In the last couple of days, two people have died.
Norman Borlaug was a food scientist who:
rose from his childhood on an Iowa farm to develop a type of wheat that helped feed the world, fostering a movement that is credited with saving up to 1 billion people from starvation.
They give part of his speech when he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize:
“We must recognize the fact that adequate food is only the first requisite for life,’’ he said in his Nobel acceptance speech. “For a decent and humane life we must also provide an opportunity for good education, remunerative employment, comfortable housing, good clothing, and effective and compassionate medical care.’’
Sounds like a liberal to me (the NY Times has a longer obituary). I know that many people on the left had a problem with him since his methods lead to a large reliance on pesticides and oil based fertilizer (I also worry about this), but he was attacking a much more immediate problem: millions were in danger of starvation. Now that hunger is a smaller problem (the real problem now isn’t the amount of food, but access to it), we can work on ways to get better methods of growing it.
The other person who died over the weekend was Jim Carroll who was a poet and writer (The Basketball Diaries). He also put together what I think is one of the great albums: Catholic Boy. My favorite song from the album is It’s Too Late, but since I can only find a link to the music of that song I’ll also put in the more famous:
