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This is the story of Dr. Norman Borlaug who was trying to breed wheat, in 1945, which could resist stem rust, a disease that ruined many crops.
In, 1968, Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich and his wife Anne (who is uncredited) published an explosive book. In The Population Bomb, they noted that in poor countries such as India and Pakistan, populations were growing more quickly than food supplies. In the 1970s, they predicted: "Hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death".
Thankfully, Ehrlich was wrong, because he didn't know what Norman Borlaug had been doing. Borlaug would later be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for the years he had spent shuttling between Mexico City and the Yaqui Valley, growing thousands upon thousands of kinds of wheat, and carefully noting their traits: this kind resisted one type of stem rust, but not another; this kind produced good yields, but made bad bread; and so on.
[...] Borlaug produced new kinds of "dwarf" wheat that resisted rust, yielded well, and - crucially - had short stems, so they didn't topple over in the wind. By the 1960s, Borlaug was travelling the world to spread the news. It wasn't easy.
[...] Progress has slowed, and problems are mounting: climate change, water shortages, pollution from fertilisers and pesticides. These are problems the green revolution itself has made worse. Some say it even perpetuated the poverty that keeps the population growing: fertilisers and irrigation cost money which many peasant farmers can't get. Paul Ehrlich, now in his 80s, maintains that he wasn't so much wrong, as ahead of his time. Perhaps if Malthus were still alive, in his 250s, he'd say the same. But could more human ingenuity be the answer?
[...] Since genetic modification became possible, it's mostly been about resistance to diseases, insects and herbicides. While that does increase yields, it hasn't been the direct aim. That's starting to change. And agronomists are only just beginning to explore the gene editing tool CRISPR, which can do what Norman Borlaug did much more quickly. As for Borlaug, he saw that his work had caused problems that weren't handled well, but asked a simple question - would you rather have imperfect ways to grow more food, or let people starve? It's a question we may have to keep asking in the decades to come.
The man who helped feed the world
[Related]: An Essay on the Principle of Population
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday June 15 2019, @05:28AM (6 children)
Why is helping supposed to be a good thing? Shouldn't someone show that the problem is important enough first?
(Score: 2) by Snow on Saturday June 15 2019, @07:14PM (5 children)
Okay, I'll bite.
Tell me how you see the world in 100 years if we do nothing different. What is the state of the ocean? How is our air quality? How are our forests? Biodiversity?
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday June 15 2019, @08:55PM (4 children)
I see more than 90% of the world's population in developed world conditions - that includes low pollution/high air quality, global restoration of ecosystems and forests, a state of relative peace, and overall high standard of living much like in the developed world today - but covering 90% percent of the population at year 2119 standards not year 2019 standards. Biodiversity will be somewhat reduced due to the continuation of the difficult passage to developed world status that every country has done or will do (including present day habitat destruction and overharvesting of wild species for food, drugs, or clothing) plus invasive species.
Global climate will be warmer. If, for example, we were to continue to heavily rely on fossil fuels through the next hundred years, we might see a rise in temperature as much as 2.5 C (assuming more than doubling CO2 levels and a high end 2 C per doubling of CO2). That isn't likely to happen merely because of exhaustion of the easier fossil fuel sources over a century of human activity and continued technology development of rival approaches. Oceans would be somewhat more acidic, but still not a significant problem for marine ecosystems. We'd probably see a net rise in sea level of around 50 cm and some modest further decline in polar ice.
Globally there would be net negative population growth, again due to the above developed world status. Environmentalists would still be speaking of impending disaster, but it wouldn't have come, while the more clever activists would tie in with developed world social issues like increasing government nannying more (particularly, of the corporate welfare sort), ancient labor questing beasts like zero work weeks/permanent retirement, the latest social trends in virtual reality world, or protecting outer space worlds from human exploitation.
I can't help but suspect that there would still be some lingering embarrassment at the excesses of environmentalist propaganda of the early 21st Century.
So how's that?
(Score: 2) by Snow on Saturday June 15 2019, @11:49PM (3 children)
I hope you are right.
I guess my line of thinking is: What if you are wrong?
If you try to 'go green' and it turns out that CO2 isn't so bad, then you have cleaner air. (Not saying CO2 is dirty, but combustion has byproducts). Maybe there will be spillover effects for other things like less plastics from the green movement. There will be a financial cost, but also results.
If you do nothing and it turns out things are bad... well, that sucks.
What do you want your legacy to be if things go bad? Someone who is part of the problem, or someone who tried to fix things?
Based on that, I think the only responsible course of action is for humanity as a whole to do what we can to reduce their footprint on this planet.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday June 17 2019, @03:39AM (2 children)
I can be wrong in so many ways. Why is this particular way of being wrong more likely than all the other ways I could be wrong? It's a typical failure mode of Pascal's wager.
My view is when you are affecting the lives of billions of people, you need to show that your "trying" is better than doing nothing. Here, doing nothing elevates billions of people out of poverty. That's a pretty high yard stick for all these schemes.
(Score: 2) by Snow on Monday June 17 2019, @02:52PM (1 child)
I disagree with your position, but I see your reasoning.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday June 17 2019, @07:41PM
Keep in mind that the developed world used to be poorer than any part of the world today. Yet it reached developed world status. Meanwhile every part of the world has improved in the direction of developed world status. It's a solved problem with everyone inching along the solution, some faster than others.