, nationality, or political beliefs — the achievements of individuals who have advanced human development by improving the quality, quantity or availability of food in the world.”
Borlaug also was featured in a Penn and Teller BS program on genetically modified foods. He appears at around 1:53 to speak of what he does and how these foods can help feed people around the world. P&T say he helped save 1 billion people with his agricultural improvements in the world.
Perhaps that is why some leftists hate Borlaug. They believe the world is too populated now. Of course I don’t see too many of them volunteering to off themselves for the sake of the planet.
Compare how often Paul Ehrlich is interviewed, compared to Norman Borlaug.
Of course, you could argue that I shouldn’t complain, since it’s a win-win. Ehrlich gets what he wants, a platform. Borlaug gets what he wants, people not starving.
Never forget that ideas have consequences.
Neo,
Let me add my thanks for mentioning Norman Borlaug. He has long been one of my heroes. Contrast Borlaug’s many, real and considerable accomplishments against elitist luddites like Paul Erlich, mentioned above or Obama’s newly appointed science adviser and long time Erlich pal, John Holdren. Or contrast Borlaug’s accomplishments to such self-aggrandizing windbags as Al Gore.
One contrast which really strikes me is when you read about a predicted malthusian catastrophie like Erlich wrote about in his book The Population Bomb where he predicted that “in the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death” and that nothing can be done to avoid mass famine greater than any in the history, and radical action is needed to limit the overpopulation.
This was pessimistic on all levels. In predicting such a mass famine, in failing to think that there might be enough technical progress to allow another solution, in thinking that people were incapable of overcoming the problem, in its elitist dislike of people in general and suggesting that a radical population reduction was the only way to avoid starvation. Population reduction for thee, not he ofcourse.
Borlaug’s main objective was to improve agriculture so as to be able to feed more people. He went about it with a humility and selflessness that seems as if from another age. Borlaug’s solution was optimistic and positive. It was also democratic, not elitist, but most of all, it was real.
No wonder the environmentalists, and the left either don’t like him or dismiss him. As Ymarsakar says, he definitely turns their world upside down. We need more Borlaugs.
I had read about him in Bjorn Lomborg’s book ‘The Skeptical Environmentalist’. In the section on Food and Hunger, you can see comparisons of Lestor Brown’s doomsday predicaments and Norman Borlaug’s real work of saving people from hunger side by side.
This man sits among a pantheon of heros – next to Mother Theresa.
Environmentalists made the predictions they did because they have a world-view that requires it. They are not really so base as to desire the suffering of millions of others. But neither do they care very much about it or take it much into account. In the same way that many elitists cared about what happened in Iraq only in terms of what that meant for politics in Washington, so also do many environmentalists only care about the events of the world in terms of how it affects cultural dominance here. They want certain predictions to come true because it would vindicate their world-view and elevate their group’s status here.
Thus, Borlaug being a man of science and user of technology to relieve suffering has little relevance to them. What he accomplished did not prove them right and change the fabric of American society to a more rational one where their values – and many of them individually – achieve dominance.
Some of the noblest – and loneliest – people in the world are those environmentalists who spend their effort in actually trying to clean, improve, and protect the environment with concrete action.
Neo,
Another interesting aspect of Borlaug’s work is that as far as I am aware, it was done without large government grants.
Below is a quote from a very interesting read that is tangentially related to Borlaug and his research.
Never forget that ideas have consequences.
Oh, we certainly wouldn’t want to forget that.
Link
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Ideas are powerful and they do and will get people killed. But what they don’t do is automatically save people or make their lives better. That requires action and a specific kind of action.
Another interesting aspect of Borlaug’s work is that as far as I am aware, it was done without large government grants.
Socialism operates on the principle that if the government has a powerful ability to interfere with business, that businessmen and those who depend upon business for their wealth will pour money into the coffers of politicians so as to prevent that government power being used against them, the businessmen and investors.
The idea of individual businessmen utilizing their profits for the greater good on their own initiative is not an idea the Left accepts. It is too foreign to their world of Haliburtons and Fannie Maes and Enrons. The fact that George Soros, leading funder of Leftist causes, has a lot of stock in Haliburton now, while Fannie Mae was the direct result of business colluding with government power, only reinforces the Leftist cry for more government power over business practices. The fact that the same people who caused such corruption disasters in the first place are also leading the charge for more government power over businesses, is, of course, par for the course.
It would be a mighty inconvenience for politicians if private industries could solve problems without needing to give millions in bribes to those same politicians. Very inconvenient.
The best thing that ever happened to Norman Borlaug was probably the government not “creating opportunity” for him. Even decent people and their creativity can be rather easily corrupted by govt beauracrats employing the carrot and stick we see with climatologist.