Norman Borlaug

More than 30 years ago, Norman Borlaug wrote, "One of the greatest threats to mankind today is that the world may be choked by an explosively pervading but well camouflaged bureaucracy."

He still believes that environmental activists and their allies in international agencies are a threat to progress on global food security. Barring such interference, he is confident that agricultural research, including biotechnology, will be able to boost crop production to meet the demand for food in a world of 8 billion or so, the projected population in 2025.

Norman Borlaug won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970 and was still teaching, in 2000, at the age of 86. He was the 'father' of the Green Revolution, the dramatic improvement in agricultural productivity that swept the globe in the 1960s, achieved by the production of high-yield dwarf wheat. His team's dwarf wheat varieties resisted a wide spectrum of plant pests and diseases and produced two to three times more grain than the traditional varieties, and were shipped to countries where wheat was struggling to grow. As a result both Pakistan and India have been able to feed themselves in spite of huge population growth.

Information above from an article in ReasonOnline. Norman Borlaug died at the age of 95, on Saturday, Sept 12th, 2009.

Secret Life of Bees

Finished Sue Monk Kidd’s The Secret Life of Bees today, after having put it aside for a while when I struck a bit of a slack patch in the middle. It’s an interesting coming of age story - I suppose that’s what you call it, although a growing-up story might be more appropriate. Lily, the daughter of an abusive father, tells us early in the piece that she accidentally shot and killed her mother during a family argument. Her only friend appears to be a black woman called Rosaleen who works on the peach orchard Lily’s father owns. When Rosaleen is arrested and then hospitalised because she’s beaten up by angry whites, Lily ’rescues’ her from the hospital, and the two set out on a journey that takes them to a house owned by three black sisters - three wise, but rather strange sisters.
The story is set in the days when blacks were signing up to register for the vote, and when integration was happening but greatly rejected by the whites. But this is the background to a story in which bees play a large and vital part and in which learning about yourself, your anger, your failures and mistakes and the need to move forward all contribute to what happens.
The language is often rich and vital - sometimes almost too much so. Lily and Rosaleen, and Lily’s father are solid real characters. The three sisters never strike me as black women, somehow, as Rosaleen does. Maybe this is a fault in my reading of the story, but whereas Kidd presents Rosaleen as a physical black presence, the three sisters seem to live on a different plane, and thinking of them as black is something I found hard to do.
Kidd wrote the non-fiction book When the Heart Waits some years ago, and it was one of the better-selling books in the shop I ran. The Secret Life of Bees is different altogether, apart from being fiction. It has an odd spirituality in it, is very female-focused, and Kidd’s version of feminism again comes to the fore - though here it‘s entirely appropriate to the story. Nevertheless the male characters in the book are no ciphers; sometimes they’re more real than the women.

Here’s a short quotation from chapter fourteen of the book:
People, in general, would rather die than forgive. It’s that hard. If God said in plain language, ‘I’m giving you a choice, forgive or die,’ a lot of people would go ahead and order their coffin.

Tightening the Belt - severely!

In an article in the Otago Daily Times this morning Murray Grimwood says that for our survival as a species we’ll have to live within some tight parameters. He lists five particular things:

replacement population only;
total re-use of resources;
total elimination of pollution;
self-sufficient housing (linked together in energy terms like the Internet);
a halt to physical ‘growth.’

He adds that as a result of following these things we will work less and walk more, weigh less and live more, impact less, conserve more.
My problem with these points isn’t that they’re unrealistic, but rather that a huge percentage of the population, in the Western world anyway, isn’t interested in recycling, living conservatively or considering how they use the resources they have.
I’m fairly recycling-focused, but even I find it hard to think of living within restricted parameters.
And I’m not sure that I agree, if we were to go ‘conservative’ in our progress, (if that’s not an oxymoron), that we would work less. Rather we would work harder at better things, things that involve domestic manual labour for men and women, things we could do with our hands, creative things. And we’d definitely walk more.
My mother remembers walking to Blackhead Beach when she was a child, with her parents. This would be an all day trip, there and back, up hill and down dale, and no doubt they’d be carrying picnic baskets and all the beach paraphernalia.
The other factor is how to make total re-use of resources. Perhaps with oil running out we’ll have a huge amount less plastic to deal with. That would help immensely. It’s one of the least reusable material on the planet.

I can't show you a photo of Blackhead Beach on this blog, because of copyright restrictions, but if you click here, you'll see several professionally-taken ones.