Norman Borlaug VS Albert Gore

At a time when doom-sayers were hopping around saying everyone was going to starve, Norman was working. He moved to Mexico and lived among the people there until he figured out how to improve the output of the farmers. So that saved a million lives.

The he packed up his family and moved to India, where in spite of a war with Pakistan, he managed to introduce new wheat strains that quadrupled their food output. So that saved another million.

You get it? But he wasn't done. He did the same thing with a new rice in China. He's doing the same thing in Africa -- as much of Africa as he's allowed to visit.

When he won the Nobel Prize in 1970, they said he had saved a billion people. That's BILLION! Carl Sagan BILLION with a B! And most of them were a different race from him.

Norman is the greatest human being, and you probably never heard of him.
-- Penn Jillette, of the comedy team Penn and Teller

If there's one thread running through Borlaug's life it's doing -- acting with fierce determination. Working on a problem as fundamental as world hunger is a complicated business, and Borlaug is a complicated man, somehow balancing contradictions.

He is the scientist and the dirt farmer; the advocate of common sense and the master of political subtleties; the humanitarian and the pugnacious fighter; the idealist and the consultant to governments of every political ideology. He has been called a peaceful revolutionary, and the tension in that term - between benevolence and aggressiveness - seems particularly apt.
- From the University of Minnesota College of Agriculture, Food and Environmental Science

Norman Borlaug is credited with actually saving a billion lives from starvation. He is an advocate of increasing crop yields to stop deforestation, has benefited many multiple nations, and has won the trifecta of the most prestigious awards for an American citizen: Nobel Peace Prize, the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Congressional Gold Medal. There are only 4 others in history to have won this combination; Martin Luther King Jr., Mother Teresa, Nelson Mandela, and Elie Wiesel. He just last week received the Congressional Gold Medal, at the age of 93, having likely benefited one out of every seven people on the earth.

Not bad for a guy who no one knows. He said this about lobbyists "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"

Now contrast this man with the current "leader" of the world's movement to protest climate change. Albert Gore, former Vice President and now spokesman for the environment has developed into a lobbyist. He has won an academy award for his documentary, "The Assault on Reason." He has authored multiple books on the subject, and is credited with the re-establishment of the environmental movement, launching his 7 step pledge to climate focused action.

Both men have received notoriety for their work, spread awareness, and possibly benefited people. Great. But you you honestly believe that the 11 live earth concerts held globally benefited the earth? The Live Nation group (based out of Beverly hills ca) has said that they took measures such as LED lighting, recycling, and urged people to used public transportation, and the rest of their environmental impact would be offset by purchasing Carbon Credits.

Where have all the hippies gone? Do they honestly believe that purchasing carbon credits will offset the impact of those 11 concerts? If Al Gore is the new activist, then hopefully we will find double the Norman Borlaugs in the future to offset their impact. Is this an effort to clear Gore's conscious from the lack of success in getting the US to adopt the Kyoto Protocol in the first place? Personally I would feel like a failure if during my vice presidency I was named the chair of an Earth Summit, and then I couldn't get my own government, and president to send it to the Congress, much less vote on it.

Its sad that a man can actually save lives, and yet in our contrived public view, its the man with the media backing that wins the popular promulgation.