al gore ..are you listening?....the doomsday machine has met its maker...


Borlaug's Revolution
July 17, 2007; Page A16
In 1944, when Norman Borlaug arrived in Mexico, the nation was in the grip of crop failure. Cereals like wheat are dietary staples. But in Mexico, an airborne fungus was causing an epidemic of "stem rust," and acreage once flush with golden wheat and maize yielded little more than sunbaked sallow weeds. Coupled with a population surge, famine seemed in the offing.


Dr. Borlaug left Mexico in 1963 with a harvest six times what it was when he arrived. From acres of arable land sprung a hyperactive strain of wheat engineered by the scientist in his laboratory, fertilized and nurtured according to his methods, and irrigated by systems he helped to design. Mexico's peasantry was not only fed -- it was selling wheat on the international market.


The reversal of the Mexican crop disaster was an early tiding of the Green Revolution. Over the next 30 years, Dr. Borlaug devoted himself to the undeveloped world, undoing crop failure in India and Pakistan, and rescuing rice in the Philippines, Indonesia and China. He has arguably saved more lives than anyone in history. Maybe one billion.

Dr. Borlaug was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970, yet his name remains largely unknown. Today, at age 93, he receives the Congressional Gold Medal. Perhaps it will secure the fame he merits but never pursued. Then again, perhaps not. While Dr. Borlaug was expanding human possibility, his critics -- who held humanity to be profligate and the Earth's resources finite -- were receiving all the attention.

They still are.
The most famous may be Paul Ehrlich, a biologist who declared in the 1960s that "the battle to feed all of humanity" was lost. "In the 1970s and 1980s," he claimed, "hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now." In 1973, Lester Brown, founder of the Earth Policy Institute and still widely quoted today, said the demand for food had "outrun the productive capacity of the world's farmers."

The only solution? "We're going to have to restructure the global economy." Of course.
Greenpeace and other pessimists were scandalized at Dr. Borlaug's Green Revolution; it disproved their admonitions and, worst of all, led to industrial development. They even convinced the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations to stop funding Dr. Borlaug's efforts. We see these battle lines today in the energy wars. History has its share of tragedy, but Dr. Borlaug's life demonstrates that environmental doomsayers are almost always wrong because they overlook one variable: human ingenuity.

The late economist Julian Simon was in the habit of claiming that natural resources are basically infinite. His refrain: "A higher price represents an opportunity that leads inventors and businesspeople to seek new ways to satisfy the shortages. Some fail, at cost to themselves. A few succeed, and the final result is that we end up better off than if the original shortage problems had never arisen."

As anti-development environmentalists preach the gospel of limits and state coercion, here is a question worth asking: How many millions of people might have perished had Norman Borlaug heeded their teachings?

Borlaug's Revolution - WSJ.com

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No individual can plan his own existence in their view.

So the state planners must arrogate to themselves the right to manipulate any sector of the economic system if the good of “society” or the “general welfare” is paramount.

Ipso- if the rights of the individual get in the way, the rights of the individual must be sublimated.

The Road to Serfdom
FA Hayek (interpretation)


Mortgage Backed Security survivor

Even Borlaug knew clearly that there is a limited amount of arable land, and there is a limit to the amount of arable land that humans can exploit. He certainly did introduce revolutionary techniques for the growing of crops, but all that means is that the limited amount of earth we have to grow on can produce a higher yield. Not an infinite yield.

Andrew

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Ethanol is a fabulous solution to our energy dilemma because it will provide more fuel for us to drive around and look for food.

-- Unknown

On the other hand, the Milky Way Galaxy is out there for us to colonize. By present human standards, it can practically grow an infinite yield. We just have to be mature enough to leave the cradle of our species that is the Earth.

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President Josiah Bartlet: Sweden has a 100% literacy rate. 100%! How do they do that?
Leo McGarry: Maybe they don't and they can't add.

simpler solution: stop having so much friggin babies

You know that and I know that.

It's the poor, uneducated, miserable people who do not get it.

Oh and then there are the religous people who want to have as many of God's little miracles as possible. They are the worst.

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One day, I will sneak across the border into Canada and be an illegal alien. It will be fun.

It will happen sooner or later, there will be massive starvation, but some people believe that that is the natural way, and so it should be allowed to happen, and trying to prevent it is interfering with "God's Plan".

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“ The subjects of every state ought to contribute towards the support of the government, as nearly as possible, in proportion to their respective abilities; that is, in proportion to the revenue which they respectively enjoy under the protection of the state.”

Adam Smith , The Wealth of Nations 1776

"We have always known that heedless self-interest was bad morals; we know now that it is bad economics"
FDR's second Inaugural Address

wtf? is this sarcasm?

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www.myspace.com/crusade7

Why? An expanding population will force the leaders of our planet to look for more territory. The only way to go to get it is up - up into space.

Population growth is a good thing. Every successful species grows in numbers. The trouble is that the population in industrialised countries has such a low nativity that it does not even keep up the same level without immigration. This is a sign that there are fundamental flaws with our modern ways and views on children.

The universe is out there for us to settle. Let's do that.

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President Josiah Bartlet: Sweden has a 100% literacy rate. 100%! How do they do that?
Leo McGarry: Maybe they don't and they can't add.

Actually in many developed countries the population isn't replacing itself and it seems that the world population is leveling off and will likely start a decline.

Demography | How to deal with a falling population | Economist.com

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"Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

Additionally the biggest consumers are the least populated, most education and most wealthy with China being the exception. But more to the point world consumption continues to grow at a rate that exceeds population growth - ie on per capita we are all consuming more. Now this is total consumption (not just food) but surely diverting what is a large slice of the pie from luxuries to necessities would increase our food capacity.

State of the World 2004: Consumption By the Numbers | Worldwatch Institute (Any more recent refs?)

Thomas Malthus' theory of population, Club or Rome's "Limits to Growth", etc., etc. ... there had always been doomsday warnings. All of them have turned out to we wrong so far. But that doesn't mean that population growth, poverty or scarcity of resources in the world cannot and will not cause severe problems we all will have to deal with.

The only starvation that has me worried is that caused by centrally planned socialist countries, like the one the U.S. is slowly becoming. We will always find ways to overcome our obstacles, even if we run out of land we will colonize the oceans, and eventually colonize space. The solution is not to stop having babies, it's to stop listening to doomsday predictions from people who just want to have control over your life. Human starvation is not caused by lack of resources, it's caused by evil governments run by ruthless people who don't care about their populations!

-Ericson
Opposing socialism at every opportunity! Vote for Ron Paul in 2008

I think we should seriously consider living in small adavanced communities. Why take over the entire world? why not live and let live? We shouldnt become some sort of locust swarm consuming all the resources and destroying the biological diversity of the world.

Current population growth rates are not alarming for the survival of men. We will find our way. There is plenty of oppertunity left in the world to produce food. But do we really want to use the entire planet for our own consumption? I think not.

I disagree in part. The growth rates in industrial countries are alarming. There must be something wrong with a society with a negative population growth rate, especially when these societies are not ravaged by war or natural disasters.

I don't think so either. In the far future, I envision a human civilisation that has left Earth entirely and declared the whole planet a wildlife preserve. The only humans allowed would be scientists and guards. Tourist visas would be issued under certain conditions. Perhaps people who swore to live in an ecological fashion would be allowed, if they would allow their children to make their own choices in the matter.

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President Josiah Bartlet: Sweden has a 100% literacy rate. 100%! How do they do that?
Leo McGarry: Maybe they don't and they can't add.

Maybe we could launch a starship to Alpha Centauri in 100 years for a journey of 1000 years. Would "The Gold At The Starbow's End" (Frederick Pohl) be found?

We could terraform Mars - over thousands of years!

Or perhaps build great sun orbiting man made planetoids. The economics of moving mass means the resources to build these must come from the asteroids. Stop an asteroid from spinning, move it to a Lagrange point and then refine it's entire mass (because the minerals are diffuse rather than concentrated as on Earth) - then we'll know when it can be done.

Although some of these scenarios are perhaps in our future they are not solutions to immediate problems due simply to the time they will take to implement. In fact humans are far more imaginative and capable of solving Earth problems - right here on Earth.