Borlaug Revisited

Nice article in the Wall Street Journal today on Norman Borlaug: The Man Who Defused the “Population Bomb”. Access it here: http://tinyurl.com/nhh32h. There’s a lot to like in the piece, even if the Journal was — ehem — a little slow out of the chute on this one. Gregg Easterbrook does a nice job of underscoring the stunning shallowness of a society where a man like Borlaug was almost completely unknown. Reading the piece, I was particularly impressed by the quotes from Borlaug himself, especially this one:

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.”

Do yourself a favor and read the whole thing.