It is debatable whether or not Nobel Peace Prize winner Norman Borlaug was the greatest human being who ever lived. It comes down to definitions. If you define greatest as saving more human lives than any other one person, he is indeed the greatest human being who ever lived. He is certainly greater than your average religious prophet.
As a social movement, Borlaug's Green Revolution saved hundreds of million of people. It is an astounding achievement in the history of humanity. He deserves so much more recognition and I hope the media doesn't forget about him. I only heard of him because of a Penn and Teller TV show. Voters, at this time you may want to consider voting this story up if you haven't already.
But it is also a high risk, high yield strategy. The high yield is great, the high risk not so much. It is heavily reliant on very few, very closely related varieties and pesticides. That's just a ticking clock until a fungus or something like it, attack these strains and the lack of genetic diversity leads to mass starvation.
There's also the very long term damage from chemical fertilizer, things like hard-pan.
That wasn't the point the OP said that the Green revolution was great for the environment. That's not strictly true there are some good things but also bad.
Sure they are. Any progressive, liberal, green, whatever, person who corners you in a coffee shop and laments how evil farmers are for not doing organic farming. That guy, you know him. He better think it's going to feed the world. I'd rather believe he's stupid than believe he's genocidal.
Maybe the progressive, liberal, green people I've met are more nuanced. Most realize that organic farming is inherently less efficient (in calories per acre farmable land) and aren't putting forward as a solution to world hunger.
I liked Borlaug and agree with most of his ideas -- but find the way glibertarians like Pen Gillette have abused his name as a rhetorical playing card quite distasteful.
OK, I'm trying to understand your perspective. I mean, Penn Gillette did literally (the real literally, not the literally that means not-literally) play Borlaug as a rhetorical playing card on his show, but I don't see why it was distasteful. It certainly wasn't before his death.
Borlaug was practically unheard of and Penn held him up as the greatest human being that ever lived. What's the problem? It sounds more like you just don't like Penn because he's Penn, so everything he does is distasteful, whether you agree with him or not.
Stanislov Petrov - who didn't intentionally decide to not start WW3, he just decided that if it were going to happen, the Americans would have started it differently. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Petrov
Fritz Haber - Looking to make money, he came up with a way to make fertilizer from the nitrogen in the air. This is now the process that underlies about half of the agricultural fertilizer production. If this hadn't been invented, the upper limit of human population would be a lot lower than it is now - we'd have got to about 3 billion people before we reached the point where we couldn't feed any more people.
As for Haber, his comparable achievements in the science of waging war and of providing the technology to enable to German war machine makes his achievements more morally ambiguous. Also, someone else would have invented his process. Borlaug's achievements were as social as scientific, he got out in the fields and got the farmers to grow the new higher yielding crops.
Way too early to evaluate the green revolution. It may have just allowed us to temporarily overshoot the earth's carrying capacity, which wouldn't be much fun on the ride down.
If the practices can be sustained, then we've increased the carrying capacity. To revert to traditional practices could decrease it again. The bigger the difference between our population size and carrying capacity, the worse that ride down will be. Of course, how these practices can be made/kept sustainable is an issue.
I'd say that the sustainability of the practices is _the_ issue. Depleting groundwater, eroding topsoil, reducing crop genetic diversity, and changing the climate may all be reducing the long-term carrying capacity.
As a social movement, Borlaug's Green Revolution saved hundreds of million of people. It is an astounding achievement in the history of humanity. He deserves so much more recognition and I hope the media doesn't forget about him. I only heard of him because of a Penn and Teller TV show. Voters, at this time you may want to consider voting this story up if you haven't already.
Previous discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47348
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Borlaug http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Revolution