Named and Nameless/Green Revolution 2.0
I'm in my favorite seat in the Harvest Room at the SPSC (University of Minnesota, St. Paul Campus, to provide some add'l grounding). The window wall faces the woody hillside in front of McNeal and I'm thankful for the sunshine. My chair sits beneath a portrait of Norman Borlaug, a simple plant breeder, Iowa born, U of M graduate. But just up the hill and left of McNeal sits Borlaug Hall...named for the man who was the father of the Green Revolution, the 1970 Nobel Peace Price recipient, and credited with saving over a billion lives...more than any other human in history. He did this by using scientific methods to develop high-yield and disease-resistant crops for developing nations, then personally overseeing their delivery and adoption in more than 20 countries.
I hadn't heard of Borlaug prior to coming to grad school here at the U, but apparently I'm not alone. This 10+ year old article from the Atlantic Monthly provides some good background on our region's unsung hero, and raises some interesting discussion topics at the same time. Like what about over-population? The "greenness" of chemical farming? The loss of traditional culture?
Discussion is good, but I'll defend my affinity for Borlaug for a couple of purely subjective reasons. Never having met him, I imagine him as a humble guy (part of that whole unsung thing). Plus, he's a good Norwegian, and obviously I dig that. Add to that, I just consulted the trusted info source that is Wikipedia and learned that Borlaug met his wife Margaret in Dinkytown at a coffeeshop in 1933. That's just darn cute. They were married 69 years till Margaret's passing in March of 2007.
This Spring I'm TA'ing a class that started out meeting in Borlaug Hall. Maybe it was the fact that it always feels good to vacate McNeal, or maybe the architecture of Borlaug just really is fabulous (I don't know if that's true—the interior signage certainly does suck), or maybe it is related to this idea of the power of naming...like the notion of space vs. anti-space being defined by design intent or lack thereof, an object/entity's symbolic power/meaning owing to its name (or lack thereof). Borlaug Hall feels free of pretension, full of possibilities.
I had hoped to tie these meanderings in with some other disjointed thoughts, like how great it is that the U of M now composts the vast majority of all food-related waste...right here at the SPSC there's a uniformed student agent manning the toss cans. It's another kind of Green Revolution. Borlaug's was concerned with production, ours is reduction. His was remarkably his own, ours belongs to everyone (hence the 2.0 addendum). We're all responsible in this networked interface, contributing to the pile of scraps filling those bins (or not). I like the thought of this, of being an unsung hero in a collective of unsung heroes carefully separating my plastics from my paper. Sometimes it's ok to be nameless. But I also like the thought that this space (this campus) is designed space, and the things produced here have names. It's a gentle reassurance to those of us (like me from time to time) who get to wondering whether all our academic seed-sowing will ever yield a harvest, and whether that harvest will feed anyone beyond our campus. And whose names will imbue future buildings with possibilities.
Adding a favorite by Manolo García, birdsong (I can hear them through the windows) in keeping with the nameless choir/green theme. Also posting the flyer for the CDes Greenlight group's GreenScreen events (Yes Men is worth watching).
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