in this outpost's mad love for the marvel that is iowahawk, who not only brings the funny, but pens insightful serious stuff with the best of them - He writes an excellent tribute to American agronomist and hero Norman Borlaug, who died on Sept. 12.
My favorite part:
The last season of Norman Borlaug's life was spent on the faculty of Texas A&M University where continued working to promote humanitarian projects and food yields around the world. Despite the many accolades he earned he remained modest, almost to a fault. According to one story a security cop refused him entry into his campus office parking lot one Saturday morning, due to an Aggie football game. He cheerfully complied and walked an extra mile from another lot, instead of pointing out to the cop that the building was actually named after him.
Unlike contemporary self-styled members of the environmental-scientific community -- many of whom seem to view the human race as malignancy -- Norman Borlaug was unapologetic in his view that science should be harnessed for the good of mankind. For him, starvation was a pressing human problem to be eradicated, not the inevitable self-inflicted consequence of human folly; and he went about solving it in a systematic, methodical way. Not through armchair theorizing or manifestos, but through hard work and dirt-under-the-fingernails empiricism. He didn't seek utopia, just better crop yields.
Borlaug Wiki.
No comments:
Post a Comment