The Seeds We Sow, Kindness That Fed A Hungry World

This work is an account of cross generational change embellished with fictionalized conversations among historical figures. With regard to genre, it is non-traditional in its use of history and biography as vehicles for examining kindness as an attitude toward the world. All of the characters who are identified by two or more names are historical figures. A few characters identified by a single name are fictional, primarily because the main players in the historical events being described are not known. The book uses the lives of three great men, (George Carver, Henry Wallace, Norman Borlaug) and the research of another (Edward Lorenz) to tell the story of how kindness is passed and enhanced across generations by virtue of the "butterfly effect." The "butterfly effect" maxim emerged from the title of a paper Dr. Lorenz presented at the American Association for the Advance of Science annual conference in 1972. He had originally submitted his paper to the conference program committee without a title. One of his friends on the committee was ribbing Dr. Lorenz when he added to the conference program booklet the facetious title "Predictability: Does the Flap of a Butterfly's Wings set of a Tornado in Texas?" In his opening remarks, Dr. Lorenz' response to the question posed by the title was, "If the flap of a butterfly's wing can be instrumental in generating a tornado, it can equally be instrumental in preventing a tornado." Whatever it is called, Dr. Lorenz' theory is at once both exquisitely simple and intricately complex. The implication is that given enough time every event, indeed every expression of energy everywhere, ripples through time and space to impact every subsequent event and expression of energy everywhere, forever--the "butterfly effect." While this book offers considerable detail about the lives of these men, it is not a series of biographies. Rather, it is the story of the impact they had on each other, and all of humanity, as they pursued the hybridization of the plants that feed us and the hybridization of the way we interact with each other and the environment. Because George Washington Carver, Henry Agard Wallace, and Norman Ernest Borlaug lived, so do we. This book tells that story.