Lester R. Brown Quotes & Sayings

If an economy is to sustain progress, it must satisfy the basic principles of ecology. If it does not, it will decline and eventually collapse. There is no middle ground — Lester R. Brown

Saving civilization is not a spectator sport. — Lester R. Brown

The biggest threat to global stability is the potential for food crises in poor countries to cause government collapse. — Lester R. Brown

Each summer, for example, nitrogen and phosphate washing from farmlands in the Mississippi Valley enter the Gulf of Mexico, creating a massive algal bloom covering some 16,000 square kilometers. As the blooms die off, this area-roughly the size of New Jersey-is so deprived of oxygen that no fish survive. — Lester R. Brown

The choice is ours-yours and mine. We can stay with business as usual and preside over a global bubble economy that keeps expanding until it bursts, leading to economic decline. Or we can adopt Plan B and be the generation that stabilizes population, eradicates poverty, and stabilizes climate. Historians will record the choice, but it is ours to make. — Lester R. Brown

We can build an economy that does not destroy its natural support systems, a global community where the basic needs of all the Earth's people are satisfied, and a world that will allow us to think of ourselves as civilized. This is entirely doable. — Lester R. Brown

In this era of tightening world food supplies, the ability to grow food is fast becoming a new form of geopolitical leverage. Food is the new oil. Land is the new gold. — Lester R. Brown

Humanity's greatest challenge may soon be just making it to the next harvest. — Lester R. Brown

Among the environmental trends undermining our future are shrinking forests, expanding deserts, falling water tables, collapsing fisheries, disappearing species, and rising temperatures. The temperature increases bring crop-withering heat waves, more-destructive storms, more-intense droughts, more forest fires, and, of course, ice melting. We are crossing natural thresholds that we cannot see and violating deadlines that we do not recognize. — Lester R. Brown

Our early 21st century civilization is in trouble. We need not go beyond the world food economy to see this. Over the last few decades we have created a food production bubble-one based on environmental trends that cannot be sustained, including overpumping aquifers, overplowing land, and overloading the atmosphere with carbon dioxide. — Lester R. Brown

It takes 1,000 tons of water to produce 1 ton of grain. As water becomes scarce and countries are forced to divert irrigation water to cities and industry, they will import more grain. As they do so, water scarcity will be transmitted across national borders via the grain trade. Aquifer depletion is a largely invisible threat, but that does not make it any less real. — Lester R. Brown

In Mexico City, Tehran, Kolkata, Bangkok, Shanghai, and hundreds of other cities, the air is no longer safe to breathe. In some cities, the air is so polluted that breathing is equivalent to smoking two packs of cigarettes per day. — Lester R. Brown

No civilization has survived the ongoing destruction of its natural support systems. Nor will ours. — Lester R. Brown

Another agricultural trend of growing concern is the increased nutrient content of coastal waters resulting from fertilizer runoff in agricultural regions. Augmented by urban sewage discharge in some situations, this results in huge algal blooms, which, as they die and decay, deplete the oxygen content in the water, leading to the death of the fish. — Lester R. Brown

The throwaway economy that has been evolving over the last half-century is an aberration, now itself headed for the junk heap of history. — Lester R. Brown

One way or another, the choice will be made by our generation, but it will affect life on earth for all generations to come — Lester R. Brown

In the Middle East, where populations are growing fast, the world is seeing the first collision between population growth and water supply at the regional level. For the first time in history, grain production is dropping in a geographic region with nothing in sight to arrest the decline. Each day now brings 10,000 more people to feed and less irrigation water with which to feed them. — Lester R. Brown

Our numbers expand, but Earth's natural systems do not. — Lester R. Brown

The 20th century was the time when the world turned to use of fossil fuels and the 21st century will be the century of the renewables. — Lester R. Brown

Children whose developing lungs are particularly vulnerable suffer the most from air pollution. For children, breathing the air in cities with the worst pollution, such as Beijing, Calcutta, Mexico City, Shanghai, and Tehran, is equivalent to smoking two packs of cigarettes a day. — Lester R. Brown

Saving Greenland is both a metaphor and a precondition for saving civilization. If its ice sheet melts, sea levels will rise 23 feet. Hundreds of coastal cities will be abandoned. The rice growing river deltas of Asia will be under water. There will be hundreds of millions of rising-sea refuges. The word that comes to mind is chaos. If we cannot mobilize to save the Greenland ice sheet; we probably cannot save civilization as we know it. — Lester R. Brown

The problem with water, though, is that the shortfalls don't show up until the very end. You can go on pumping unsustainably until the day you run out. Then all you have is the recharge flow, which comes from precipitation. This is not decades away, this is years away. We're already seeing huge shortages in China, where the Yellow River runs dry for part of each year. The Yellow River is the cradle of Chinese civilization. It first failed to reach the sea in 1972, and since 1985 it's run dry for part of each year. For 1997 it was dry for 226 days. — Lester R. Brown

Socialism failed because it couldn't tell the economic truth. Capitalism may fail because it couldn't tell the ecological truth. — Lester R. Brown

Yet, most of the readily accessible reserves of oil formed over hundreds of millions of years will be consumed within a single generation, spanning the years from 1960 to 1995. — Lester R. Brown

The foundation is being laid for the emergence of both wind and solar cells as cornerstones of the new energy economy. — Lester R. Brown

Nuclear power, once regarded as petroleum's natural heir, has become less and less attractive as its numerous drawbacks come to light. Coal, the other fossil fuel, is ultimately as exhaustible as oil. — Lester R. Brown

Nations are in effect ceding portions of their sovereignty to the international community and beginning to create a new system of international environmental governance. — Lester R. Brown

In today's integrated world economy, ... eradicating poverty may contribute as much to U.S. security as eradicating terrorism. — Lester R. Brown

Today, more than ever, we need political leaders who can see the big picture, who understand the relationship between the economy and its environmental support systems. — Lester R. Brown

Population growth is exceeding farmers' ability to keep up ... Our oldest enemy, hunger, is again at the door. — Lester R. Brown

They have also been adopting fuel efficiency standards for automobiles in China. — Lester R. Brown

We are witnessing the beginning of one of the great tragedies of history. The United States, in a misguided effort to reduce its oil insecurity by converting grain into fuel for cars, is generating global food insecurity on a scale never seen before. — Lester R. Brown

The transition from coal, oil, and gas to wind, solar, and geothermal energy is well under way. In the old economy, energy was produced by burning something
oil, coal, or natural gas
leading to the carbon emissions that have come to define our economy. The new energy economy harnesses the energy in wind, the energy coming from the sun, and heat from within the earth itself. — Lester R. Brown

Rising oil prices have focused the world's attention on the depletion of oil reserves. But the depletion of underground water resources from overpumping is a far more serious issue. Excessive pumping for irrigation to satisfy food needs today almost guarantees a decline in food production tomorrow. — Lester R. Brown

A sustainable economy represents nothing less than a higher social order one as concerned with future generations as with our own, and more focused on the health of the planet and the poor than on material acquisitions and military might. While it is a fundamentally new endeavor, with many uncertainties, it is far less risky than continuing with business as usual. — Lester R. Brown

Farmers ... can no longer keep up with rising demand; thus the outlook is for chronic scarcities and rising prices. — Lester R. Brown

We know what we have to do. And we know how to do it. If we fail to convert our self-destructing economy into one that is environmentally sustainable, future generations will be overwhelmed by environmental degradation and social disintegration. Simply stated, if our generation does not turn things around, our children may not have the option of doing so. — Lester R. Brown

Global food insecurity is increasing ... the slim excess of growth in food production over population is narrowing. — Lester R. Brown