Down to Earth

About this programme by Peter Day

He doesn't quite go back to St Francis, but Lester Brown has been in the environmental movement almost as long as it has existed. He started off as a boy farmer in New Jersey in the 1950s, later joining the US Department of Agriculture where he travelled widely and started worrying about the state of the earth. He's been doing that actively, vocally and influentially ever since.

Lester Brown founded the Worldwatch Institute in Washington DC in 1974. It became internationally known for its gloomy annual reports on the State of the World, charting global erosion, pollution and degradation.

In 2001 he stepped up the pace by starting a new organisation called The Earth Policy Institute around the idea that the world needs a specific survival plan. He's now produced four successive editions of "Plan B", naming them in computer software iteration terms 1.0, 2.0, etc.

"Plan B 4.0: Mobilising to Save Civilisation" has just been published, and it is also downloadable at no charge from the Internet. Like so much of what he has written, Plan B is full of grim forebodings shaped around likely global food shortages in the coming decades.

Lester Brown looks back into the deep historic past to detect awful warnings about civilisations (notably the Sumerians) that could create irrigation and agricultural structures supporting the abundant crops which supported early intense city life, but were not equipped to deal with the consequences of what happened next: the irrigation sucked the salt up into the fields around the Euphrates River, and the first great city civilisation could not support itself. (The word civilisation of course comes from the word city.)

Appetites

Maybe like us the Sumerians had it all in the 3rd century BC, and they lost it because their wondrous technology got them only so far.

That has been Lester Brown's awful warning when people say that the world is now in a position to engineer itself out of the dilemma of perils such as global warming; that is why the last time I heard from him for Global Business he was still highlighting the strains that the new developing countries would put on existing global resources: If China develops its consumer appetites to the same extent as the USA has done, then the majority of the world production of stuff such as oil and food would be needed to satisfy simply one country, let alone the rest of us.

This time (talking about the publication of Plan B 4.0) he has an even more urgent tone: fears about melting icecaps and mountain glaciers flooding the great plains where much of the world's food is produced and disrupting the water supplies that feed them. Too much water and too little water, an unholy combination.

Nevertheless, Lester Brown sees signs of opportunity. He's particularly taken by the way wind power is being developed in the USA at what he says is a cracking pace. I am certainly bombarded with weekly news of investments in alternative energy plans; I am never sure how many of them will actually be carried out, or how much they are interesting ideas with limited practical application.

Demanding

For example some people are getting excited about using the world's hot places to capture energy from the sun and transfer it to urban and industrial places much further north: the Sahara might be able to provide power for much of Europe, for example.

Certainly huge amounts of solar energy beat down on the desert. But will it ever be feasible to transmit it huge distances to urban users? Not clear.

Lester Brown has a demanding target to be met by new forms of energy production and energy saving: carbon dioxide emissions reduced by 80 percent by 2020, and more after that. These are far bigger reductions than those talked about by politicians, though who knows what might emerge in the Copenhagen Summit conference in December?

Difficult but not impossible he says, which is better than the Sumerian experience.

It has to be pointed out that there are bitter opponents of the sustainability idea who think that Lester Brown is just a perennial doomster whose owes his fame to his propensity for making the flesh creep with his awful warnings.

The complex arguments around global warming are difficult for non scientists to assess. But surely there is not much wrong and a great deal right in learning to live within our sustainability footprint, if only from the good housekeeping point of view?

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