Plain History: How Norman Borlaug Stopped the Apocalypse

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In every generation, important people predict that the end is near and the apocalypse is coming. In the 1960s, the fear was that population growth would destroy the planet—that fertility would outrun the food supply, and hundreds of millions of people would starve to death. The most famous warning was 'The Population Bomb,' a bestselling book published in 1968 by Stanford ecologist Paul Ehrlich, which claimed "the battle to feed all of humanity is over" and “hundreds of millions of people would starve to death” in the 1970s. But then the 1970s came and went. And global famine deaths didn’t rise. They declined by 90 percent. In the 1980s, deaths from world hunger fell again. And again in the…