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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 glob...
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 global overview for educators, this book inventories current world crises, moves on to the key changes which must take place, and considers how global economy and infrastructure can be created.
"[This edition] shines an intense light on the great challenge our civilization faces: how to use our political systems to manage the difficult and complex relationships between the global economy and the Earth's ecosystems."--Back cover.
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.
The authors have chosen 22 areas in which population pressure has serious implications - from literacy and deforestation to unemployment and individual freedom.
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.
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.
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.
First Published in 2005. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.