Lester Brown, Guest Writer
Lester R. Brown is president of Earth Policy Institute, an organization dedicated to building a sustainable future. Described by the Washington Post as "one of the world's most influential thinkers," Brown started his career as a tomato farmer. Shortly after earning a degree in agricultural science, he spent six months living in rural India, where he became intimately familiar with the food/population issue. Brown later became head of the U.S. Department of Agriculture's International Agricultural Development Service. In 1974 he founded the Worldwatch Institute, leaving in 2001 to found the Earth Policy Institute. He has authored or co-authored over 50 books, the most recent of which is World on the Edge: How to Prevent Environmental and Economic Collapse, and has received 24 honorary degrees and numerous awards, including the 1987 United Nations Environment Prize, a MacArthur Foundation "genius award," and the 1994 Blue Planet Prize. He lives in Washington, D.C.
Latest Stories from Lester Brown, Guest Writer - Page 10
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The Nature of the New world
We recently entered a new century, but we are also entering a new world, one where the collisions between our demands and the earth's capacity to satisfy them are becoming daily events. It may be another crop-withering heat wave, another village
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Learning From the Past
Our twenty-first century global civilization is not the first to face the prospect of environmentally induced economic decline. The question is how we will respond. As I note in of Plan B 2.0 (free online), we have one unique asset at our command—an
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Water Tables Falling
Water is vital to life. To many of us, it is within reach of a faucet, but for many others it is not. And it is fast becoming a scarce resource. As I note in Plan B 2.0 ), more than half the world's people live in countries where water tables are
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Conserving and Rebuilding Soils
A few weeks ago, I wrote in this column about the problem of soil erosion. Today I'd like to talk about solutions. (For full details, go to Chapter 8 in Plan B 2.0: Rescuing a Planet Under Stress and a Civilization in Trouble.)
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Losing Soil
A number of years ago I released a study on soil erosion. A morning network news program asked me to come in for an interview. In the lead up to the interview that morning, the anchor would announce this forthcoming interview, saying I would be talking
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Lester Brown: Ban the Bulb
Sometimes an idea seems almost too good to be true. But this one is not. If there was a worldwide shift from incandescent light bulbs to compact fluorescents, the drop in electricity use would permit us to close 270 coal-fired (500-megawatt) power plants
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Plan B Budget, Part 1
We all need guidelines from time to time. Today’s column is the first of three in which I will outline a Plan B budget. Today’s budget examines poverty and population stabilization. For more details you can see Chapter 7 in Plan B 2.0: Rescuing a
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The Coming Decline of Oil
Oil has shaped our twenty-first century civilization, affecting every facet of the economy from the mechanization of agriculture to jet air travel. When production turns downward, it will be a seismic economic event, creating a world unlike any we have
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Subsidizing Climate Change
Each year the world's taxpayers provide an estimated $700 billion of subsidies for environmentally destructive activities, such as fossil fuel burning, overpumping aquifers, clearcutting forests, and overfishing, as I write in as I write in Chapter 12
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The Environmental Revolution
One of the most common arguments against shifting to an environmentally sustainable economy is that industry will suffer. I have found the opposite. In fact, restructuring the global economy according to the principles of ecology represents the greatest
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Corn Demand from Ethanol Distilleries Vastly Understated
Investment in fuel ethanol distilleries has soared since the late-2005 oil price hikes, but data collection in this fast-changing sector has
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Santa Claus is Chinese
I know Santa Claus is Chinese because each Christmas morning after all the gifts are unwrapped and things settle down I systematically go through the presents to see where they are made. The results are almost always the same: roughly 70 percent are
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Cutting Carbon Emissions
Some time ago, I had a call from my son Brian, who had come across a huge new wind farm as he was driving on one of the interstate highways in west Texas. He described the rows of wind turbines receding toward the horizon. Interspersed among them were
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A New Materials Economy
In nature, one-way linear flows do not long survive. Nor, by extension, can they long survive in the expanding economy that is a part of the earth’s ecosystem. The challenge is to redesign the materials economy so that it is compatible with nature, as
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You and Me
With another election nearing, I am thinking beyond the negative ads into what we need to do to avoid economic decline and civilizational collapse. It depends on you and me, on what you and I do to reverse these trends. And that means becoming
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Raising Energy Productivity
Having closely followed and written about energy for a number of years, we at the Earth Policy Institute know that there is an enormous potential for raising energy productivity. This becomes clear in comparisons of energy use among countries. Some
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U.S. Population Reaches 300 million, Heading for 400 Million
Sometime this month, the U.S. population is projected to reach 300 million. In times past, reaching such a demographic milestone might have been a cause for celebration. In 2006, it is not.
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The Ecology of Cities
Urbanization is one of the dominant demographic trends of our time. In 1900, 150 million people lived in cities. By 2000, it was 2.9 billion people, a 19-fold increase. By 2007 more than half of us will live in cities—making us, for the first time, an
