Iowa stubborn
Iowahawk remembers Norman Borlaug:
I have many times driven Iowa Highway 9 through Cresco IA, where a modest sign welcomes you to the hometown of Norman Borlaug (oddly enough the sign also cites the 4 Navy admirals who were born there, as well as “the first airline stewardess”). The sign is in keeping with the modesty of the man himself, who grew up on a small farm outside Cresco. People joke about the flat, boring expanse of cornfield that is Iowa, and Cresco is among its flattest and corniest precincts. People joke that Iowa farmers only talk about the weather and corn. It was this weather and plant-obsessed farmer from the most boring, flat, corn-carpeted part of Iowa who is responsible for saving the lives of a billion, perhaps several billion people.
Gregg Easterbrook wrote in the HuffPo a couple of years ago, when Borlaug received the Congressional Gold Medal:
Do you know Borlaug’s achievement? Would you recognize him if he sat on your lap? Norman Borlaug WON THE NOBEL PEACE PRIZE, yet is anonymous in the land of his birth.
Born 1914 in Cresco, Iowa, Borlaug has saved more lives than anyone else who has ever lived. A plant breeder, in the 1940s he moved to Mexico to study how to adopt high-yield crops to feed impoverished nations. Through the 1940s and 1950s, Borlaug developed high-yield wheat strains, then patiently taught the new science of Green Revolution agriculture to poor farmers of Mexico and nations to its south. When famine struck India and Pakistan in the mid-1960s, Borlaug and a team of Mexican assistants raced to the Subcontinent and, often working within sight of artillery flashes from the Indo-Pakistani War of 1965, sowed the first high-yield cereal crop in that region; in a decade, India’s food production increased sevenfold, saving the Subcontinent from predicted Malthusian catastrophes. Borlaug moved on to working in South America. Every nation his green thumb touched has known dramatic food production increases plus falling fertility rates (as the transition from subsistence to high-tech farm production makes knowledge more important than brawn), higher girls’ education rates (as girls and young women become seen as carriers of knowledge rather than water) and rising living standards for average people. Last fall, Borlaug crowned his magnificent career by persuading the Ford, Rockefeller and Bill & Melinda Gates foundations to begin a major push for high-yield farming in Africa, the one place the Green Revolution has not reached.
Yet Borlaug is unknown in the United States, and if my unscientific survey of tonight’s major newscasts is reliable, television tonight ignored his receipt of the Congressional Gold Medal, America’s highest civilian award. I clicked around to ABC, CBS and NBC and heard no mention of Borlaug; no piece about him is posted on these networks’ evening news websites; CBS Evening News did have time for video of a bicycle hitting a dog. (I am not making that up.) Will the major papers say anything about Borlaug tomorrow?
Borlaug died last night at his home in Dallas. He was 95. The Washington Post does have a staff story, as distinguished from something copied off the wire services.
(With thanks to Michelle Malkin.)
Daily Pundit » Norman Borlaugh Is Dead »
13 September 2009 · 11:56 am
[...] dustbury.com ยป Iowa stubborn Borlaug died last night at his home in Dallas. He was 95. The Washington Post does have a staff story, as distinguished from something copied off the wire services. [...]
fillyjonk »
14 September 2009 · 8:12 am
I wonder if there might be some political reasons why Borlaug is not better known here. I know in some of the more hard-core environmental circles, the Green Revolution is not that well-looked-upon. (Even though it was a major way of reducing human misery. I don’t often understand the hard-core environmentalist mindset).
Or maybe it’s just the old “A prophet is without honor in his own country”?
Or maybe it’s just sheer ahistoricality – there are an awful lot of people who know little of what happened before 1975 or so.
fillyjonk »
14 September 2009 · 8:14 am
Another, less-insidious reason:
for a lot of us (at least, us gen-xers), American History tended to “stop” after WWII because the end of the school year had arrived. That era from roughly 1950 to the time when our memories begin tends to be less-covered.
And I suspect a lot of folks writing copy these days are my age or a bit older or younger.
(I have to admit I didn’t know much about Borlaug but I was aware of the Green Revolution and what it did)