Download or read book The Man who Fed the World written by Leon F. Hesser and published by Leon Hesser. This book was released on 2006 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Man Who Fed the World provides a loving and respectful portrait of one of America's greatest heroes. Nobel Peace Prize recipient for averting hunger and famine, Dr. Norman Borlang is credited with saving hundreds of millions of lives from starvation-more than any other person in history? Loved by millions around the world, Dr. Borlang is recognized as one of the most influential men of the twentieth century.

Download or read book Red China s Green Revolution written by Joshua Eisenman and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2018-04-24 with total page 427 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: China’s dismantling of the Mao-era rural commune system and return to individual household farming under Deng Xiaoping has been seen as a successful turn away from a misguided social experiment and a rejection of the disastrous policies that produced widespread famine. In this revisionist study, Joshua Eisenman marshals previously inaccessible data to overturn this narrative, showing that the commune modernized agriculture, increased productivity, and spurred an agricultural green revolution that laid the foundation for China’s future rapid growth. Red China’s Green Revolution tells the story of the commune’s origins, evolution, and downfall, demonstrating its role in China’s economic ascendance. After 1970, the commune emerged as a hybrid institution, including both collective and private elements, with a high degree of local control over economic decision but almost no say over political ones. It had an integrated agricultural research and extension system that promoted agricultural modernization and collectively owned local enterprises and small factories that spread rural industrialization. The commune transmitted Mao’s collectivist ideology and enforced collective isolation so it could overwork and underpay its households. Eisenman argues that the commune was eliminated not because it was unproductive, but because it was politically undesirable: it was the post-Mao leadership led by Deng Xiaoping—not rural residents—who chose to abandon the commune in order to consolidate their control over China. Based on detailed and systematic national, provincial, and county-level data, as well as interviews with agricultural experts and former commune members, Red China’s Green Revolution is a comprehensive historical and social scientific analysis that fundamentally challenges our understanding of recent Chinese economic history.

Download or read book Towards a Second Green Revolution written by G.B. Marini-Bettòlo and published by Elsevier. This book was released on 2012-12-02 with total page 543 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Genetic research in some fundamental crops, together with the use of chemicals as pesticides and fertilizers, opened the way in the 1950s and 1960s to great changes in methodology in agriculture - with astonishing results in the tropics. This change became known as the Green Revolution - a truly great revolution in methods and materials which, when applied with intelligence, made possible in a few years the achievement of complete sufficiency in cereals production in South and South East Asia, Mexico and South America. After 20 years of continuous success, aspects of the Green Revolution need to be rediscussed in the light of new findings and possibilities offered by scientific and technological progress - and negative side effects on environment and health. These papers examine the present state of agriculture, and indicate the way forward for its development, especially in the tropics and, in particular, Africa and South America. The need for more research is stressed; priorities in the application of this research are discussed, such as the economic aspects of any new system to be adopted, and the need to respect the ecological equilibria of different environments and the balance of energy input/output in a given agrosystem.

Download or read book The Violence of the Green Revolution written by Vandana Shiva and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2016-01-14 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Green Revolution has been heralded as a political and technological achievement—unprecedented in human history. Yet in the decades that have followed it, this supposedly nonviolent revolution has left lands ravaged by violence and ecological scarcity. A dedicated empiricist, Vandana Shiva takes a magnifying glass to the effects of the Green Revolution in India, examining the devastating effects of monoculture and commercial agriculture and revealing the nuanced relationship between ecological destruction and poverty. In this classic work, the influential activist and scholar also looks to the future as she examines new developments in gene technology.

Download or read book The Doubly Green Revolution written by Gordon Conway and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2019-01-24 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Today more than three quarters of a billion people go hungry in a world where food is plentiful. A distinguished scientist here sets out an agenda for addressing this situation. Initially published in 1997 in the United Kingdom, the book is now available in the first edition produced for the Western hemisphere. In it, the author has updated information to reflect current economic indicators. This volume includes a foreword written for the previous edition by Ismail Serageldin of the World Bank. The original Green Revolution produced new technologies for farmers, creating food abundance. A second transformation of agriculture is now required—specifically, Gordon Conway argues, a "doubly green" revolution that stresses conservation as well as productivity. He calls for researchers and farmers to forge genuine partnerships in an effort to design better plants and animals. He also urges them to develop (or rediscover) alternatives to inorganic fertilizers and pesticides, improve soil and water management, and enhance earning opportunities for the poor, especially women.

Download or read book Green Revolution written by Ben Lowe and published by InterVarsity Press. This book was released on 2009-11-19 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We are facing planet-sized challenges. Climate change and environmental crises can be pretty immobilizing, and we can fall into the temptation of thinking that we can't make a difference. But it's not just about what we can do on our own to make a difference. It's about what we can do when we mobilize together as a movement and combine for community action. Activist Ben Lowe calls the present generation to come together and care for the earth in a way that recent generations have not. Telling real-life stories of community organizing on college campuses across the nation, Lowe shows us that little things can make a big difference when we all work together. We now have an opportunity to show the world what it looks like when Christians care for the planet God gave us, so that future generations can live sustainably. This is our moment. This is our issue. Come join the green revolution.

Download or read book American Environmental History written by Dan Allosso and published by Createspace Independent Publishing Platform. This book was released on 2017-12-14 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An expanded, new and improved American Environmental History textbook for everyone! After years of teaching Environmental History at a major East Coast University without a textbook, Dr. Dan Allosso decided to take matters into his own hands. The result, American Environmental History, is a concise, comprehensive survey covering the material from Dan's undergraduate course. What do people say about the class and the text? "This was my first semester and this course has created an incredible first impression. If all of the courses are this good, I am going to really enjoy my time here. The course has completely changed the way I look at the world." (Student in 2014 class) "One of the few classes I'm really sad is ending, the subject matter is fascinating and Dan is a great guide to it. His approach should be required of all students as it teaches an appreciation for a newer and better way of living." (Student in 2014 class) "Allosso's lectures are fantastic. The best I have ever had. So impressed. The material is always extremely interesting and well-presented." (Student in 2015 class) "It is just a perfect course that I think should be mandatory if we want to save our planet and live responsibly." (Student in 2015 class) "A rare gem for an IB ESS teacher or any social studies teacher looking for an 11th or 12th grade supplementary text that aims to provide an historical context for the environmental reality in America today. Highly recommended." (District Curriculum Coordinator, 2016) "I was so impressed with this material that I am using it as a supplement for a course I teach at my college." (History and Environmental Studies Professor, 2017) Beginning in prehistory and concluding in the present, American Environmental History explores the ways the environment has affected the choices that became our history, and how our choices have affected the environment. The dynamic relationship between people and the world around them is missing from mainstream history. Putting the environment back into history helps us make sense of the past and the present, which will help guide us toward a better future. More information and Dan's blog are available at environmentalhistory.us

Download or read book Plowman s Folly written by Edward H. Faulkner and published by University of Oklahoma Press. This book was released on 2015-01-06 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mr. Faulkner’s masterpiece is recognized as the most important challenge to agricultural orthodoxy that has been advanced in this century. Its new philosophy of the soil, based on proven principles and completely opposed to age-old concepts, has had a strong impact upon theories of cultivation around the world. It was on July 5, 1943, when Plowman’s Folly was first issued, that the author startled a lethargic public, long bemused by the apparently insoluble problem of soil depletion, by saying, simply, “The fact is that no one has ever advanced a scientific reason for plowing.” With the key sentence, he opened a new era.For generations, our reasoning about the management of the soil has rested upon the use of the moldboard plow. Mr. Faulkner proved rather conclusively that soil impoverishment, erosion, decreasing crop yields, and many of the adverse effects following droughts or periods of excessive rainfall could be traced directly to the practice of plowing natural fertilizers deep into the soil. Through his own test-plot and field-scale experiments, in which he prepared the soil with a disk harrow, in emulation of nature’s way on the forest floor and in the natural meadow, by incorporating green manures into its surface, he transformed ordinary, even inferior, soils into extremely productive, high-yield croplands.Time magazine called this concept “one of the most revolutionary ideas in agriculture history.” The volume is being made available again not only because farmers, ranchers, gardeners, and agriculturists demanded it, but also because it details the kind of “revolution” which will aid those searching for the fruits of the earth in the emerging nations.

Download or read book Hot Flat and Crowded written by Thomas L. Friedman and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2009-11-05 with total page 418 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Friedman proposes that an ambitious national strategy, which he calls 'Code-Green', is not only what we need to save the planet from overheating - it is what we need to make us all healthier, richer, more innovative, more productive, and more secure.

Download or read book The Hungry World written by Nick Cullather and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2011-04-01 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Food was a critical front in the Cold War battle for Asia. “Where Communism goes, hunger follows” was the slogan of American nation builders who fanned out into the countryside to divert rivers, remodel villages, and introduce tractors, chemicals, and genes to multiply the crops consumed by millions. This “green revolution” has been credited with averting Malthusian famines, saving billions of lives, and jump-starting Asia’s economic revival. Bono and Bill Gates hail it as a model for revitalizing Africa’s economy. But this tale of science triumphant conceals a half century of political struggle from the Afghan highlands to the rice paddies of the Mekong Delta, a campaign to transform rural societies by changing the way people eat and grow food. The ambition to lead Asia into an age of plenty grew alongside development theories that targeted hunger as a root cause of war. Scientific agriculture was an instrument for molding peasants into citizens with modern attitudes, loyalties, and reproductive habits. But food policies were as contested then as they are today. While Kennedy and Johnson envisioned Kansas-style agribusiness guarded by strategic hamlets, Indira Gandhi, Marcos, and Suharto inscribed their own visions of progress onto the land. Out of this campaign, the costliest and most sustained effort for development ever undertaken, emerged the struggles for resources and identity that define the region today. As Obama revives the lost arts of Keynesianism and counter-insurgency, the history of these colossal projects reveals bitter and important lessons for today’s missions to feed a hungry world.

Download or read book The Green Revolution in the Global South written by R. Douglas Hurt and published by University Alabama Press. This book was released on 2020-03-03 with total page 279 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A synthesis of the agricultural history of the Green Revolution The Green Revolution was devised to increase agricultural production worldwide, particularly in the developing world. Agriculturalists employed anhydrous ammonia and other fertilizing agents, mechanical tilling, hybridized seeds, pesticides, herbicides, and a multitude of other techniques to increase yields and feed a mushrooming human population that would otherwise suffer starvation as the world’s food supply dwindled. In The Green Revolution in the Global South: Science, Politics, and Unintended Consequences, R. Douglas Hurt demonstrates that the Green Revolution did not turn out as neatly as scientists predicted. When its methods and products were imported to places like Indonesia and Nigeria, or even replicated indigenously, the result was a tumultuous impact on a society’s functioning. A range of factors—including cultural practices, ethnic and religious barriers, cost and availability of new technologies, climate, rainfall and aridity, soil quality, the scale of landholdings, political policies and opportunism, the rise of industrial farms, civil unrest, indigenous diseases, and corruption—entered into the Green Revolution calculus, producing a series of unintended consequences that varied from place to place. As the Green Revolution played out over time, these consequences rippled throughout societies, affecting environments, economies, political structures, and countless human lives. Analyzing change over time, almost decade by decade, Hurt shows that the Green Revolution was driven by the state as well as science. Rather than acknowledge the vast problems with the Green Revolution or explore other models, Hurt argues, scientists and political leaders doubled down and repeated the same missteps in the name of humanity and food security. In tracing the permutations of modern science’s impact on international agricultural systems, Hurt documents how, beyond increasing yields, the Green Revolution affected social orders, politics, and lifestyles in every place its methods were applied—usually far more than once.

Download or read book The Next Green Revolution written by James E. Horne and published by CRC Press. This book was released on 2001-08-22 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The authors define sustainable agriculture as "the umbrella term for approaches to agriculture that are environmentally friendly, profitable, and fair to farmers and ranchers." One of Horne's positive solutions to agribusiness-as-usual is to pay farmers to implement sustainable practice, rather than pay them later to clean up pollution or compensate for overproduction. Horne's eight goals of sustainability are healthy soil, increasing water conservation and quality, managing organic waste without pollution, safer pest management, adopting livestock and crops more adapted to nature, increased biodiversity, energy conservation, increased profitability, and reduced risk. Horne hopes to convert farmers to sustainable agriculture with folksy lines like: "I feel like I'm carrying on in the pioneer spirit of Oklahoma-- breaking new ground, looking for a better life. What keeps me going is the knowledge that the good earth will sustain us if we treat her right." Horne is president of the Kerr Center for Sustainable Agriculture in Oklahoma. Annotation copyrighted by Book News Inc., Portland, OR

Download or read book Beyond the Green Revolution written by Kenneth Dahlberg and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book, which is the result of an intellectual odyssey, began as an attempt to explore and map the environmental and cross-cultural dimensions of the continuing spread of the green revolution-that package of high-yielding varieties of grain, fertilizers, irrigation, and pesticides that constitutes the core of modern industrial agriculture. In the process of traversing the terrain of several intellectual traditions and cutting through various disciplinary forests and thickets, a number of striking observations were made-all leading to two sober ing conclusions. First, most intellectual maps dealing with agriculture fail to recognize it as the basic interface between human societies and their environment. Because of this, they are little better than the "flat earth" maps of earlier centuries in helping to understand global realities. Second, when agriculture is analyzed from a global perspec tive that takes evolution seriously, one sees that the ecological risks as well as the energy and social costs of modern industrial agriculture make it largely inappropriate for developing countries. Beyond that, one can see a great need within industrialized countries to develop less costly, less risky, and more sustainable agricultural alternatives. Early in the journey it became clear that conventional disciplinary approaches were inadequate to comprehend the scope and diversity of global agriculture and that a new multilevel approach was needed. It also became clear that any new approach would have to try to correct certain Western biases and blind spots.

Download or read book Seeds of Sustainability written by Pamela A. Matson and published by Island Press. This book was released on 2012-09-26 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Seeds of Sustainability is a groundbreaking analysis of agricultural development and transitions toward more sustainable management in one region. An invaluable resource for researchers, policymakers, and students alike, it examines new approaches to make agricultural landscapes healthier for both the environment and people. The Yaqui Valley is the birthplace of the Green Revolution and one of the most intensive agricultural regions of the world, using irrigation, fertilizers, and other technologies to produce some of the highest yields of wheat anywhere. It also faces resource limitations, threats to human health, and rapidly changing economic conditions. In short, the Yaqui Valley represents the challenge of modern agriculture: how to maintain livelihoods and increase food production while protecting the environment. Renowned scientist Pamela Matson and colleagues from leading institutions in the U.S. and Mexico spent fifteen years in the Yaqui Valley in Sonora, Mexico addressing this challenge. Seeds of Sustainability represents the culmination of their research, providing unparalleled information about the causes and consequences of current agricultural methods. Even more importantly, it shows how knowledge can translate into better practices, not just in the Yaqui Valley, but throughout the world.

Download or read book Europe s Green Revolution and Others Since written by Jonathan Harwood and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2012 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book focuses on the development of public-sector plant-breeding in Germany from the nineteenth century through its fate under National Socialism, arguing that peasant-friendly research has an important role to play in future Green Revolutions.

Download or read book Where Our Food Comes From written by Gary Paul Nabhan and published by Island Press. This book was released on 2012-02-13 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The future of our food depends on tiny seeds in orchards and fields the world over. In 1943, one of the first to recognize this fact, the great botanist Nikolay Vavilov, lay dying of starvation in a Soviet prison. But in the years before Stalin jailed him as a scapegoat for the country’s famines, Vavilov had traveled over five continents, collecting hundreds of thousands of seeds in an effort to outline the ancient centers of agricultural diversity and guard against widespread hunger. Now, another remarkable scientist—and vivid storyteller—has retraced his footsteps. In Where Our Food Comes From, Gary Paul Nabhan weaves together Vavilov’s extraordinary story with his own expeditions to Earth’s richest agricultural landscapes and the cultures that tend them. Retracing Vavilov’s path from Mexico and the Colombian Amazon to the glaciers of the Pamirs in Tajikistan, he draws a vibrant portrait of changes that have occurred since Vavilov’s time and why they matter. In his travels, Nabhan shows how climate change, free trade policies, genetic engineering, and loss of traditional knowledge are threatening our food supply. Through discussions with local farmers, visits to local outdoor markets, and comparison of his own observations in eleven countries to those recorded in Vavilov’s journals and photos, Nabhan reveals just how much diversity has already been lost. But he also shows what resilient farmers and scientists in many regions are doing to save the remaining living riches of our world. It is a cruel irony that Vavilov, a man who spent his life working to foster nutrition, ultimately died from lack of it. In telling his story, Where Our Food Comes From brings to life the intricate relationships among culture, politics, the land, and the future of the world’s food.

Download or read book The Green Revolution Revisited written by Bernhard Glaeser and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2010-11-29 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Green Revolution – the apparently miraculous increase in cereal crop yields achieved in the 1960s – came under severe criticism in the 1970s because of its demands for optimal irrigation, intensive use of fertilisers and pesticides; its damaging impact on social structures; and its monoculture approach. The early 1980s saw a concerted approach to many of these criticisms under the auspices of Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR). This book, first published in 1987, analyses the recent achievements of the CGIAR and examines the Green Revolution concept in South America, Asia and Africa, from an ‘ecodevelopment’ standpoint, with particular regard to the plight of the rural poor. The work is characterised by a concern for the ecological and social dimensions of agricultural development,which puts the emphasis on culturally compatible, labour absorbing and environmentally sustainable food production which will serve the long term needs of developing countries.