Father of Green Revolution, Norman Borlaug, Dies | Hacker News Reader

Father of Green Revolution, Norman Borlaug, Dies

news.bbc.co.uk

57 pointshealsdata22 comments

It is debatable whether or not Nobel Peace Prize winner Norman Borlaug was the greatest human being who ever lived. It comes down to definitions. If you define greatest as saving more human lives than any other one person, he is indeed the greatest human being who ever lived. He is certainly greater than your average religious prophet.

As a social movement, Borlaug's Green Revolution saved hundreds of million of people. It is an astounding achievement in the history of humanity. He deserves so much more recognition and I hope the media doesn't forget about him. I only heard of him because of a Penn and Teller TV show. Voters, at this time you may want to consider voting this story up if you haven't already.

Previous discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47348

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Borlaug http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Revolution

It was also "Green" in terms of the environment, saving millions of acres of rain forest and wilderness from agricultural cultivation.

Hardly. Part of the Green revolution was the heavy use of chemical pesticides which is horrible for the environment.

http://www.hulu.com/watch/67878/the-future-of-food?c=News-an...

He uses tons of chemical fertilizer not pesticides big difference.

Isn't nitrate run off from chemical fertilizer a big polution problem for rivers and lakes?

It's called aquatic hypoxia: http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2008/08/the-growing-prob...

You can't feed 6 billon people on organic farming.

http://www.reason.com/blog/show/132479.html

Is anybody arguing that you can? Is anybody championing organic farming because they think it will feed the world?

Sure they are. Any progressive, liberal, green, whatever, person who corners you in a coffee shop and laments how evil farmers are for not doing organic farming. That guy, you know him. He better think it's going to feed the world. I'd rather believe he's stupid than believe he's genocidal.

Maybe the progressive, liberal, green people I've met are more nuanced. Most realize that organic farming is inherently less efficient (in calories per acre farmable land) and aren't putting forward as a solution to world hunger.

That wasn't the point the OP said that the Green revolution was great for the environment. That's not strictly true there are some good things but also bad.

Plenty of studies suggest that organic can be as or more productive than chemical intensive. A quick google produces the following from the University of Michigan: http://www.ns.umich.edu/htdocs/releases/story.php?id=5936

But it is also a high risk, high yield strategy. The high yield is great, the high risk not so much. It is heavily reliant on very few, very closely related varieties and pesticides. That's just a ticking clock until a fungus or something like it, attack these strains and the lack of genetic diversity leads to mass starvation.

There's also the very long term damage from chemical fertilizer, things like hard-pan.

I liked Borlaug and agree with most of his ideas -- but find the way glibertarians like Pen Gillette have abused his name as a rhetorical playing card quite distasteful.

OK, I'm trying to understand your perspective. I mean, Penn Gillette did literally (the real literally, not the literally that means not-literally) play Borlaug as a rhetorical playing card on his show, but I don't see why it was distasteful. It certainly wasn't before his death.

Borlaug was practically unheard of and Penn held him up as the greatest human being that ever lived. What's the problem? It sounds more like you just don't like Penn because he's Penn, so everything he does is distasteful, whether you agree with him or not.

I'd put 2 other names ahead of his:

Stanislov Petrov - who didn't intentionally decide to not start WW3, he just decided that if it were going to happen, the Americans would have started it differently. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Petrov

Fritz Haber - Looking to make money, he came up with a way to make fertilizer from the nitrogen in the air. This is now the process that underlies about half of the agricultural fertilizer production. If this hadn't been invented, the upper limit of human population would be a lot lower than it is now - we'd have got to about 3 billion people before we reached the point where we couldn't feed any more people.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritz_Haber

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haber_process

Ah, Petrov very well may win.

As for Haber, his comparable achievements in the science of waging war and of providing the technology to enable to German war machine makes his achievements more morally ambiguous. Also, someone else would have invented his process. Borlaug's achievements were as social as scientific, he got out in the fields and got the farmers to grow the new higher yielding crops.

Way too early to evaluate the green revolution. It may have just allowed us to temporarily overshoot the earth's carrying capacity, which wouldn't be much fun on the ride down.

If the practices can be sustained, then we've increased the carrying capacity. To revert to traditional practices could decrease it again. The bigger the difference between our population size and carrying capacity, the worse that ride down will be. Of course, how these practices can be made/kept sustainable is an issue.

I'd say that the sustainability of the practices is _the_ issue. Depleting groundwater, eroding topsoil, reducing crop genetic diversity, and changing the climate may all be reducing the long-term carrying capacity.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_World is greatly indebted to Norman Borlaug.

We should all make as big a differnce in our lives as Norman Borlaug, he is a large source of inspiration to me.

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