Yesterday, I published some remarks from and about Norman Borlaug (go here). He was the Iowa farm boy who grew up to be the father of the “Green Revolution,” which had nothing to do with environmentalism, currently understood: The “Green Revolution” meant high-yield agriculture, the enormous increase in cereal-grain production that fed untold millions who otherwise would have gone hungry — possibly starved to death. Some people say, not without credibility, that Borlaug saved more lives than anyone else in the 20th century.

The Iowa farm boy won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970. (He was of Norwegian background, by the way — which was just a bonus for the Norwegians who give the prize.) But later, he came under tremendous attack from the enviro-Left, who called him a wrecker of ecology, a poisoner of the soil, a toady of capitalism, blah, blah, blah: You know how these people talk. Charming bunch. All of Borlaug’s erstwhile backers — the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the World Bank — fell away. They couldn’t stand the pressure from the enviro lobby. Bastards.

Anyway, much mail came in, concerning the Borlaug post. One letter was from a man whose father had been an agronomist and had worked with Borlaug. At the end of his letter, our reader said, “Incidentally, my father had even less patience with organic-farming faddists than Dr. Borlaug. As he explained it: ‘Nitrogen is nitrogen. The plant doesn’t know or care where it came from.’”

And I have something extraordinary for you. Five years after Borlaug won the peace prize, Andrei Sakharov won it. He was not allowed to travel to collect it, of course. But he wrote a Nobel lecture, delivered by his wife, Yelena Bonner, who happened to be out of the country anyway: She was in Italy, for medical treatment. As you can imagine, Sakharov had a lot to say, about the Soviet Union, human rights, nuclear weapons, and geopolitics. But he also found time for the Green Revolution, and its attackers:

It is not so very long since men were unfamiliar with artificial fertilizers, mechanized farming, toxic chemicals, and intensive agricultural methods. There are voices calling for a return to more traditional and possibly less dangerous forms of agriculture. But can this be put into practice in a world in which hundreds of millions of people are suffering the pangs of hunger? On the contrary, there is no doubt that we need increasingly intensive methods of farming, and we need to spread modern methods all over the world, including the developing countries.

Isn’t that something? With all the rest that Sakharov had to think about . . . (For his complete lecture, go here.)

Let me add this, please: Because Sakharov was one of the greatest dissidents, resisters, and human-rights champions of all time — because he was one of the most noble human beings we have ever known — we tend to forget that he was one of the greatest scientists of his age: the Soviet Union’s leading nuclear physicist, the father of its thermonuclear weapons. He sacrificed his scientific career — his privileges, his dachas, his laboratories, all of it — to do what was most right. What a man.