Death of the Anti-Mao

Norman Borlaug died. Although he won the Nobel Peace Prize, the Presidential and Congressional Gold Medals and saved or allowed the lives of maybe a billion human beings who would not have been able to live without him he is not a household name.

I was thinking of the tens of millions of people that Mao and Stalin killed, often by starvation. We have a name for their kind, mass murderers. But there is no world I know of for a man like Borlaug who is a mass benefactor on a scale that astonishes. That is sad and telling.

Borlaug fell out of favor with environmentalists http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/97jan/borlaug/borlaug.htm but his work lives on.