A living hero

Who here knows who Norman Borlaug is?

I’m ashamed to say I didn’t, until today, although I knew about the circumstances which made his a name worth knowing.

Dr. Norman Borlaug is a 91 year old man from Iowa who has saved over a billion lives.

Let me repeat that. There is man living among us who is responsible for saving over a billion lives.

In the 1960s it was conventional wisdom that the earth could not produce enough food to sustain it’s exploding population, and that megadeaths due to starvation were imminent. Paul Ehrlich wrote a famous book about it called The Population Bomb.

Borlaug proved him wrong. He created new strains of grain and taught the developing world new farming techniques. Agricultural productivity skyrocketed. The predicted famines never materialized. This development came to be known as The Green Revolution.

Productivity continues to go up, with no end in sight, despite the persistent warnings of eternally-wrong doomsayers. At 91, Borlaugh is still working to get the best agricultural technology into the hands of third-world farmers.

There will always be fearmongers among us who make small fortunes by announcing mournfully that we’re doomed and there’s little or nothing that can be done. Thankfully, there will also always be men and women like Borlaugh, who get out there and do something about it, and prove once again the endless resourcefulness of the human race.

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8 Comments

  1. a bit of an exagerration…

    I don’t think he’s single-handedly responsible for “saving” that many lives…

    …and the question of whether, in the end, this green revolution will turn out to be sustainable (seeing that a lot of the green revolution is predicated on petroleum/chemical based fertilizers/herbicides/pesticides–and the wonders of biotech/gen engineering aren’t necessarily proven yet..) mean that this green revolution may actually end up just prolonging the day of reckoning–to the extent that a much larger population then goes over the cliff…

    I’m not saying this is going to happen.. but I wouldn’t necessarily take it as a given that all the answers are in yet… (nor that agricultural yields are constantly improving… do you have any solid data about this for all areas of the world? )

    Just a little skepticism here.. I think he is a great guy and I admire his optimism… and Ehrlich is a complete asshole… but it may not all turn out to be roses…

    1. Re: a bit of an exagerration…

      nor that agricultural yields are constantly improving… do you have any solid data about this for all areas of the world?

      There is data in the article I linked to, or in the articles it links to.

      Also, (according to the UN, among others), our population is leveling off, so it’s not like it’s an eternal race between productivity and population. The earth only has to support whatever steady-state population we reach in 50-100 years. Which, given the productivity growth rates we’ve seen, the fact that there are still large swaths of the earth that have yet to fully implement existing Green Revolution methods (let alone post GR developments), and the potential of bioengineered crops, seems a near certainty.

      So yes, I think all that optimism is justified. We have crises in our future, but I don’t believe hunger due to lack of capacity is one of them.

      On the other hand, I agree that the “billions” number is, by nature, pulled more or less out of thin air. Who knows how many would actually have died were it not for the green revolution; and can you count the babies that would not have been born if it were not for the revolution as “saved”? I dunno… maybe it’s more accurate to say “millions”; I was just using the language of his congressional gold medal citation.

      1. Re: a bit of an exagerration…

        Part of the reason is that I don’t actually think the entire planet could sustain an entire world using “Green Revolution” methods–which are highly hi-tech/petroleum intensive methods… to do so would certainly increase the petroleum consumption of the world by a chunk.. and would require the kind of industrial foundation to sustain such an endeavor..

        And the greatest part of population growth is occuring in exactly those places that have some of the highest debts and least amount of industrialization…

        In any case.. I think Jared Diamond makes a fairly good case that what we consider the “Green Revolution” is not a sustainable model–it’s not particularly sustainable even in the industrialized countries over the next 100 or so years.. much less in those places that aren’t yet fully industrialized…

        A big however is that the bio-engineered crops might be a solution to the problems of the green revolution… they could eliminate the use of petroleum fertilizers and pesticides which would make a system way more sustainable..

        A “retort” however, is that every time you have given the “poor” countries tons of food and eliminated their diseases… they basically populated themselves into famines.. (see much of Africa in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s..) despite the existence of the Green revolution.. the bio-tech revolution–if it doesn’t accompany a huge social revolution might do the same thing all over again..

        In any case.. the Steady state population forecast for 100 years from now–even the low estimates–is going to be too high unless we find ways to dramatically increase our energy sources.. In “Collapse” by Jared Diamon, I’m pretty sure that he makes the argument that we have actually already passed the energy consumption marker designated by the “full utilization of all solar energy” that the earth actually absorbs each second–in other words–because we are using fossil fuels–which are finite–we are actually using more energy now than the sun gives to us each instant.. and thus eventually, as these fuels run out, will get hit with the whammy of not having enough energy to support the lifestyle of even the 6billion souls alive today–much less the rest of the biosphere and any extrapeople and what not…

        solutions, of course, could be huge ginormous solar panels to increase our energy input–plus radical efficiency increases and cutting of much of our expenditures (goodbye air-conditioning!)… but there is a check coming… prolly just not in our lifetimes…

        of course–some big new plague could just solve all of this..

        what a happy thought.. 😉

        1. Re: a bit of an exagerration…

          From what I understand Jared Diamond takes Easter Island, a small and in many ways unique piece of property, makes a bunch of assumptions, some of which have already been debunked by anthropologists, and then extrapolates to the entire world. I don’t put a lot of stock in what he has to say.

          An in general I don’t put much stock in large-scale doomsayers, period. For the simple reason that they always turn out to be wrong. There seems to be a mental block that certain people have when confronting complex systems, which causes them to predict that the system will suddenly begin to act in distinctly different ways than it ever has before, or indeed than any complex system has acted before. And invariably that sudden shift in behavior is going to happen Real Soon Now. For some it’s ecosystems; for some it’s economies; and for others it’s the whole damn globe. They seem fundamentally incapable of internalizing the fact that really big complex systems are a) dynamic; yet b) adaptive and c) resilient. Thus, for instance, the exhaustion of a resource doesn’t lead to a sudden crash; it leads to a transition. The transition may be marked by greater than normal instability, but predictions of crashes are always overblown.

          From what I understand Green Revolution tech is fundamentally based on hardier crop varieties, not on petroleum. These crops work in conjunction with pesticides and fertilizer, true, but I don’t think there’s any particular reason those chemicals need to be petroleum-based (if they even are now). And I can’t imagine that using tractors to spread those fertilizers would represent a significant chunk of fossil fuel usage compared to, say, the trucking industry.

          You wrote of social revolution… can anyone deny that social revolution is going on right now? Third world nations like India and China are rapidly approaching first-world status – with the requisite drop in population growth and increase in productivity. Can Africa be that far behind, once cheap labor becomes scarce in Asia? In the West we are using less energy to get more done every year, a product or byproduct of technological advances (tiny example: did you know that every generation of electronic components uses lower voltage in order to work faster?). The rest of the world is following, some faster than others. It’s not a question of “if” but of “how fast”.

          1. he’s not a doomsayer…

            1. Your understanding of Jared Diamond is ill-informed. Collapse covers something like a variety of different case studies about different societies that collapsed–including the Mayan, Norse in Greenland, and Easter Island–but also societies that have not collapsed but are facing problems–like the ecosphere in Montana and that of Australia–and also gives success stories of societies that faced collapse and pulled themselves back from the brink–such as medieval Japan and the tiny island of Tikopia…

            And he is not a doom-sayer.. but rather thinks that there are problems that we need to address if we are going to avoid the fate of a number of societies of the past… and he is not some hippie radical tree-hugger but gives pretty sound economic advice and differentiates different possible econo-political solutions (top down, bottom up) that have worked or could work..

            You should really read the book before poo-pooing it.. It’s not a doom-gloom book–but rather a kind of call-to arms for the sustainability movement–one that as I can personally verify–is catching on strong in many different engineering circles…

            As for the Green Revolution–it does involve hardier crops–but at its root, it is fundamentally tied to petroleum products. If we just had the hardier crops–but not the pesticides and the fertilizers and such, then instead of the tripling/quadrupling of yields that have occurred.. we’d only be talking about an increase of perhaps 50%.. which is not bad.. but not nearly the whole story…

            And in a larger sense.. your mentioning of the trucking yield is very much connected to this green revoluiton–because it allowed farmers to plant and grow massive amounts of crops quite far from the relevant markets–but depends upon these mostly now petroleum based transportation networks in order to make these crops worth planting…

            As for the social revolution–that is much easier to say about Asia than it is about Africa.. India and China have had social planners trying to change it’s political and economic structure towards more industrialization for the better part of 60 years.. and before that point, they were also rather advanced civilizations (some of the oldest in the world) with a fairly in depth infrastructure and hierarchical social arrangements..

            This is not the case in Africa in any way.. It is not going to be quite so easy there…

            In any case–I’m not a doom and gloomer–I do think everything will pull thru eventually.. I’m just incredibly leary of anything that sounds like technological utopianism… Originally.. the green revolution founders pretty much prophesized the end of hunger everywhere… and yet famines still occurred for the next 30 years…and the unintended side-effects of pesticides and fertilizers–including destruction of much wildlife, raising rates of cancer, and toxic algae blooms–are still significant problems to deal with..

            It’s not that they cannot be handled eventually.. but I do believe–and the point about using more energy at the moment in an absolute sense than the sun actually gives to the earth is definitely a problem not resolved by any stretch of the imagination–that there are going to be some challenges.. and there might just be a few catastrophes along the way…

          2. Re: he’s not a doomsayer…

            and the point about using more energy at the moment in an absolute sense than the sun actually gives to the earth is definitely a problem not resolved by any stretch of the imagination

            Sure it is. Nuclear power.

            Do I think that’s The Answer? No. I think we’re going to see a mix of strategies to deal with energy shortages as time goes by; and because of the nature of advancement some of those strategies are necessarily unknown and unpredictable right now. But the point is that technologically speaking, we have the capability to generate fuck-tons of energy if we really, really wanted to, without any near-term sustainability problems. Converting this energy into the forms we need (e.g. transportation) is tricky but not intractable.

            I just don’t see an energy deficit as a real problem now or in the foreseeable future. Maybe an energy routing gap; but no dearth of energy itself.

          3. point taken…

            but for me.. the two things are pretty synonymous.. Of course we have tons of energy on this planet… if we have matter conversion into energy.. we have unlimited energy… but such technologies are not necessarily givens to me…

            as for nuclear power–only if fusion really does come online do we some ways to extend our supplies.. fission suffers from the same limitations–uranium is not necessarily that common–it is finite (and decreasing as we speak all by itself! 🙂 ) and fusion.. well.. besides also being implicitly limited to tritium and deuterium (at least at first) which, while abundant.. are also “relatively” finite… the idea of creating a reaction in my neighborhood that–in nature–can warm my skin from 95 million miles away… that’s kinda scary…

            In any case.. I see that we are, again, of two different opinions on this… you are the optimist and I am the pessimist.. which kinda fits our political mindsets.. 🙂

        2. Re: a bit of an exagerration…

          Exactly, plague is a very good solution. Or even starvation, the weak die, more people go into grief counseling as a job and people move on with a less populated planet. In the end, if there are to many people the system will adapt, or people will die. However, all the people that will die would have died anyway.

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