Lester R. Brown

We are in a race between political and natural tipping points. Can we close coal-fired power plants fast enough to save the Greenland ice sheet and avoid catastrophic sea level rise? Can we raise water productivity fast enough to halt the depletion of aquifers and avoid water-driven food shortages? Can we cope with peak water and peak oil at the same time? These are some of the issues Lester R. Brown skillfully distills in World on the Edge. Bringing decades of research and analysis into play, he provides the responses needed to reclaim our future.

“How to build a more just world and save the planet.... We should all heed Brown’s advice.”―Bill Clinton In this updated edition of the landmark Plan B , Lester Brown outlines a survival strategy for our early twenty-first-century civilization. The world faces many environmental trends of disruption and decline, including rising temperatures and spreading water shortage. In addition to these looming threats, we face the peaking of oil, annual population growth of 70 million, a widening global economic divide, and a growing list of failing states. The scale and complexity of issues facing our fast-forward world have no precedent. With Plan A, business as usual, we have neglected these issues overly long. In Plan B 3.0 , Lester R. Brown warns that the only effective response now is a World War II–type mobilization like that in the United States after the attack on Pearl Harbor.

“[Brown’s] ability to make a complicated subject accessible to the general reader is remarkable.”―Katherine Salant, Washington Post As fossil fuel prices rise, oil insecurity deepens, and concerns about climate change cast a shadow over the future of coal, a new energy economy is emerging. Wind, solar, and geothermal energy are replacing oil, coal, and natural gas, at a pace and on a scale we could not have imagined even a year ago. For the first time since the Industrial Revolution, we have begun investing in energy sources that can last forever. Plan B 4.0 explores both the nature of this transition to a new energy economy and how it will affect our daily lives.

With food scarcity driven by falling water tables, eroding soils, and rising temperatures, control of arable land and water resources is moving to center stage in the global struggle for food security. “In this era of tightening world food supplies, the ability to grow food is fast becoming a new form of geopolitical leverage. Food is the new oil,” Lester R. Brown writes.What will the geopolitics of food look like in a new era dominated by scarcity and food nationalism? Brown outlines the political implications of land acquisitions by grain-importing countries in Africa and elsewhere as well as the world’s shrinking buffers against poor harvests. With wisdom accumulated over decades of tracking agricultural issues, Brown exposes the increasingly volatile food situation the world is facing.

In this new edition, Lester Brown outlines a survival strategy for our early twenty-first civilization.The world faces numerous environmental trends of disruption and decline such as rising temperatures, falling water tables, shrinking forests, melting glaciers, collapsing fisheries, and rising sea levels. In Plan B , Lester R. Brown notes that in ignoring nature's deadlines for dealing with these environmental issues we risk the disruption of economic progress.In addition to these environmental trends, the world faces the peaking of oil, the addition of 70 million people per year, a widening global economic divide, and the spread of international terrorism. The global scale and growing complexity of issues facing our fast-forward world have no precedent.

The great energy transition from fossil fuels to renewable sources of energy is under way. As oil insecurity deepens, the extraction risks of fossil fuels rise, and concerns about climate instability cast a shadow over the future of coal, a new world energy economy is emerging. The old economy, fueled by oil, natural gas, and coal is being replaced with one powered by wind, solar, and geothermal energy. The Great Transition details the accelerating pace of this global energy revolution. As many countries become less enamored with coal and nuclear power, they are embracing an array of clean, renewable energies. Whereas solar energy projects were once small-scale, largely designed for residential use, energy investors are now building utility-scale solar projects. Strides are being some of the huge wind farm complexes under construction in China will each produce as much electricity as several nuclear power plants, and an electrified transport system supplemented by the use of bicycles could reshape the way we think about mobility.

"One of the world's most influential thinkers."― Washington Post In 1543, Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus challenged the view that the Sun revolved around the Earth, arguing instead that the Earth revolved around the Sun. His paper led to a revolution in thinking―to a new worldview. Eco-Economy discusses the need today for a similar shift in our worldview. The issue now is whether the environment is part of the economy or the economy is part of the environment. Lester R. Brown argues the latter, pointing out that treating the environment as part of the economy has produced an economy that is destroying its natural support systems. Brown notes that if China were to have a car in every garage, American style, it would need 80 million barrels of oil a day―more than the world currently produces. If paper consumption per person in China were to reach the U.S. level, China would need more paper than the world produces. There go the world's forests. If the fossil fuel-based, automobile-centered, throwaway economic model will not work for China, it will not work for the other 3 billion people in the developing world―and it will not work for the rest of the world. But Brown is optimistic as he describes how to restructure the global economy to make it compatible with the Earth's ecosystem so that economic progress can continue. In the new economy, wind farms replace coal mines, hydrogen-powered fuel cells replace internal combustion engines, and cities are designed for people, not cars. Glimpses of the new economy can be seen in the wind farms of Denmark, the solar rooftops of Japan, and the bicycle network of the Netherlands. Eco-Economy is a road map of how to get from here to there.

How human demands are outstripping the earth's capacities―and what we need to do about it. Ever since 9/11, many have considered al Queda to be the leading threat to global security, but falling water tables in countries that contain more than half the world's people and rising temperatures worldwide pose a far more serious threat. Spreading water shortages and crop-withering heat waves are shrinking grain harvests in more and more countries, making it difficult for the world's farmers to feed 70 million more people each year. The risk is that tightening food supplies could drive up food prices, destabilizing governments in low-income grain-importing countries and disrupting global economic progress. Future security, Brown says, now depends on raising water productivity, stabilizing climate by moving beyond fossil fuels, and stabilizing population by filling the family planning gap and educating young people everywhere.If Osama bin Laden and his colleagues succeed in diverting our attention from the real threats to our future security, they may reach their goals for reasons that even they have not imagined.

In an integrated world economy, China’s rising food prices will become the world’s rising food prices. China’s land scarcity will become everyone’s land scarcity. And water scarcity in China will affect the entire world. China’s dependence on massive imports, like the collapse of the world’s fisheries, will be a wake-up call that we are colliding with the earth’s capacity to feed us. It could well lead us to redefine national security away from military preparedness and toward maintaining adequate food supplies. To feed its 1.2 billion people, China may soon have to import so much grain that this action could trigger unprecedented rises in world food prices. In Who Will Feed China: Wake-up Call for a Small Planet , Lester Brown shows that even as water becomes more scarce in a land where 80 percent of the grain crop is irrigated, as per-acre yield gains are erased by the loss of cropland to industrialization, and as food production stagnates, China still increases its population by the equivalent of a new Beijing each year. When Japan, a nation of just 125 million, began to import food, world grain markets rejoiced. But when China, a market ten times bigger, starts importing, there may not be enough grain in the world to meet that need - and food prices will rise steeply for everyone. Analysts foresaw that the recent four-year doubling of income for China's 1.2 billion consumers would increase food demand, especially for meat, eggs, and beer. But these analysts assumed that food production would rise to meet those demands. Brown shows that cropland losses are heavy in countries that are densely populated before industrialization, and that these countries quickly become net grain importers. We can see that process now in newspaper accounts from China as the government struggles with this problem.

On the bicentennial of Malthus's legendary essay on the tendency for population to grow more rapidly than the food supply, the question facing the world is not whether population growth will slow, but how. Human demands are pressing up against more and more of the Earth's limits. This book from the Worldwatch Institute examines the impacts of population growth on global resources and services, including food, fresh water, fisheries, jobs, education, income, and health. Despite the current hype of a "birth dearth" in parts of Europe and Japan, the fact remains that human numbers are projected to increase by over 3 billion by 2050. Rapidly growing nations are likely to outstrip the carrying capacity of their natural support systems. Governments worn down by several decades of rapid population growth often cannot mobilize the resources necessary to cope with emerging threats such as new diseases, food and water shortages, and mass unemployment. Already, in several African nations, hunger, disease, and social disintegration are leading to rising death rates, checking the rapid growth of population. Either nations with surging populations will quickly shift to smaller families or nature will impose its own, less humane limits to growth. As the world enters the new millennium, no challenge is perhaps so urgent as the need to quickly reduce population growth. Pakistan's population is projected to increase from 148 million to 357 million, surpassing that of the United States before 2050. Zimbabwe, Botswana, Zambia, Namibia, and Swaziland, where over one-fifth of the adult population is infected with HIV, will likely reach population stability shortly after the year 2000, as AIDS-related deaths offset soaring birth rates. A Worldwatch Environmental Alert book. Newsmaking press conference on publication National press and television coverage Illustrated

An inspirational memoir tracing Lester Brown’s life from a small-farm childhood to leadership as a global environmental activist. Lester R. Brown, whom the Washington Post praised as “one of the world’s most influential thinkers,” built his understanding of global environmental issues from the ground up. Brown spent his childhood working on the family’s small farm. His entrepreneurial skills surfaced early. Even while excelling in school, he launched with his younger brother a tomato-growing operation that by 1958 was producing 1.5 million pounds of tomatoes. Later, at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Brown emphasized the need for systemic thinking. In 1963 he did the first global food supply and demand projections to the end of the century. While on a brief assignment in India in 1965, he pieced together the clues that led him to sound the alarm on an impending famine there. His urgent warning to the U.S. and Indian governments set in motion the largest food rescue effort in history, helping to save millions of lives. This experience led India to adopt new agricultural practices, which he helped to shape. Brown went on to advise governments internationally and to found the Worldwatch and Earth Policy institutes, two major nonprofit environmental research organizations. Both brilliant and articulate, through his many books he has brought to the fore the interconnections among such issues as overpopulation, climate change, and water shortages and their effect on food security. His 1995 book, Who Will Feed China? , led to a broad restructuring of China’s agricultural policy. Never one to focus only on the problem, Brown always proposes pragmatic, employable solutions to stave off the unfolding ecological crises that endanger our future. 16 pages of photographs

Provides an overview of major world problems and the growing need for peaceful coexistence among all nations

The authors of the highly acclaimed State of the World series elaborate upon their vision of a global economy that does not destroy its own natural support systems. Authoritative yet extremely readable, this book addresses control of energy resources, population, poverty, transportation, taxes, and other issues necessary to create an environmentally sound global economy.

La interacción de los sistemas ecológico, social y económico, plantea dilemas de alarmante perspectiva, siendo absolutamente necesario, propone el autor : analizar y medir los recursos; así como planificar la explotación de las riquezas naturales; detener a tiempo las devastaciones del medio ambiente; diseñar opciones viables y métodos plausibles para allegarse nuevas fuentes de energía.

Report assessing society's ability to sustain itself without hurting the next generation

Award-winning environmental analyst Lester R. Brown and his colleagues chart progress in building the eco-economy, an economy that is compatible with the earth's ecosystem. Brown explains, for example, why wind-generated electricity with its abundance and falling cost is emerging as the foundation of the new post-fossil fuel energy economy: now cheaper than electricity from coal, oil, or natural gas, it can be used to electrolyze water and produce hydrogen, the fuel of choice for the new fuel cell engines that every major automobile manufacturer is working on. And since an eco-economy relies heavily on recycling materials already in the system, such as steel and aluminum, we learn how, in this new economy, recycling industries will largely replace mining industries. Bringing together in one volume the essential Eco-Economy Updates that are distributed worldwide over the Internet and published in the world's leading newspapers, The Earth Policy Reader monitors the shift from the old economy to the new.

A comprehensive assessment of the world's changing environmental state touches on the condition of the world's forests, the decline of fisheries, vertebrate fauna that face severe stress, the financial implications of sustainable development, and more. Simultaneous.

FIRST EDITION HARDCOVER

Report assessing society's ability to sustain itself without hurting the next generation

Many countries that have experienced rapid population growth for several decades are showing signs of demographic fatigue. Overwhelmed by the need to educate children, create jobs, and deal with the environmental effects of population growth, governments faced with a major new threat-such as AIDS or aquifer depletion-often cannot cope. In our demographically divided world, fertility has dropped and population has stabilized or is declining in some countries; but in others where fertility is still high, population is projected to double or even triple before stabilizing. As recent experience with AIDS in Africa shows, some of these high-fertility countries are simply overwhelmed when a new threat appears. While industrial countries have held HIV infection rates among their adult populations to 1 percent or less, infection rates are as high as 26 percent of the adult population in some African countries. With their rising mortality trends, more reminiscent of the Dark Ages than the bright millennium so many had hoped for, these countries are falling back to an earlier demographic stage with high death rates and high birth rates, and no growth in population. In examining the stakes involved in potentially adding another 3.3 billion people over the next 50 years, the study calls for immediate expansion of international family planning assistance to the millions of couples who still lack access, and new investment in educating young people, especially women, in the Third World, to promote a shift to smaller families.

Focusing on the complex relationships between the globalizing economy and the health of Earth's ecosystems, this annual survey of the world's environment by the Worldwatch Institute reveals the effects of fossil fuels and the "throwaway" economy on the planet's ecosystems and recommends solutions to this pressing problem. Simultaneous. 15,000 first printing.

The trends of environmental deterioration are beginning to threaten the security of food supplies. These trends, combined with a shrinking backlog of agricultural technology, are slowing growth in the world grain harvest. Meanwhile, the demand for grain is expanding at a near record rate as 80 million people are added each year and as incomes climb at record rates in Asia, led by China. As demand starts to outrun supply, grain prices are rising. Higher grain prices will not have much effect on the world's affluent, but for the 1.3 billion people who live on a dollar a day or less, rising grain prices quickly become life-threatening. People unable to buy enough food to feed their families are likely to take to the streets. The resulting political instability could effect the earnings of multinational corporations, the performance of stock markets, and the stability of the international monetary system. At that point, the problem of the poor would become everyone's problem. Securing future food supplies now goes far beyond ministries of agriculture, involving family planners as well as farmers. Decisions made in ministries of energy that affect climate stability may have a greater effect on food security than those made in ministries of agriculture. The steps needed to secure future food supplies, including stabilizing population and climate, are precisely the same as those needed to move the world economy onto an environmentally sustainable path. The purpose of this paper is to convince national political leaders that such as effort is needed.

World Watch ja Earth Policy -instituuttien perustaja Lester R. Brown esittelee uutuuskirjassaan lupaavalla alullaan olevaa, maailmanlaajuista energiavallankumousta. Nykyisiä tehokkaampien ja ekologisempien energiatuotantotapojen suosio kasvaa kiihtyvään tahtiin ja avaa ovia suureen muutokseen jo lähitulevaisuudessa.Lester R. Brown on yksi aikamme vaikuttavimmista ympäristötutkijoista ja -vaikuttajista. Elämänsä aikana hän on osallistunut kymmenien aihepiirin tietokirjojen tuottamiseen. The Washington Post -lehti on kutsunut Brownia yhdeksi aikamme etevimmistä ajattelijoista.“Kirja, joka lupaa hyviä uutisia elinkelpoisista energiavaroista ilmastonmuutoksen aikakautena.” – Booklist

Featuring charts and tables, the latest reference book in an annual series analyzes current global environmental problems and trends, offers possible solutions, and traces the enormous changes of the last century and the challenges to come. Simultaneous.

Reveals the connection between the environment and such concerns as national security, public health, economic growth, and the abundance of food, outlining steps toward building an environmental society that can form a partnership with nature.

Report assessing society's ability to sustain itself without hurting the next generation

This book tells the story of the turnaround on the food front. its heroes are new high-yielding cereals and the men who developed them. These new seeds are triggering an agricultural revolution in poor countries such as Pakistan, India, Turkey, the Phillippines, Kenya, and Mexico, a revolution that makes the earlier agricultural takeoffs in the United States and Japan seem minor by comparison.

Book by Brown, Lestor R., Jacobson, Jodi L.

Discusses economic, social, and environmental trends