 Lester R. Brown |
Last month at SUNY New Paltz, Brown described what's possibly to come, and outlined how we can avoid disaster.
In his latest book, Plan B: Rescuing a Planet under Stress and a Civilization in Trouble (W.W. Norton, 2003), Brown warns that we are living in a bubble economy, the output of which is artificially inflated by its over-consumption of the earth's natural resources. "As world population has doubled and as the global economy has expanded sevenfold over the last half-century, our claims on the earth have become excessive," Brown writes. "We are asking more of the earth than it can give on an ongoing basis." This is most obvious, says Brown, in the food sector, where the world grain harvest has been inflated by the overuse of aquifers, a practice that promises a future loss of food production once aquifers are depleted - which is already occurring worldwide, most notably in China.
Brown predicts that China will begin competing with US consumers for US grain as its own grain stores are depleted over the next two years. With 1.3 billion consumers and a trade surplus of more than $80 billion with the US, China has the power to drive up food prices around the world and essentially shortchange Americans of their own grain supply. To avoid the bursting of the bubble economy and the resultant widespread environmental devastation and water and food shortages, we must change the political-economic system and our lifestyle "at wartime speed," says Brown, who founded the nonprofit interdisciplinary research organization Earth Policy Institute. His previous book, Eco-Economy: Building an Economy for the Earth (W.W. Norton & Company, 2001) is already a classic. "Business as usual," or "Plan A," won't help us anymore. It's time for a contingency plan - "Plan B" - in order to sustain economic progress worldwide and save the earth from ecological destruction. "Throughout history, humans have lived on the earth's sustainable yield," Brown writes, "but now we are consuming the endowment itself. In ecology, as in economics, we can consume principal with interest in the short term, but in the long run it leads to bankruptcy."The problems, Brown explained, stem from rising populations as well as rising CO2 emissions. United Nations projections show world population growth reaching 8.9 billion by 2050, with a high projection of 10.6 billion. The low projection, assuming that the world will move below replacement-level fertility to 1.7 children per couple, shows population peaking at 7.5 billion in 2039 and then declining. "We have little choice but to strive for the lower projection," Brown said, which means pushing for worldwide family planning resources and limiting the number of children we have.
Worldwide temperature projections show that, thanks to rising CO2 emissions, the earth's average temperature during this century will rise by somewhere between 1.4 to 5.8 degrees Celsius, Brown said. "That's between 2 and 10 degrees Fahrenheit. Now I talk about the trends of falling water and rising temperatures and how they will affect the world grain harvest, but the question is: What will bring this trend into sharp focus? It's likely to be when China moves into the world grain market and needs massive quantities of grain. China is losing a lot of cropland to non-farm uses as it industrializes. It's a typical pattern we've seen in Japan, Korea and Taiwan. [They] all import 70 percent or more of their total grain supply."
In addition to rising temperatures, said Brown, recent research studies focusing on "the precise relationship between temperature and crop yields" show that with each 1 degree Celsius rising temperature during the growing season, there is a 10 percent decline in grain units: wheat, rice, and corn. "I would remind you that the average temperatures have increased seven to 10 degrees Celsius since 1970," Brown said. "In the last few years we've seen intense heat waves reducing harvests. In 2002, drought reduced the grain harvests in India, the US, and Canada. We had a shortfall in world grain production of 90 million tons. In 2003, we had heat waves in Europe; 35,000 people died in eight countries, and grain harvests from France to the Ukraine dropped by 30 million tons in a matter of weeks; 30 million tons is equal to about half the US grain crop, so it's not inconsequential."
What if "business as usual" continues? We each drink four liters of water a day, including that contained in other liquids, but it takes 500 times that amount - 2,000 liters - of water to produce the food one person eats each day, explained Brown. Given the strain placed on water supplies by CO2 emissions and rapidly growing populations, he said, China, India, and the US "are close to the tipping point" and need to "develop the capacity to step up decision-making to match the accelerated pace of change."
"We've got to change the system, get the market to tell the ecological truth." |
Without systemic changes taking effect, "Probably one of the things that will be a dominant theme in international affairs will be growing food securely," Brown said, "as the result of spreading water shortages, rising temperatures, and expanding deserts, all undermining food production. This growing food insecurity may lead to price rises that will be destabilize governments of low-income countries that depend on imports for a large share of their supply. That political instability could disrupt our economic security. So while a wave of price increases might not be that [immediately] threatening to you and me, what would threaten us is economic disruption and decline."
But besides working to limit population growth, what can the average person do to stop the seemingly steady slide toward disaster? For one, if we each replaced all of our light bulbs with compact fluorescent bulbs, Brown said, "we could close hundreds of coal-firing plants worldwide." If we began driving gas-electric hybrid cars, he added, "We could cut gasoline usage in half." However, since "saving the planet is not a spectator sport," Brown cautioned, such lifestyle changes are not enough. "We need to be politically active at all levels. Lifestyle changes are useful and important but they're not going to save the day. We've got to change the system, get the market to tell the ecological truth. That's the key. We have to get more politically active at every level and support the candidates who understand these issues and want to do something about it."
Despite the rather dire statistics with which he works every day, Brown calls himself "inherently optimistic - anyone who's been working on environmental issues for 35 years has to be." Systemic change, he believes, can happen suddenly after years of working for it without results. For example, although oil companies "have as much influence in Washington, DC now as they've ever had and they are really writing energy policy" for the Bush administration, Brown said "it's going to take some hard work and some lobbying and public education, but it's possible" to change US energy policy.
"Let's drop back 10 years," Brown said. "If I'd been speaking here and said, 'I think the tobacco industry is going to pay,' that they're going to agree to compensate state governments for past Medicare-related costs of treating smoking-related illnesses to the tune of $251 billion - that's almost $1,000 for every person in this country, an extraordinary sum - you would have asked why I'd been invited to speak, because that would have been so far beyond anything we could have imagined. Yet, in 1997, everything changed. The same thing could happen for energy. "
All the same, Brown said, "we can win an awful lot of battles, but still lose the war." When asked to run for president on the Green Party ticket in 2000, Brown declined ."I was afraid of upsetting the election results. But Ralph [Nader] wasn't," he said pointedly. Instead, Brown has "invested a significant amount" of his retirement funds in Senator John Kerry's election campaign. "That's how strongly I feel about it," he said. "I think of something Thoreau said once. He said, 'What good is having a nice house if you don't have a decent planet to put it on?' Well, what good is retirement if you don't have a decent place to retire to?"