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An inspirational memoir tracing Lester Brown's life from a small-farm childhood to leadership as a global environmental activist.
In this urgent time, World on the Edge calls out the pivotal environmental issues and how to solve them now. 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 skilfully distils in World on the Edge. Bringing decades of research and analysis into play, he provides the responses needed to reclaim our future.
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. In Lester Brown's brilliant and invigorating account of the industrial economy, he shows how a rethink of its fossil fuel-based, throwaway ethos is necessary to ensure that it works with, not against, the natural environment. The issue now is whether the environment is part of the economy or the economy is part of the environment. 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...
Provides alternative solutions to such global problems as population control, emerging water shortages, eroding soil, and global warming, outlining a detailed survival strategy for the civilization of the future.
Over the past few years Lester R. Brown has written several bestselling works that have made us aware of the need for sustainable development. This latest work shows that we have created a bubble economy, one whose output is artificially inflated by overconsuming the earth's natural capital. The present course, Plan A, will lead to continuing environmental deterioration and eventual economic decline. The alternative is Plan B, a worldwide mobilization to stabilize population and climate before these issues spiral out of control. The goal is to stabilize population close to the United Nation's low projection of 7.4 billion, to reduce carbon emissions by half by 2015, and to raise water productivity by half. Lester Brown puts forward a workable blueprint that can be enacted now.
Historically, food security was the responsibility of ministries of agriculture but today that has changed: decisions made in ministries of energy may instead have the greatest effect on the food situation. Recent research reporting that a one degree Celsius rise in temperature can reduce grain yields by 10 per cent means that energy policy is now directly affecting crop production. Agriculture is a water-intensive activity and, while public attention has focused on oil depletion, it is aquifer depletion that poses the more serious threat. There are substitutes for oil, but none for water and the link between our fossil fuel addiction, climate change and food security is now clear. While pop...
Originally published in 1995, but with enduring relevance in a time of global population growth and food insecurity, when it was first published, this book attracted much global attention, and criticism from Beijing. It argued that even as water becomes scarcer in a land where 80% of the grain crop is irrigated, as per-acre yield gains are erased by the loss of agricultural land to industrialization, and as food production stagnates, China still increases its population by the equivalent of a new Beijing each year. This book predicts that in an integrated world economy, China’s rising food prices will become the world’s rising food prices. China’s land scarcity will come everyone’s l...
A lily pond, so the French riddle goes, contains a single leaf. Each day the number of leaves doubles--two leaves the second day, four the third, eight the fourth, and so on. Question: If the pond is completely full on the thirtieth day, when is it half full? Answer: On the Twenty-ninth day.
Originally published in 1995, after decades of steady growth, this book was written at a time when the world’s food supply was no longer keeping up with population increases. This book examines the causes of the imbalance in the food/population equation and suggests ways in which Malthusian checks can be countered. It calls for an international strategy to restore global security, and a budget to implement it, with a massive redirection of the world’s financial resources. On one side of the argument the authors advocate increased expenditure on family planning services, education, and women’s rights. On the other, they stress the environmental importance of reforestation and soil conservation schemes to halt the deterioration of the agricultural resource base.
In this study, the award-winning environmental analyst Lester Brown and his colleagues have charted progress in building the eco-economy - an economy in harmony with the Earth's ecosystems, not undermining them. This edition of the biennial reader highlights 12 key trends, from population growing by 80 million annually, to ice melting, to the boom in use of solar cells. It explains, for example, why wind-generated electricity is emerging as the foundation of the new post-fossil fuel energy economy. It also specifically investigates China's desertification problem, the issues surrounding food production, and the challenge of controlling climate change. Drawing on research and analysis by the Earth Policy Institute, the reader monitors the shift from the old economy to the new.