The greatest American died this past Saturday. It wasn’t on Yahoo! News, and I didn’t see it on CNN.
If you’re not sure who I’m talking about, don’t worry. Norman Borlaug is virtually unknown considering his amazing contribution to humanity.
Borlaug, an agricultural scientist, is credited with saving more lives than anyone in human history. Estimates range anywhere from 250 million to over 1 billion lives.
He began his work in 1944 in Mexico, where he developed new disease-resistant strains of wheat called “semidwarf” wheat which could produce as many as six times as much yield. He also developed new strains of rice.
Borlaug then went to the Indian subcontinent, a war-torn region on the verge of mass famine, to continue his work. Though he was originally met with cultural objections from the Indian and Pakistani governments, the situation became so dire by 1965 that he was allowed to introduce the new strains.
By 1970, and despite “experts” predicting an inevitable worldwide mass starvation, wheat yields in India and Pakistan had nearly doubled, and both countries were completely self-sufficient in wheat production by 1974.
Known today as the Green Revolution, these dramatic increases in yield prevented the predicted great starvation wave from happening. For his efforts, Borlaug was given the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970.
And despite these amazing accomplishments (Really! Even conservative estimates say he saved a quarter-billion people!), he still has his detractors. Some idiots try to call his cross-breeding of plants somehow immoral.
Borlaug was never afraid to fire back at them, pointing out the millions upon millions of people who would again be at risk of starvation if pesticides, fertilizers and genetically-engineered crops were not in use.
Also, by increasing the yield of crops, more wheat can be grown on less land, thus sparing forests, so Borlaug actually fought deforestation and saved millions of acres globally in addition to all the human lives he saved.
And yet Borlaug gets almost no credit for what he did. His death should have been all over the news. I didn’t even hear about it until I flipped through the Wall Street Journal yesterday and saw a blurb.
The planet should have all cried together Saturday. His death should have been on every newspaper’s front page, and every flag in the world should be flying at half-mast for the next week.
The greatest American – no, the greatest human being – who ever lived passed away this weekend. The savior of untold millions, Borlaug embodied the unlimited possibilities of human innovation.
Harry Nelson is the opinion editor of The Reflector. He can be contacted at[email protected].