PLAN B - Rescuing a Planet under Stress and a Civilization in Trouble

This is the third in Lester Brown's current series of books urging the creation of an eco-economy where human economic activity is situated within a larger ecological context. For many years Brown was President of the Worldwatch Institute, whose publications are regularly reviewed here, and has more recently established the Earth Policy Institute, which produces regular and informative briefings on current ecological issues (to sign up, log onto www.earthpolicy.org). The contents of this new book draw on Brown's earlier analyses but the main focus is his idea of Plan B, where Plan A is simply a continuation of the inherently unsustainable business as usual. His initial thesis is that we have built an artificial bubble economy, 'one where economic output is artificially inflated by overconsumption of the earth's natural assets'. Or, in other words, we are no longer living on the earth's sustainable yield but are consuming the endowment as well. No investor would take an optimistic long-term view of such a trend. Food production is a specific sector where Brown's thesis is demonstrably true: the world grain harvest has been inflated by overpumping aquifers, which is already resulting in a depletion that guarantees a future drop in production when one considers that it takes 1,000 tons of water to yield one ton of wheat. China provides a specific example where its grain harvest has declined from 390 million to 340 million tons in the last five years (wheat went down from 123 million tons in 1997 to 83 million in 2000). This means that China is set to become a large net importer of grain, which will have a considerable impact on world prices and therefore on availability for less well-off countries, as Brown first pointed out in his 1995 book Who Will Feed China? Part 1 of the book runs updates readers on the familiar themes of emerging water shortages, eroding soils and shrinking cropland, rising temperatures and rising seas, and the implications of our deeply divided social world. Two specific issues worth noting are the competition between transport and food production - the extra 12 million cars consumes in new roads and parking facilities around 1 million hectares of land - enough to feed 9 million people if it were all cropland. The upshot is that densely populated countries cannot afford transport systems centred on cars. Again, China and India are cases in point. The second issue is the inverse relationship between a 1-degree Celsius rise in temperature and corn/soybean yield in the US, which has resulted in a 17% drop over a 17 year period. Brown argues that this may explain why there has been no per hectare yield increase for corn since 1994. One can see that there is a pincer movement in rising temperatures and falling water tables. And, given that there seems very little more yield increase from new varieties (this took place between the 1950s and the 1980s), one cannot help forecasting a situation which will not decrease the current number of 840 million hungry people. Part 2 sets out Brown's Plan B, showing that there are a number of countries adopting policies to raise water and land productivity, cutting carbon emissions and responding to the global social challenge. For instance, drip irrigation and composting toilets are becoming more widespread. No till policies are reducing soil erosion, while hybrid cars are emerging on the market. However, the trend to eat further up the food chain as the economy develops needs to be reversed, not only so that there is more grain to go around, but also that high consumption of animal protein is correlated with rising obesity figures that pose a threat to health in developed countries. The real crunch, however, is whether the United States will provide leadership in implementing the necessary tax shifts and market reforms suggested by Brown, who illustrates that it is possible if the US put itself on a war footing - frankly a vanishingly improbable scenario under the current administration. A central omission from Brown's analysis is the mantra of economic growth, which is used to combat the ideas he is putting forward. However, the kind of policies he advocates will need to be implemented sooner or later and there are signs that politicians are waking up - and this book is essential reading in translating understanding into policy.