Norman Borlaug, the father of the green revolution (1914-2009)
September 15, 2009
With all these recent celebrity deaths, it’s pretty lame of us media types that we haven’t given more press/public attention to a real hero that has passed away. While Patrick Swayze may have made a lot of great films and seemed like a nice guy, and Michael Jackson was the King of Pop and an amazing entertainer, Norman Borlaug was a true hero that saved hundreds of millions of people’s lives. Borlaug, dubbed the “Greatest Human Being That Ever Lived” by Penn and Teller, died of lymphoma at the age of 95 in his Dallas home on Saturday, September 12.
A Nobel Peace Prize winner, Borlaug was also the recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Congressional Gold Medal and has been called the father of the Green Revolution. He has also been credited with saving more lives than ANYONE that has ever lived. Why? Because he helped to develop a high-yielding, short-straw wheat variety that was more resilient than any other wheat out there. This meant that millions of people in Mexico, India and Pakistan were saved from eminent starvation with the development of this new wheat. Crops were established and hundreds of millions of people projected to be starving to death by the 1980s were saved. Since its creation, the dwarf wheat he helped create has been planted in crops in six Latin American countries, six in the Near and Middle East, and several countries in Africa and helped save millions more from famine.
“There are 800 million hungry people on earth, as many as 400 million in Asia alone,” Borlaug said at the IARI Auditorium at New Delhi on March 16 2005. He went on to say, “We will have to double the world food supply by 2050,” a feat he saw as improbable with our current agricultural resources and means.
Still actively pursuing his dreams to end world hunger through biotechnology well into his 90s, this amazing man was still the president of the Sasakawa Africa Association, an sister organization of the Carter Center and whose goal is to test and promote higher-yielding technology for maize, wheat, rice, grain legumes, and roots and tubers to help feed African nations, up until this year. And he was also still teaching at Texas A&M with a center there named after him, the Norman E. Borlaug Center for Southern Crop Improvement.. He also has numerous other research centers across the world in Bolivia, the UK, and the US standing in his name. Borlaug is immortalized within a stained glass window called the “World Peace Window” at St. Mark’s Cathedral in Minneapolis, Minnesota and is survived by his two children, his grandkids and more than a pair of great grandkids.
It says something as a country and as a society when we give more press to someone who entertains than who helps actually save lives. I’m not saying we shouldn’t mourn Swayze’s or Jackson’s deaths, far from it, I was totally struck when I heard about MJ dying and even a bit sad about Swayze. But to have SUCH little press out there about this true global hero’s death is just down right despicable when every other image on TV, like CNN, is still about MJ and now Swayze (and yes Kennedy too but that’s a whole other ball of wax) and there’s a mere two-second blip about Borlaug. Sad. The man deserves a great tribute and he should be plastered all over the TV screens as well as all the dailies.
This man has done so much to help our world and the human race it’s impossible for me to have time to relate it all right now. Here are some more credible places to read about this amazing individual: New York Times, and Forbes
Source: The Boston Phoenix
New Zealand’s New Face Of Environmental Activism
May 23, 2009
The respectable faces of environmental activism have plucked eyebrows and discreetly applied lip gloss.
Their names are listed at the end of television shows and the start of company reports.
On a rainy Auckland Tuesday, nobody is scaling a coal-fired power station or storming a whaling ship. But they are pushing an environmental message. The rich, the famous, the as-seen-on-Shortland-Street have gathered in a Mt Eden film studio to convince government to act faster against climate change.
Actors Lucy Lawless and Keisha Castle Hughes are here. So is former vodka mogul Geoff Ross, The Warehouse founder Stephen Tindall and recently sacked Niwa scientist Jim Salinger. Roll out the green carpet the celebrity activist has something to say.
“There is no Planet B,” says Lawless.
“The science is bloody obvious,” says Salinger.
They take their place in front of a video camera, on the gaffer-taped mark on the floor, and prepare to take Greenpeace where it’s never been before: the middle market.
Over the next seven months, local celebrities will attempt to convince 300,000 Kiwis to sign-on to a call for a 40 percent cut in greenhouse gas emissions by 2020. It’s the biggest and most mainstream public mobilisation the usually radical environmental movement has attempted.
“We believe government does not feel it has a clear mandate to take strong action on climate change,” says Greenpeace. “We need to change this perception.”
In December, world leaders will gather in Copenhagen for the United Nations climate change conference. The Danish government is calling it the “crucial conference” where the aim is global agreement on a plan to reduce the total quantity of greenhouse gas emissions generated by human activity. New Zealand has committed to a 50% reduction on its 1990 emission levels by 2050.
That’s not fast enough, says Greenpeace executive director Bunny McDiarmid.
“Most of the people in government won’t be around in 2050, so they won’t be held accountable. If you’re being a responsible government, what happens in the next 10 years on climate change is going to be what counts.”
McDiarmid was a 28-year-old deckhand when Greenpeace protest ship the Rainbow Warrior en route to protest nuclear weapons testing was bombed in Auckland harbour by French secret service agents
Climate change is, says McDiarmid, “the biggest thing humanity has faced”. Bigger than nuclear bombs?
“As long as we didn’t push that button we were OK. But we have pushed this button already.
“In my 25 years of working in the environmental movement I have never felt so scared and motivated by what is at stake for all of us… this is an issue that will touch every single person’s life, if it hasn’t already.”
McDiarmid says the Greenpeace target is based on work by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Implementing a 40% cut in emissions, in a country where half of those emissions come from agriculture, would, she acknowledges, require “a transformation of the way we’re doing our farming”.
Why bother when, as a nation, we contribute to less than half a percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions?
“The world economy is already being affected by climate change. To think our little economy is going to survive and be different because we choose not to participate in these negotiations at the level at which we should…
“We’re all in the same little boat. There is a lot of work going into what the impacts will be for countries like New Zealand, but I would argue we’re probably already seeing them in terms of our droughts, and the cost of those droughts, here and internationally. You’re talking millions and millions of dollars and people’s livelihoods and lives being wiped out, and that has to be weighted against the cost of acting now.”
In March 2008, six Greenpeace climate change activists were arrested when they took to sea to stop a coal ship leaving Lyttelton harbour. In October, four protesters were arrested when they chained themselves to forestry equipment near Tokoroa.
No one was arrested in the making of the new celebrity Sign On campaign. Has Greenpeace gone soft?
“Hopefully we always remain a little unpredictable,” McDiarmid says. “This may be the necessary and unpredictable strand of this campaign.
“The more diverse the Kiwis are who are saying this is important, the better.
“They almost need to be an odd bunch of bedfellows.”
Lucy Lawlessthe Warrior Princess turned eco-Queen gets “one, maybe two” requests a week to endorse products and causes.
“I just can’t get that jazzed about getting a free, I don’t know, washing machine. How do I choose what I support? By my gut and by the integrity of the organisation.”
She says she has inherited a planet that has been rubbished. “I’m pissed at former generations for having been ignorant and stupid and greedy, but it’s our job to start cleaning up.”
Lights. Camera. Action. “Hi, I’m Robyn Malcolm… Cliff Curtis… Peter Gordon… Emily Barclay… Toni Potter…”
Visit Stuff to read the complete and original article.
Intel’s new television commercial featuring Ajay Bhatt, co-inventor of the USB port, should be seen as more than a clever marketing ploy. It’s a signal of the official promotion of “geeks” from odd cast-outs to a much higher status, one of techno demi-gods and possibly the rescuers of our weak economy.
Wonks across the country are speculating that a particular flavor of “geek” might outpace the likes of Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Mr. Bhatt. The flavor is “green” and this new tasty sensation has its eyes on the traditional sectors like energy, manufacturing, construction and finance.
Meet the new “rock stars” of America’s recession: green entrepreneurs.
These eco-capitalists are putting out off-the-chart hits with new green factories, tens of thousands of green jobs, and business ventures that are pumping hundreds of millions of dollars into Florida’s fragile economy. Just this year, Florida International University researchers made history by discovering a new single-element compound, a breakthrough that could rewrite chemistry books.
Another Orlando area “rock star” is Dr. Demitri Nikitin, founder of Advanced Solar Photonics who is currently building Florida’s first solar panel manufacturing plant in Lake Mary. Nikitin holds a Ph.D. in Science and has participated in and co-developed over 100 inventions and applications related to the laser and electronics industries.
“We are growing a 500MW facility, bringing approximately 1,500 green jobs in the next two years. We are the only manufacturer that can boast that 100% of the components and materials of our monocrystalline panels will be made in America. Even the equipment used for production is made in the United States,” said Nikitin.
If green is the new red, white and blue, then Floridian’s are somewhere between Caribbean Green and Electric Lime.
Take a new Florida city, Babcock Ranch, which will power 19,500 homes by solar power and cost the average customer’s monthly bill an additional 31 cents. This will be the first city on earth powered by zero-emission solar energy. The new city is being developed by Kitson & Partners on 17,000 acres northeast of Fort Myers. The city will include the world’s largest photovoltaic power plant, which will be operated by Florida Power & Light.
More green developments are being celebrated at this week’s Green Cities™ Florida — a sustainability conference being held May 20-21 in Orlando. There’s no opening act here – just a stage packed with the “heavy hitters” of the new green economy — an economy green devotees claim is the answer to America’s economic woes. The event organizers are focusing on training specific to the construction industry this year, already anticipating a turn around in Florida’s building market for 2010.
Case in point: Mike Italiano. He’s President & Chief Executive Officer for Market Transformation to Sustainability (MTS) and Capital Markets Partnership. Italiano has over 35 years of environmental experience including as Senior Analyst in the White House Science Office and Assistant to the Director, National Commission on Water Quality where he helped write the Congressional Report on the Clean Water Act.
Italiano is leading the green pack to green money. As co-founder of America’s biggest green construction association, the United States Green Building Council, he has successfully worked on getting the financial industry to back green construction and products with the new Capital Markets Partnership.
“Getting the capital market to move forward with green building certified sustainable products can literally get us out of this recession; prevent a depression. And we’re working to make sure that all the ground work is laid and top management can understand that we can get the financial institutions and governments to realize it and move forward in a united front to commercialize both of these activities, which is over an $800 billion market. That’s just in the U.S.,” Italiano stated.
Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Citi and others are signatories to the Capital Markets Partnership which has developed a new green underwriting standard for residential, commercial and industrial construction backed by municipal bonds.
“The science of sustainability is what convinced the banks to sign.”, says Italiano. “The proof that ‘green’ science pays in the long term, could no longer be ignored, especially when explained in scientific terms. Sustainability is an economic technology that will turn this recession around, conserve resources and stimulate the job growth we need.”
A Green Buzz exclusive.
