Posted on 09/12/2009 10:24:34 PM PDT by Jedidah
DALLAS – Agricultural scientist Norman Borlaug, the father of the "green revolution" who won the Nobel Peace Prize for his role in combating world hunger and saving hundreds of millions of lives, died Saturday in Texas, a Texas A&M University spokeswoman said. He was 95.
. . . more at link
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
He won the Nobel Peace Prize back when it was given for actually promoting peace by helping mankind. He is credited with saving many millions -- perhaps a billion -- lives of people in developing countries by giving them the means to grow their own food.
He also won the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Congressional Gold Medal.
He taught for many years at Texas A&M University, where he was professor emeritus. The Norman Borlaug Institute for International Agriculture in College Station bears his name.
Link to his bio at wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Borlaug
A true hero.
If there were a prize for “greatest human being in history,” Norman would be at the top of the list, IMO.
There is no one else who has ever lived who can make a justifiable claim to have personally saved a billion people from premature death by starvation and malnutrition.
He graduated from my alma matter:
The University of Minnesota. What a person. Bless him.
Welcome to immortal memory, Mr Borlaug.
The Green Revolution did more to end world hunger in two decades than all of the Churches, charities, and governments have done over several centuries.
Borlaug quote:
“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.”
Amen. I took many classes in Borlaug Hall in the 1980s.
RIP.
[Borlaug....... used innovative breeding techniques to produce disease-resistant varieties of wheat that produced much more grain than traditional strains
He and others later took those varieties and similarly improved strains of rice and corn to Asia, the Middle East, South America and Africa..............
“Three or four decades ago, when we were trying to move technology into India, Pakistan and China, they said nothing could be done to save these people, that the population had to die off,” he said in 2004.]
Quite a contrast with celebrity crackpot “Science Advisor” that Obama has chosen. John Holdren is the world’s leading expert on “sustainability”. He collaborated with Paul Ehrlich who in the late 60’s (just after Borlaug had made massive third world starvation a thing of the past), predicted that overpopulation would produce a massive die-off of humanity by 1980. Holdren is following in his hero’s foot steps by predicting a billion deaths from global warming by 2020. His “sustainable” development ideas just might get us there in spite of people like Borlaug.
To me, he was closer to what Jesus had in mind than many missionaries who talk a great game and essentially say, "Oh, I've got no food, but bless you brother."
bump
R.I.P. to the person who saved more human lives than anyone else.
Green Revolution ‘father’ dies
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/8253298.stm
btt
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