Lester Brown came from a New Jersey farm family, created a tomato business as a teenager, and was himself a farmer for a few years before beginning a long career as an environmental analyst. Today he heads the Earth Policy Institute, a think tank in Washington, DC. His work spans several fields that are increasingly recognized as one giant interconnected system: call it the food-water-energy nexus.
For some 50 years, Brown has been warning about the depletion of natural resources and its impacts on agriculture and climate. He was one of the first people to look at how population increases would affect global food demand, and he attracted international attention in 1994 when he challenged the official view of China’s food prospects.
Brown began his government career as an analyst in the Asia branch of the USDA’s Foreign Agricultural Service. In 1964, he became a foreign agricultural policy adviser to Secretary of Agriculture Orville Freeman, and in 1966 he was appointed administrator of the International Agricultural Development Service. He resigned when President Nixon was elected and spent six years at the newly formed Overseas Development Council.
Brown launched the Worldwatch Institute in 1974 to do interdisciplinary research on environmental issues including food, energy, population, and water. The institute produced a number of reports that were widely cited and attracted worldwide press attention. In 2001, Brown founded the Earth Policy Institute, which focuses on developing plans for an environmentally sustainable economy.
Brown has master’s degrees in agricultural economics from the University of Maryland and in public administration from Harvard University. He has written or co-authored more than 50 books, including Full Planet, Empty Plates: The New Geopolitics of Food Scarcity (W. W. Norton, 2012) and his just-published autobiography Breaking New Ground: A Personal History (W. W. Norton, 2013). Brown’s series of Plan B books describes how to “save civilization” through improvements in energy efficiency, a shift to renewable energy technologies, redesigned cities, environmental restoration projects, and a massive mobilization of economic resources. He spoke with the Bulletin about his planet-saving plan, his new memoir, and climate change.
BAS: What concerns you most about climate change?
Brown: Agriculture as it exists today is designed to maximize production within the climate system we’ve had during the 11,000 years since agriculture began. So those two systems fit together really well, but now that fit is beginning to break down. If we knew more and could forecast better, we could anticipate changes and adapt to them, but we’re just not anywhere near good enough at projecting the future of climate change to begin restructuring the world agricultural system based on what we think might happen.
BAS: Extreme weather has made people more aware of climate change, but crises come and go. Do you see them changing our ways?
Brown: They do come and go, but they’re coming and going more frequently now and they’re also more destructive. Hurricane Sandy was an example of a shift in weather patterns that we had never seen before. It’s that kind of thing—unprecedented behavior in the climate system—that makes things much more risky for a farmer today than 60 years ago when I was farming. Back then, we worried about variations in weather from year to year, but we didn’t have to think about climate change and some of the massive shifts that can come with it. Farmers today are facing more uncertainty in this area than any generation of farmers in history.
BAS: A few years ago, in Scientific American, you wrote that “the biggest threat to global stability is the potential for food crises in poor countries,” and that it could “bring down civilization.” Do you still see food insecurity as the world’s biggest threat?
Brown: I think it is the weak link in the system. A lot of people know that we’re over-consuming resources. We’re over-plowing; we’re over-cutting forests; we’re over-grazing grasslands; we’re over-pumping aquifers. Most people realize that the world economy can’t keep growing forever on a finite planet. When you look back at earlier civilizations—the Sumerians, the Mayans, civilizations whose archaeological sites we now study—it appears that food was the weak link for them, too. The Sumerians built dams to back up water, and used irrigation canals to move it. Some of the water that was diverted from the river evaporated. Some was used by crops. And some trickled down, raising the water table over time. When the water table got close to the surface, water began evaporating through the soil into the atmosphere, leaving behind salt and minerals. When salt concentrations reach a high enough level, you get declining yields and shrinking harvests and, if someone doesn’t intervene, eventually the collapse of civilization itself.
BAS: What parts of the world are most at risk?
Brown: If we look at the big three grain producers—China, India, and the United States, which together account for about half of the world harvest—four-fifths of China’s grain comes from irrigated land, close to three-fifths of India’s grain comes from irrigated land, and in the United States it’s about one-fifth. So the United States is not as vulnerable as China and India. Most of our grain is produced in the very productive Midwest, where the rainfall is adequate.
BAS: What about genetically modified crops, such as strains that require less water? What is your assessment of the risks involved?
Brown: Genetic modification is good for some things—such as developing cotton varieties that are naturally resistant to the boll weevil, and soybeans that are tolerant of herbicides. But we have not been able to use genetic modification to raise yields, because plant breeders had already done virtually everything they could think of to raise yields before genetic modification came along. So it’s not as though there is a long list of things that we can do to raise grain yields. In fact, in the more agriculturally advanced countries, yields have plateaued after rising for decades. The yield of rice in Japan has been flat for 15 years, and the yield of wheat in France and Germany and the United Kingdom has been flat for more than a decade. Farmers have succeeded in removing nutrient and moisture constraints on yields, so the only constraint left is the efficiency of photosynthesis itself. Once you hit that glass ceiling, there’s no place to go. You can breed for drought tolerance—either with traditional breeding practices or with genetic modification—and you might be able to get a higher yield, but not much more than 15 percent. So it’s not like when scientists first figured out how to dwarf wheats and rices, and the yields doubled or tripled. Those sorts of increases are all history now.
BAS: You worked for the US Department of Agriculture in India during the monsoon failure of 1965. The United States responded by increasing wheat shipments, but insisted that India take steps to restructure its agricultural system. If the monsoon were to fail again, as some climate models predict, are countries in that region ready?
Brown: The big one is India, of course, because it is so dependent on the monsoon and has such a huge population. There might be better information available today, on both the weather conditions and how they’re affecting crop conditions, but it would be difficult to find enough additional grain to handle a monsoon failure. India has actually been exporting some grain in recent years, but it’s difficult to know how much the good harvests are due to over-pumping. There are now 27 million irrigation wells in India and no controls on drilling, so farmers have been making investments in irrigated agriculture. That is good for expanding the harvest, but the water table is falling and the aquifer is being depleted. Over-pumping creates a false sense of security, because you have unusually good crops but it’s a short-term phenomenon.
BAS: You wrote an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal 40 years ago about the need for a world food reserve. What are your thoughts on that proposal now?
Brown: It’s probably more appropriate now than it was then. We didn’t have climate change to deal with then, and aquifer depletion was hardly anything we’d heard of, because at that time most of our irrigation water was surface water.
BAS: If we were to have a food reserve now, what would it look like and who would be in charge of it?
Brown: It should be an international reserve managed by a body of the principal exporters and importers, because carrying reserves costs money. You have to have storage capacity. Once you have the grain in the bin, you can’t leave it in there indefinitely; you have to take it out after a year or two and replace it with new grain. I don’t think we’re any closer to having an international food security reserve today than we were 50 years ago.
BAS: Looking back on your famous prediction that China will have to become a massive importer of grain to feed its people, would you make the same prediction today?
Brown: It’s not so much a prediction now, because China is importing 10 to 15 million tons of grain a year—which is not a lot by their trade standards, but by international trade standards it’s quite a bit and they’re just getting started. Also, China today is far and away the world’s largest soybean importer, but not because the Chinese eat a lot of soybeans. The beans are crushed, the oil is extracted, and the meal that remains is a high-protein feedstock that enables pigs and chickens and other animals to convert grain into animal protein more efficiently than they otherwise would be able to do.
BAS: At this point, is climate change primarily a science and technology problem—to be solved with renewable energy technologies, for example—or is it mainly a cultural problem?
Brown: It’s both. We’ve grown up in an age of almost-free energy. We’re now beginning to raise the price on energy in various ways. The cost of oil, for example, is increasing as we’re forced more and more to tar sands or to offshore oil. High-speed rail has gotten a huge boost in Europe and Asia, so we’re seeing a restructuring of transport systems with more emphasis on rail and bicycles. Cars are getting smaller. Local governments are beginning to tax cars indirectly through much higher parking fees. I don’t have a car, but I hear people complaining as I walk down the street.
BAS: You make a strong case that the technologies are available and the costs are manageable. On the other hand, there’s a politically and economically powerful fossil fuel constituency that is unlikely to go quietly into the night. What are the political changes needed to make this kind of transition possible?
Brown: It reminds me of the situation 20 or so years ago with tobacco. The medical community knew that there was a strong link between smoking and lung cancer, but as recently as the mid-1990s the CEOs of tobacco companies swore under oath that there was no conclusive evidence of this. It’s not an easy thing to prove. But suddenly, almost overnight, that whole situation changed. Everyone realized that there was a link between smoking and cancer, and we began to work on discouraging the use of cigarettes. You don’t find many people smoking anymore, certainly not in public places. I have a feeling we’re approaching a similar social tipping point on climate change.
BAS: Some have likened the scope of such a transition to a “wartime mobilization.” Do you think that’s an apt analogy?
Brown: It is, in the sense that we’re faced with a major threat, and a meaningful response to that threat is going to require a restructuring of the world energy economy. Whether that’s building mega-wind farms in China, or doubling the fuel efficiency of new cars sold in the United States, or restructuring the transport system and relying more on rail and bicycles and less on cars, or what have you, I think that’s clearly the way to go and that’s what we’re beginning to see now.
BAS: In the face of such a daunting transformation, there might be a strong compulsion to go for the quick fix, even if that quick fix is geoengineering, with all its unknowns and risks. What are your thoughts on that route?
Brown: When we start redesigning the natural system in a conscious way, we’re in trouble. You can’t change part of the Earth’s life support system without affecting the whole thing in one way or another, and in ways that we sometimes can’t anticipate and certainly can’t accurately predict.
BAS: You have now published several updates of your Plan B for saving the planet, and one of your conclusions is that the world must reduce carbon emissions 80 percent by 2020. Leaving aside the merits of those numbers, how do you get the world to adopt your plan? Are you convinced that writing books and giving keynote addresses and meeting with influential people will do the trick?
Brown: It has an effect. For example, the Netherlands is in effect adopting Plan B as the guide for restructuring their economy over time. Other countries are adopting parts of Plan B.
BAS: Is the goal still to reduce 80 percent by 2020?
Brown: No question. Political leaders don’t like to use that number because it’s so ambitious, but it is commensurate with the risks that we’re facing. Just cutting carbon emissions 80 percent by 2050… the game’s going to be over long before that. So we’ve got to think about what we do in the next few years. There are some exciting things happening. An example would be the bike-sharing programs that are showing up in cities all over the world. The model right now is Washington, DC, where we have more than 200 bike stands where people can rent bikes around the city.
BAS: Is there a Plan C?
Brown: I have a feeling it’s Plan B or something very similar to it, or we’re not going to make it.
BAS: Climate policy experts seem to be in near-unanimous agreement that the key to reducing emissions is a tax or fee that makes fossil fuels pay for their indirect costs to society. Do you agree?
Brown: Yes, that’s probably the most effective tool we have for restructuring the world energy economy. Basically it would be a carbon tax, and we probably would start it at a lower level and keep increasing it over a 10-year period, so that there would be time to adjust to the much higher cost of carbon-based fuels. That would encourage conservation and investments in efficiency while also encouraging investments in alternative sources of energy.
BAS: There’s a steady drumbeat for a carbon tax, from many conservatives as well as liberals. When and how do you foresee such a tax actually happening?
Brown: It almost certainly won’t happen at the global level. I think it’s going to happen when individual countries take initiatives, and in some cases they’ll be major players like the United States or China. Obama gets criticized for not doing enough, but one of the most important things that he’s done is to nearly double the fuel efficiency standard for new cars by 2025. The other big thing is not coming from government but primarily from the Sierra Club, which is leading the Beyond Coal movement. Their goal is to retire one-third of the coal-fired power plants in the United States by 2020. If someone asks me, “What can I do?” I tell them to find the nearest coal plant and begin to organize and generate pressure to close it.
BAS: You have been urging Japan to meet its energy needs with geothermal power instead of nuclear. Why geothermal?
Brown: Because there’s a lot of tectonic plate activity along the coast of the western Pacific and that includes Japan and eastern China and all the way down into the Philippines and Indonesia. In those areas there tends to be a lot of heat near the surface. Japan, for example, has thousands of natural hot baths and could easily run its economy on geothermal energy if it wanted to make the investment required. China is investing heavily in wind.
BAS: In your 1977 essay “Redefining National Security,” you made an argument that security should encompass environmental threats. More than three decades later, we have seen a continued and substantial growth of military budgets, and the armed forces of the world gaining an even larger share of scarce resources. More and more issues are cordoned off from public debate because of “national security” reasons. If you were to revisit the question of the environment as a national security issue, would you change your formulation at all?
Brown: No. It continues to be an unfortunate situation where we’re investing a lot of resources into weapons systems that we’ll probably never use; at least we hope we never will. Who’s going to attack the United States today? No one has the military power to do that, and we don’t need to be spending so much for military purposes because it’s not a major threat to security. Climate change is a major threat to security. Water shortages are a threat. We need to be identifying the real threats to our security, not the ones created by the military-industrial complex.
BAS: On the day after your second child was born, you announced to a conference that she would be your last child, because of your concerns about overpopulation. That was almost 50 years ago, and yet most Americans still don’t seem very concerned about population growth. Why not?
Brown: We’re a country with a frontier mentality. The people who came to this country were independent types rebelling against controls, political or religious or whatever, in Europe and elsewhere. Not many Americans today think of having more than two or three children, so population control has become integrated into the culture. In fact, in a matter of decades the country’s population will be shrinking. A large part of the world now has fertility below the replacement level. In Latin America, particularly Brazil, fertility has dropped precipitously in recent years, faster than demographers ever thought it would. The problem areas remain: the Indian subcontinent and sub-Saharan Africa. Adding two billion people is going to be a huge challenge, but it’s not so totally out of control now as it was a few decades back.
BAS: News media were a key part of the Worldwatch Institute’s success, reporting frequently on the papers and books that you produced. Did all of this press attention translate into meaningful policy changes? How do you prevent dire messages from falling quickly off the radar screen once the initial flurry of media coverage is over?
Brown: The difficulty in trying to assess the contribution or influence of a given research institute is that there are a lot of things happening in the world, of which you’re a piece, sometimes a very small piece. Some people have said that what we did at the Worldwatch Institute was to make the environmental issue an issue; we gave it a visibility it may not have had before. There were political research institutes and economic research institutes, but no environmental research institutes. We filled a huge gap in public understanding of what security was all about and what the threats were, and how dependent the world economy is on the natural systems and resources that underpin it. No civilization has survived the ongoing destruction of its natural support systems, nor will ours.
BAS: You have been accused of taking a “doomsday approach” to the world’s problems. Is that a fair criticism?
Brown: I don’t know, but I hope they’re right!
BAS: What are you most optimistic about?
Brown: Population would be one. The advances we’re beginning to make in restructuring the world energy economy would be another. And most people have made lifestyle changes. Recycling is something that we, in many cities in this country, do pretty well now, and the European countries and Japan have been doing very well for some time. I think San Francisco is the first American city that will be reusing, recycling, or composting everything. There are still some areas where we’re lagging badly. I think there’s a real gap in our understanding of how water shortages are going to affect our future in a very substantial way.
BAS: You wrote that you judge yourself not by how many books you have written or talks you have given, but by “whether we are reversing the trends that are undermining our future.” So, how are you measuring up these days?
Brown: We’ve got a ways to go. The encouraging thing is that the unsustainability of many of these trends is now widely recognized. It has not reached the point where it’s strong enough to push Congress to move on these things in a way that many of us would feel comfortable with, but we are recognizing it. Climate change is now widely discussed and, since Hurricane Sandy, the climate deniers have not been as outspoken and vociferous as they used to be. It’s becoming clear to most people that we’re facing some real challenges on the climate front. If you were to look at the percentage of news time given to weather now, compared with 20 years ago, I think you would see a huge increase. That is part of the process of cultural change, of education, of providing people with information that will underpin changes in their attitudes and their values and will help them to better understand what’s actually happening.
