The Man Who Defused the 'Population Bomb'

The Wall Street Journal ^ | 9/16/2009 | Gregg Easterbrook

[TChris]

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.

Born in 1914 in rural Cresco, Iowa, where he was educated in a one-room schoolhouse, Borlaug won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970 for his work ending the India-Pakistan food shortage of the mid-1960s. He spent most of his life in impoverished nations, patiently teaching poor farmers in India, Mexico, South America, Africa and elsewhere the Green Revolution agricultural techniques that have prevented the global famines widely predicted when the world population began to skyrocket following World War II.

[TChris]

Another amazing American hero, ignored by the State-Run Media...

[steve-b]

The “population bomb” scenario overlooked the fact that people naturally stop having so many children as their standard of living and education improves — it makes sense to concentrate on quality over quantity.

[GOPJ]

Another damnation of our MSM - they “missed” on the story about this good man....

[rlmorel]

I read about this man the day he died.

I had never heard of him. What an amazing story, an amazing man. The architect of the Green Revolution.

[Ruy Dias de Bivar]

***makes sense to concentrate on quality over quantity.***

Yet the real reason for having many children at that time was that most of them would not make it to adulthood.

Most would die as children. Some would make it to the teen years. One or two might make it to old age and have families.

There is a story about a doctor who went into the jungles somewhere and gave the children innoclulations against diseases.
When he told the tribal elders how this would allow the children to live to old age, they said ....It was good, but who would feed them?

[Alberta's Child]

The same thing happened back in the 1960s and 1970s with population growth alarmist Paul Ehrlich and his former student Julian Simon.

[xcamel]

Great article.

[Buckeye McFrog]

and yet Paul Erlich goes right on collecting fat campus speaking fees, including one from my alma mater. (sigh)

[Cicero]

I had heard about Borlaug’s work on increasing food yields, but it was many years ago. Nothing I can remember for the past couple of decades.

If the truth be told, the envirofanatics would rather have seen those billion lives he saved ended, even though as Borlaug points out the unintended consequence of NOT improving food yields would probably have been cutting down most of the world’s forests for farmland.

That still is their secret wish—to kill off a few billion people in order to “save the Earth.” That’s why Borlaug and his work are largely ignored.

[dead]

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."

Great man of vision.

[AnotherUnixGeek]

Another amazing American hero, ignored by the State-Run Media...

The Indians, who he did so much to help, didn't forget him:

Terming the death of agricultural scientist and Nobel laureate Norman Borlaug as the end of an era, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh Monday described him as one with a 'towering intellect' who 'helped millions of people escape from a life of hunger and deprivation'.

I sincerely hope our own president had something to say about Borlaug's life and contributions, but so far I've found nothing.

But then, Obama has surrounded himself with environmentalists like population-control advocate John Holdren, who argued that Borlaug's techniques would never stop worldwide famine. In the world of environmentalism, being proven right or wrong are nothing - what matter is conformance to environmentalism.

[swarthyguy]

He’s a villian to the enviros.

By his talents, many countries averted famine and a total deforestation of their lands to accomodate increased food production and population increases.

In the world of the Greenies, this was totally uncalled for.

[ForegoneAlternative]

Nephew graduated from Dartmouth a while back.

Tom Brokaw gave the commencement speech, his tired, and emetic, “Greatest Generation” schtick so he could sell a few more books. This from a guy who spent every weekday evening of his adult life being a traitor to his country. He droned on and on. Posing his Trademarked Craggy Visage in all directions for the fawning Baby Boomer CoolPixes. Vomiting one last dribble of cryptofeudal “liberalism” into the minds of Generation Next — before they finally got to learn how the world really works after two decades of helicopter parenting, playdates, and “educational” pseudoscience.

And there, to pick up his umpteenth honorary doctorate, was Norman Borlaug, who said practically nothing at all, just smiling and picking up yet another sheepskin to stick on the considerable pile of same back in College Station.

Talk about going from a moral sewer to a skyscraper of the human spirit in the space of a single dais.

[Mrs. Don-o]

"When he told the tribal elders how this would allow the children to live to old age, they said ....It was good, but who would feed them?"

Such a story may exist "out there" somewhere, but it doesn't make sense in the context of the life realities of primitive people.

Human grouips living at a subsistence level do not make distinctions betweel "producers" and "consumers," because almost everybody at every age is both. A 4-year-old can gather aticks to make a fire and can watch that his younger siblings don't wander off. A 6-year-old can pick up nuts and pick berries and gather eggs and follow fairly complex instructions from his elders. By age 8 a child can be efficient enough to be a net surplus producer, and thereafter extremely valuable from an economic standpoint, especially if his parents or grandparents are ill or injured or otherwise impaired.

This is true in hunter-gatherer, herder-nomad and farming societies alike. The poorer you are, the less you can afford the luxury of NOT investing heavily in children.

And yes, many pre-modern societies had a high mortality rate balanced by a high natality rate: but all of them reckoned children as wealth.

[Mrs. Don-o]

And by the way, since our modern social safety-net system is based on an inter-generational ponzi scheme which assumes a larger number of payers (workers, taxpayers, progeny) in each generation, the common "we can afford not to have children" assumption is unsustainable.

We'll earn that lesson painfully but well between now and 2015.

[Clemenza]

Urbanization is the key factor in decline in population growth. In the early 1960s, the typical Mexican woman had 6.2 children. This figure was down to 2.3 children as Mexican society became more urbanized. Its common sense actually: in the city, there are more diversions. In the country, your diversions are farming and procreation.

[VOA]

There-goes-a-good-man bump.

My brother is still proud to have attended classes in Borlaug Hall
where he got his Masters in plant sciences.

Despite his humble bachelors degree from a “State U.” from below the
Mason-Dixon Line.

[steve-b]

Modern economies are driven by technology, not brute numbers, rendering this factor increasingly irrelevant.

[SunkenCiv]

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