Environmentalist Lester Brown says we need to come back down to earth
Lester Brown has been accused of being a catastrophist. But last week, on a visit to Beijing, the 76-year-old environmental campaigner said that he didn’t think it was too late to save the world. Almost, but not quite. His vision for what we can do to dig us out of the admittedly very deep hole we have dug for ourselves involves a large dose of wind power, low energy light bulbs and a big pinch of optimism. Because if we don’t, he says, “we are facing the end of civilization, nothing less.” It’s all outlined in the latest incarnation of his book, Plan B 4.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization.
Brown planned to revise his Plan B every two years, but he’s shortened the time period, as “things are changing fast in both negative and positive direction.”
The weakest link
“Business as usual has started to read like the end of the world,” wrote Brown in the preface of the book, quoting an article he read in Newsweek.
It’s all about the food supply – something that doesn’t get a lot of attention amidst all the talk of carbon reduction and deforestation. “Food has become the weakest link in our modern civilization,” says Brown. “If we continue with business as usual, such a collapse [collapses of civilization from declining food supply] is not only possible but likely.”
For more than 40 years, Brown has tracked the world’s food supplies. In the late 1960s, Brown, then a US Department of Agriculture official, sketched the impending food crisis and resource scarcity. It was viewed as an alarmist position at the time; now it doesn’t seem so far fetched. He sketches a persuasive argument on how reduced wheat yields in China could affect the price of staple food worldwide, based on data including melting glaciers, rising sea levels and decreasing ground water supplies.
“Almost all of the environmental indicators, falling water tables, melting glaciers and ice sheets, disappearing species, dying coral reefs, are all headed towards the wrong direction,” says Brown. The food crisis may have already arrived, he says:
The world’s population suffering from hunger and malnutrition increased from 825 million in the mid-1990s to over 1 billion in 2009. And the prospect is even gloomier: “We now have an integration of the food and energy economies. Rising oil prices will lead to rising food prices. Most economists have not quite realized what’s happening.
Lester Brown, 2010
Brown calls for an alternative scenario that he named Plan B. The targets of Plan B are fixed: “We have to cut carbon emissions 80 percent by 2020, instead of by 2050. Eighty percent by 2050 then the game is over. I don’t think we quite realized this,” says Brown. “Things are changing fast…it’s not decades or years, but a matter of months.”
Tipping point
In 1974, Brown quit his government job to create the Worldwatch Institute, the first NGO focusing on global environmental issues. In 1995, he published the book Who Will Feed China, and predicted China’s rising population and economy will impact global ecological systems in a negative way. It still might, he says, if environmental factors lead to decreased yields of basic food. China already has to import soybeans.
“If you speak out the truth, it’s easy to be viewed as a catastrophist,” says Brown. Comfortingly, the gray-haired activist has seen more and more support in recent years, from climate scientists as well as opinion leaders. Bill Clinton gave his endorsement to Brown’s Plan B: “We should all heed his advice.”
“In effect, we are in a race between political tipping points and natural tipping points,” says Brown. “Can we reach the political tipping point that will enable us to cut carbon emissions before we reach the point where the melting of the Himalayan glaciers becomes irreversible?”
While he recognizes that global political momentum is necessary, Brown believes that big global treaties, such as last year’s Copenhagen Summit, are doomed to fail. Rather, it is efforts on a more local scale that he believes could be mankind’s ultimate savior – if they are willing to work at it.
“The international negotiated climate agreement has become obsolete. For one thing, it takes time: Years to reach the agreements and then another few years to rectify them, but things are changing so fast in the climate front and we don’t have that time anymore…delegations usually consist of diplomats and lawyers. When was the last time that a large group of diplomats and lawyers came up with a brand new solution?”
Lester Brown, 2010
Instead, Brown found exciting developments in grassroots movements, like the Texans who mobilized against the building of new coal-fired power plants, and developments in renewable energy, in particular solar and wind power. Desertec, a business-led consortium, plans to generate solar energy using a new salt-based technology in North Africa’s deserts, which will then be fed into a Europe-wide electricity grid. He’s also excited by plans for the expansion of wind power in China.
Plan B team
Brown is convinced that we can still save civilization. The real question remains: Can it arrive soon enough? Brown hopes his Plan B can help “to tip the balance toward the forces of change and hope.”
Brown’s answer is delicious: we need a Sandwich Revolution. The Kennedy School graduate categorizes social changes into three models: The Pearl Harbor model, where a catastrophic event brought in a wholesale change; the Berlin Wall model when the change takes place quietly, and the Sandwich model where bottom up grassroots movement meets top down political aspiration. But how much influence can Brown have, if as he says, both individuals and governments need to make radical change before the decade is out? In 2001, he founded the Earth Policy Institute, with the aim of providing, in political speak, “a road map” to sustainability.
In the bottom up approach, worldwide thousands of Brown’s readers are buying Plan B and distributing to friends as well as their elected political representatives. They are called the Plan B Team, and he wants everyone to join up, from the concerned public, up to people like former CNN-owner Ted Turner, who has distributed more than 3,000 copies of Plan B among his powerful friends.
To policymakers, not only in Washington, but also Beijing, Lester Brown is a familiar name. “If I were to sit with Premier Wen Jiabao, I would encourage him to look at the world as it is today, not just imitate what the industrial countries built, the fossil fuel based, automobile centered, throw away economy.
That is not going to be viable. [The new situation] challenges them to use their imagination to see what kind of economy and society that they want to create,” says Brown. Though Beijingers only began to see Plan B 4.0 on the shelves of the Bookworm from last week, Brown has already started working on the next version, Plan B 5.0. He changed the title from Mobilizing to Save Civilization to World on the Edge: How to Avoid Environmental and Economical Collapse.
“When friends ask, how are you? More often than not I would say: ‘I am fine, it’s the world I am worrying about’, and more and more these days, I heard this reply: ‘aren’t we all?’” he says.