Brown is the author of over 50 books on global environmental issues and his works have been translated into more than forty languages. His most recent book is Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization.[1]Klaus Schwab of the World Economic Forum describes it as "a great book which should wake up humankind." Brown summarized many of the major issues confronting civilization in the May, 2009 issue of Scientific American.[2]
The recipient of 40 honorary degrees and a MacArthur Fellowship, Brown has been described by the Washington Post as "one of the world's most influential thinkers."[3] As early as 1978, in his book The Twenty-Ninth Day, he was already warning of "the various dangers arising out of our manhandling of nature...by overfishing the oceans, stripping the forests, turning land into desert."[4] In 1986, the Library of Congress requested his personal papers noting that his writings “have already strongly affected thinking about problems of world population and resources.”
In the mid-1970s, Brown helped pioneer the concept of sustainable development, during a career that started with farming. Since then, he has been the recipient of many prizes and awards, including, the 1987 United Nations Environment Prize, the 1989 World Wide Fund for Nature Gold Medal, and the 1994 Blue Planet Prize for his "contributions to solving global environmental problems." In 1995, Marquis Who's Who selected Brown as one of its "50 Great Americans." He was recently awarded the Presidential Medal of Italy and was appointed an honorary professor at the Chinese Academy of Sciences. He lives in Washington, D.C.
Early life
Brown was born and raised on New Jersey farmland, near the Delaware River. From his childhood readings he discovered that many of the founding fathers had also been involved in agriculture, like his family, and then wanted to learn to grow tomatoes. By the age of fourteen he and a brother, with some rented land and an old tractor, started a tomato-growing business, which eventually grew to become New Jersey's largest, selling over 1.5 million pounds a year. He later said, "farming is all I ever wanted to do with my life. You have to know soils, weather, plant pathology, entomology, management, even politics. It's the ideal interdisciplinary profession." [5]
Education
Shortly after earning a degree in agricultural science from Rutgers University in 1955, he spent six months living in rural India where he became intimately familiar with the food/population issue. "His experiences in Indian villages changed his life," wrote biographer David De Leon. "Although he went back to growing tomatoes when he returned to the United States, this no longer seemed like exciting work."[5]
After being with the USDA just four years, he had assembled a study on world resources. Secretary of agriculture, Orville Freeman offered him a job with various policy councils, saying "you sketched the problems. Now you have to do something about them."[5] He was soon elevated to being the resident specialist on global issues. In this capacity, he advised the secretary of agriculture on his overseas agricultural policies. He also worked for the International Agricultural Development Service throughout the late 1960s and early 1970s, while at the same time earning a degree in public administration from Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government. His primary job was to "increase food production in underdeveloped countries."[5]
In early 1969, he left government to help establish the Overseas Development Council. He also became an enthusiastic believer in the promise of a Green Revolution, with the hope of using better seeds and cultivation methods to help solve global problems of poverty and hunger. In his opinion, "this technology was the most crucial historical event since the steam engine."[5] In subsequent years, however, he realized that rapid population growth in undeveloped countries was overwhelming the gains in increased food production.[citation needed]
Career as environmental activist
File:Lester Brown LOC.jpgLester Brown, 1960s
In 1974, with support of a $500,000 grant from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Brown founded the Worldwatch Institute, the first research institute devoted to the analysis of global environmental issues. While there he launched the Worldwatch Papers, the annual State of the World reports, World Watch magazine, a second annual entitled Vital Signs: The Trends That are Shaping Our Future, and the Environmental Alert book series. According to De Leon, "he gathered a staff of young idealists just out of college. They were expected to be 'professional generalists,' rather than narrow specialists with advanced degrees."[5]
The institute eventually became noted for being an independent and respected think tank focusing on environmental issues and also a storehouse for a large amount of environmental information. Their goal is to educate the public and government about environmental problems and to recommend actions. The institute has refused to become a lobbying organization, with Brown saying, "the world is filled with specialists who dig deep burrows into the earth and bring up these nuggets of insight, but there's no one up on top pulling it all together. That's our job."[5] As a result, he has been described as "one of the world's most influential thinkers" and was given a $250,000 "genius award" by the MacArthur Foundation in the late 1980s.[citation needed]
Primary themes
There have been a number of consistent themes in his work over the years, some of which are listed below:[citation needed]
In a recent talk at Catawba College, the college newspaper referred to him as an "environmental Paul Revere," [as] he warned his audience that "unless civilization changes its ways, its end is truly near... we're in a race between natural tipping points and political tipping points, - 'what we need most of all is for the market to tell the environmental truth.' " He added, "We don't need to go beyond our ice melts to know that we're in trouble. How much are we willing to spend to avoid a 23 foot rise in sea level?" He explained that "indirect costs are shaping our future," and by ignoring these, "we're doing exactly the same thing as Enron- leaving costs off the books. Consuming today with no concern for tomorrow is not a winning philosophy." He spoke of rapid population growth and deforestation and "two new stresses – rising food and oil prices." "As oil prices go up, grain prices will follow," he said. [7]
Offering solutions
In December 2008, in Brown's essay for his Earth Policy Institute, he presented ways of creating new jobs by public investment in both the renewable energy industry and in energy efficiency technology. He gave growth statistics along with the calculated number of jobs that would be created: [8]
The renewable energy industry - wind, solar, geothermal - are expanding by over 30 percent yearly;
There are now, in the U.S., 24,000 megawatts of wind generating capacity online, but there is "a staggering 225,000 megawatts of "planned wind farms";
Every billion dollars invested in wind farms creates 3,350 jobs - nearly four times the number created from coal plants;
A billion dollars invested in solar creates 1,480 jobs;
What is needed is a World War II-type mobilization to produce electric-powered cars that will operate at an equivalent gas cost of $1 per gallon (Replacing each SUV with a plug-in hybrid could save $20,000 of oil imports over its lifetime);
"The U.S. goal for Detroit should be not merely to save it but make it the world leader...";
A $500 billion dollar investment in clean and renewable energy systems would create 3 million new jobs that would last through 2020;
He notes that "historically, it is rare for so many emerging threats to have a common solution."
Brown has authored or co-authored 50 books. One of the world's most widely published authors, his books have appeared in some 40 languages. Among his earlier books are Man, Land and Food, World Without Borders, and Building a Sustainable Society. His 1995 book Who Will Feed China? challenged the official view of China’s food prospect, spawning hundreds of conferences and seminars. Over the years his books have influenced the thinking and actions of many world leaders.
For example, when asked by Wired magazine about CNN founder Ted Turner's involvement with his ideas, he replied, "Ted is one of the world's most committed environmentalists. After he read the original Plan B in 2003, he called and said he wanted to distribute it to the world's key decision makers -- heads of state, cabinet members, Fortune 500 CEOs. He distributed ... 3,569 copies ... with a note saying 'I read this. It's important stuff. You need to read it too.' " [9]
In May 2001, he founded the Earth Policy Institute to provide a vision and a road map for achieving an environmentally sustainable economy. In November 2001, he published Eco-Economy: Building an Economy for the Earth, which was hailed by E.O. Wilson as “an instant classic.” His most recent book is Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization (2008).
Who Will Feed China?
In writing this book which was published in 1995, he was ahead of his time in recognizing the risks to world resources as more countries, especially China, become developed. He writes, "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." He explains some of the dilemmas they face: water is becoming scarce; 80 percent of their grain crop requires irrigation; growing cities are erasing cropland for industrialization; food production is stagnating; yet China's population increases "the equivalent of a new Beijing each year."
He describes China's growth and its affect on the global 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 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." One of his conclusions is that the new age of food scarcity "could well lead us to redefine national security away from military preparedness and toward maintaining adequate food supplies."
In the book's Forward, he writes, "Although I was aware that the Chinese were sensitive to the notion that they might need to import large amounts of grain, I had not realized just how sensitive the issue is. All the leaders of China today are survivors of the massive famine that occurred in 1959-1961 in the aftermath of the Great Leap Forward -- a famine that claimed a staggering 30 million lives. If this many died, then as many as a couple hundred million more people could have been on the edge of starvation."
This book, published in 2004, is a more current description of "the ways in which human demands are outstripping the earth's natural capacities, and how the resulting environmental damage is undermining food production on a global scale." He documents a number of vital changes that are affecting civilization today:
Crop production is suffering "due to global warming" and describes how just a few degrees of increased average temperature will lead to a 10 percent decline in grain yields.
Water scarcity and shortages, such as from "aquifer depletion" may be as important as oil depletion. He states, "There are substitues for oil, but none for water."
Decreasing cropland in key countries like China create serious dilemmas, "as densely populated countries extend their reliance on automobiles, they pave scarce cropland for roads, highways, and parking lots."
Population growth rates, while slowing mostly in the developed countries, is still increasing by 76 million each year. Again, he presents another dilemma: "In a world where the historical rise in land productivity has slowed by half since 1990, grain production is falling behind population."
His conclusion is that our "ability to provide enough food is at stake, and depends not only on efforts within agriculture but also having an energy policy that stabilizes climate, a worldwide effort to raise water productivity, the evolution of land-efficient transport systems, and population policies..."
Plan B 3.0
Plan B 3.0 - Mobilizing to Save Civilization, published in 2008, is a continuation of the critical themes covered by his earlier books, the book is written as a final warning call for the leaders of the world to begin "mobilizing to save civilization" and stresses even more that time is of the essence. The entire book can be read online for free.
At California State University, Chico, Plan B has become "required reading for all incoming freshmen." The university says that it is being used in many courses in History, English, Philosophy, Communications, Political and Social Science.[10]
Awards and recognition
Lester Brown is the recipient of many prizes and awards, including 40 honorary degrees, and is an honorary professor of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.[11]
Lester Brown, along with many activists in the environmental movement, have been characterized as liberals. As such, Brown does not advocate fundamental change to the structure of capitalist production, but mainly wants more controls on it. This is a position which is critiqued by Marxists and some other leftists.[12] Lester Brown has also been criticized by L.T. Evans for his "unrelenting pessimism" about the state of the environment.[13]
Bibliography
Man, Land and Food (1963)
Increasing World Food Output (1965)
Seeds of Change (1970)
Man and His Environment: Food (with Gail Finsterbusch) (1972)
World Without Borders (1972)
In the Human Interest (1974)
By Bread Alone (with Erik Eckholm) (1974)
The Twenty-Ninth Day (1978)
Running on Empty (with Colin Norman & Christopher Flavin) (1979)
Building a Sustainable Society (1981)
State of the World (with others) (1984-2001)
Vital Signs (with others) (1992-2001)
Eko Keizai Kakumei: Environmental Trends Reshaping The Global Economy (1998) (in Japanese)
Saving the Planet: How to Shape an Environmentally Sustainable Global Economy (1992)
Full House: Reassessing the Earth's Population Carrying Capacity (1995)
Who Will Feed China?: Wake-Up Call for a Small Planet (1995)
Tough Choices: Facing the Challenge of Food Scarcity (1996)
Beyond Malthus: Nineteen Dimensions of the Population Challenge (with Gary Gardner and Brian Halweil) (1999)
Eco-Economy: Building an Economy for the Earth (2001)
Plan B: Rescuing a Planet Under Stress and a Civilization in Trouble (2003)
Outgrowing the Earth: The Food Security Challenge in an Age of Falling Water Tables and Rising Temperatures (2004)
