This is a fascinating article.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Borlaug <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Borlaug>
Just a few interesting factoids:
Norman Borlaug has been deemed the father of the Green Revolution for his work in agricultural science which increased crop yields enough to keep up with human population growth avoiding an otherwise inevitable Malthusian disaster. Borlaug is often credited with saving over a billion people worldwide from starvation.
He attended the one-teacher, one-room New Oregon #8 rural school in Howard County Iowa up through eighth grade.
Initially, Borlaug failed the entrance exam to the University of Minnesota, but was then accepted to the school’s newly created two-year General College.
While at the University of Minnesota, he was a member of the varsity wrestling team, reaching the Big Ten semifinals, and helped introduce the sport to Minnesota high schools by putting on exhibition matches around the state.
On the educational value of his martial arts experience, he once said, “Wrestling taught me some valuable lessons … I always figured I could hold my own against the best in the world. It made me tough. Many times, I drew on that strength. It’s an inappropriate crutch perhaps, but that’s the way I’m made”.
Borlaug was inducted into the National Wrestling Hall of Fame in Stillwater, Oklahoma, in 1992.
Of environmental lobbyists he stated, “some of the environmental lobbyists of the Western nations are the salt of the earth, but many of them are elitists. They’ve 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 fifty years, they’d be crying out for tractors and fertilizer and irrigation canals and be outraged that fashionable elitists back home were trying to deny them these things”.
I think that if the world’s politicians had all met in Copenhagen back in the sixties, they might have addressed the problem of imminent famine by voting for a resolution that crop yields would increase, just as they recently addressed the problem of climate change by voting that the world’s temperature will not rise. The former would have been just as pointless and as utterly useless as the latter. The world’s saviors are seldom politicians and the solutions to our problems don’t always come from more rules and more laws. More often they come from individuals like Norman Borlaug and from those free societies that allow such men and women to exist and prosper.