Perhaps the most important person of the 20th century just died…

…and most of us have never heard of him.

A man named Norman Borlaug died on Saturday at the age of 95. I had never heard of him until this morning. Who cares that some old guy died? Billions of people do. His is an amazing story. Norman Borlaug developed agricultural techniques that revolutionized the raising of crops in third world nations, many with harsh climates that are unsustainable for American crop strains. Yawn. Farming is boring.

How about this. His work in large part averted wide scale famine in India and other nations and saved the lives of as many as a billion people.

1,000,000,000 people

I read a fascinating story about him this morning, The Man Who Defused the 'Population Bomb'. Norman Borlaug helped people feed themselves and spent a great deal of his life apparently in some of the most impoverished places in the world. He also seems to have had little use for environmentalists who care more about the issue du jour than they do about children starving to death. This quote really struck me:

"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".

Unlike many so-called social activists and environmentalists who sit in cushy offices and wag their finger at America, Norman Borlaug spent his life helping people raise the crops to feed themselves. It is easy to sit in an office sipping a $5 latte and complain about global warming but when you are living in a hut trying to feed your family, you don’t care much about Kyoto and cap and trade legislation.

I don’t know a thing about Norman Borlaug’s politics or religious views. I do know this. His was a life well lived and impacted the lives of untold millions in a real way. Yet because he isn’t an athlete or a famous singer, his death goes largely unnoticed. Michael Jackson dies and the world nearly ended. Everyone is abuzz over Kanye West and Joe Wilson. Meanwhile a man who did more to feed the world than perhaps any other person in modern history dies and nobody cares. What is wrong with us?