A Billion Lives Saved

Today would have been the 108th birthday of Norman Borlaug.

"Norman who?," some of you might ask, which is a shame and a harsh indictment of our educational system.

Borlaug was an agronomist whose pioneering work in cross-breeding (aka genetically modifying) wheat and agricultural practices has been demarcated as the start of the Green Revolution that has saved a billion people across the globe from starvation. His innovations produced disease-resistant plants, doubled or tripled crop yields per acre, and saved millions of acres from deforestation and being turned into relatively ecologically barren farmland.

His work put the lie to the Malthusian doomsayings of such as Paul Ehrlich, Garrett Hardin, and of course, Malthus himself, as well as mooting the eugenic proclivities of many Best-and-Brightest social-engineering types of yore, including George Bernard Shaw, Havelock Ellis, H. G. Wells, Louis Brandeis and Oliver Wendell “Three generations of imbeciles are enough” Holmes, Jr..

Borlaug's achievements did not go unnoticed. He was awarded:

The Nobel Peace Prize

The Presidential Medal of Freedom

The Public Welfare Medal

The National Medal of Science

The Congressional Gold Medal

And more than 50 honorary degrees. A statue of him stands in the National Statuary Hall of the United States Congress.

Oh, and he has been inducted into the collegiate National Wrestling Hall of Fame.

He serves as shining proof that human innovation can overcome what too many deem insurmountable challenges, in a manner that benefits and improves lives rather than restricting or ignoring them.

Nevertheless, he has his share of critics. Some decry that his work benefited big business over small farmers. Some argue that his work reduced biodiversity and introduced chemicals into the farming industry. Some argue that all he did was forestall the inevitable. Some decry him for normalizing genetic modification of foods.

His innovations were resisted mightily by some environmentalists. This should come as no surprise, given that many environmentalists hate humanity and would shed only crocodile tears at the sorts of mass die-offs that Borlaug's work averted. Which makes them as monstrous as any of the world's worst mass-murdering despots.

Even today, when GMO crops continue to improve the lives of the world's poorest, we witness the continued resistance to the use of Golden Rice, a crop that could save half a million lives a year in south and southeast Asia. That resistance comes, of course, from wealthy first-worlders, who have zero personal risk of famine, malnutrition, or loss of children from such. It's born of ignorance-based fear, of a baseless tendency to regard that which Nature has produced as, well, "natural" in a positive fashion and therefore superior to anything man could create. No matter that virtually everything we eat has been altered by human intervention (hybridizing, cross-breeding, animal husbandry across millennia, followed and enhanced by more scientifically precise gene-editing), and no matter that Mother Nature is more interested in killing us than in kumbaya and dances around the May Pole.

Borlaug didn't demand that humans suffer to "save the planet" (hint: the Earth doesn’t care) He figured out how to save humans - then and there, here and now, not a century in the future. Therein lies a lesson our leaders should heed, and heed well.

Borlaug's name deserves to be known by everyone. A national... nay, a global day of commemoration would be a good start.

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Yours in liberty,

Peter.