I'm surpised no one has diaried this yet.
Norman Borlaug, the "father of the green revolution," has died at the age of 95. For his efforts to increase crop productivity, especially of cereal grains, through the development of new high-yielding, disease-resistant varieties, Borlaug changed the very face of agriculture worldwide, and is credited with saving millions from lives of poverty and starvation. He became one of the most honored individuals of the last century, bestowed with every high honor from the Nobel Peace Prize to the Congressional Gold Medal to National Medal of Science.
For that same work, Borlaug was criticized for leading the way toward ever more input-intensive, fossil-fuel-dependant, corporate-driven, industrial forms of agriculture whose high yields masked enormous social, economic, and environmental costs. The conversion of traditional, locally adapted agricultural systems to "green revolution" systems over the last two generations has given us vast monocultures on the land, with unforeseen and unintended impacts on soil and water quality, pest resistance, nutritional quality, wild and agricultural biodiversity, public health, community life, and economic justice. His work thus stands at the nexus of discussion about the very meaning and understanding of sustainability.
It is difficult in a short diary to take the measure of Borlaug, the green revolution, and the criticisms of the man and the campaign he led and exemplified. You can find brief reviews of his life and work here and here.
I've worked some over the years in the field of international development, agriculture, and environmental policy, and since the 1970s Borlaug has always been at the center of debates, not just about development policies, but about the very meaning of sustainability. Is sustainability fundamentally a technical and economic goal, one in which science and technology seeks to improve the long-term lot of human beings? Or does sustainability inherently entail ethical and ecological considerations about the long-term health and well-being of interlocked human and natural systems?
In any discussion of the evolving paradigm of sustainability, Borlaug was always a force to be reckoned with. Sincerely concerned about the fate of undernourished people and what he regarded as the inadequate performance of agricultural systems in the developing world, he worked tirelessly, in the research plot, in the conference hall, in the scintific journals, in the policy offices, in the funders' headquarters, to advance his vision of agricultural development.
That vision was one that sprung from an agronomic worldview; that is, success in agriculture came from focusing on the productivity of the plant through cross-breeding (and later genetic modification), application of synthetic fertilizers and pesticides, irrigation, and other input-intensive methods of food production and distribution. Boiled down, Borlaug's accomplishment was fairly basic: through cross-breeding, Borlaug was able to develop cereal grain cultivars that distributed a greater proportion of their energy and biomass to the seed heads -- the edible part -- while still allowing the plant to hold up under the greater weight. (This was done by using stout "dwarf" varieties.) All the other accoutrements on the input-intensive system -- the herbicides, insecticides, fungicides, fertilizers, new farm machinery, etc. -- were in service of this basic change in the physiology of the plant. His work through the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT), supported by the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations and the Mexican government, became the model for similar efforts involving other crops in other regions of the world.
By contrast, the development of sustainable agriculture -- and sustainability in a still broader sense -- reflects the gradual emergence (some would say re-emergence) of an agroecological worldview. Agroecology borrowed concepts from ecology proper and applied them to agricultural systems; that is, agroecology looks at the function, composition, structure, and performance of farming systems as ecosystems, paying attention not just to the "improvement" of this or that crop plant in isolation, but to the entirety of the system and the relationships within them (soil, water, plants, andmials, farmer, processor, consumer....). The agroecological approach of course has precedents in many traditional practices, and modern sustainable agrculture had its important visionaries in the pre-WWII years (Albert Howard, Liberty Hyde Bailey, Aldo Leopold, et al.) But over the next two generations, the availability of cheap fossil fuels, the support of national and international research institutions, the rise of globalized corporate agriculture, and the focus of development policy on providing cheap food, the agrocecological approach was overwhelmed. The current wave of attention to local and organic food production, and the connections to public health and nutrition, has perhaps begun to swing the pendulum back....
Borlaug was not blind to the socioeconomic and ecological impacts of his work. I don't beleive that he ever fully plumbed the depths of the meaning of conservation in the manner of his fellow Iowan Aldo Leopold ("Conservation is a state of health in the land. The land consists of soils, waters, plants, and animals, but health is more than a sufficiency of these components. It is a state of vigorous self-renewal in each of them, and in all collectively.") The current New York Times story quotes a 1991 statement by Vandana Shiva on Borlaug and the green revolution: "In perceiving nature’s limits as constraints on productivity that had to be removed, American experts spread ecologically destructive and unsustainable practices worldwide."
Borlaug did recognize the population-growth side of the hunger/sustainability equation (the "population monster" he called it in his Nobel speech). He eventually acknowledged, to some degree, the problems of overapplication of (if not over-dependence on) artificial fertilizers and pesticices. He argued, however simplistically, that the most effective way to reduce tropical deforestation was to increase yields on existing agricultural lands, thus reducing the need for additional conversion (the so-called "Borlaug hypothesis"). Borlaug was a formidable voice in the ongoing debate about the nature of sustainable agriculture and development. One did not have to agree with him to recognize his sincere belief that his was the better approach. It is no doubt true that many tens of millions of human beings are alive and perhaps healthier because of his work. Whether the progeny of those tens of millions, in the decades to come, will enjoy healthier lives within healthier ecosystems within a healthier world, is a question yet to be answered.
In reading about his life today -- his youthful curiosity about his home farm in Iowa, his early intent to become a forester, his stint with Civilian Conservation Corps in the 1930s, his switch in his professional develoment from forestry to plant pathology -- I'm left wondering what might have happened had he continued to explore actively the complicated connections between conservation and agriculture. He might have made even more distinctive and important contributions. He might be remembered now not just for increasing crop yields (albeit on an epic scale), but for providing deeper insights into the foundations for a truly sustainable future.