Posted by
Bill Crawford on Friday, April 01, 2011 12:29:11 PM
When I was just out of high school, a friend of mine dragged me to a film being presented to her class by one of the Health teachers. The film was one of those Malthusian doom-and-gloom prophesies being put out by the limits to growth crowd (who later became the older leading edge of the global warming crowd today).
When it was over, I raised my hand and offered a rebuttal. I had read and latched on to four concepts that belied the film. I didn't invent them, I just found them. I believed in them because I am an incurable optimist and I think that history justifies this.
One: the conventional wisdom about population growth was way, way off. When you have an agrarian society, children are an asset from the time they can walk. More children also lead to better retirement. When you industrialize and children become more of a liability to raise, people magically stop having as many. This is why, since then, birth rates in every area of the world save the sub-Saharan have declined to near or below replacement level (2.1 children per family).
Two: When people reach a certain level of eco development, pollution stops increasing and stabilizes. This is the point where most of the country owns a refrigerator and a car and new purchases are more efficient replacements.
Three: Fossil fuel reserves extant are probably way, way more than these people were projecting. I've since learned to simply laugh in the face of "peak oil" advocates, who propose that world reserves are somewhere between ten and thirty years of depletion.
Four: Round about 1975, for the first time in world history, food production reached the point where any starvation out there was a distribition problem, not a production one.
What I didn't know at the time was that there was one man who was responsible for a lot of the last factor. Norman Borlaug (1914-2009) was an American scientist who developed short stalk hybrid grains that grew in more arid areas than most wheats, made heavier food grains faster and since they were shorter and didn't bend at maturity, were easier to harvest.
This man should be celebrated with Jonas Salk in our schools, I think he affected world starvation more than anybody else in history. He won the Nobel Peace Prize for this in 1970, but that isn't enough. It's people like this that occasionally roam the planet that allow me to get away with being an optimist. I have never seen him mentioned in a textbook. There is something wrong with that.