Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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37 of 38 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Comprehensive and well researched, February 11, 2006
Brown addresses the grand challenges of our age: population, exhaustion of existing fuels, destruction of ecosystems, corruption of the atmosphere. He makes meticulously researched economic arguments in language accessible to all literate persons. In the first chapters, Brown cites case after case to show that we really do have a problem. In the latter chapter, he maps a way out, Plan B 2.0, which has an annual budget about 1/6th the expenditure for military arms. To dispute him, one would have to disprove each argument five different ways. He's very convincing. The footnotes alone take 71 pages. My principal complaint is the format of the book. It is too big to fit in the pocket of a pair of jeans or a jacket. Brown has made an important statement on which each of us should develop an opinion. Our lives depend on it.
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33 of 34 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The solutions to the world's problems are easier than one might imagine!, March 19, 2006
The first half of this book summarizes the numerous problems that our world is facing; the second half provides feasible solutions to those problems. Even though I was well aware of our planet's problems (which include global warming, loss of forest and farmland, loss of fresh water, ongoing and threatened epidemic diseases, exhaustion of our fossil fuel resources, increasing pollution, etc.), I found Brown's fact-filled cataloguing of these problems to be scarier and more alarming than any description I had previously encountered. The gut-wrenching impact of Brown's description of our planet's ills stems partly from the thoroughness with which he backs up his claims and partly from the fact that, unlike most analysts, he forces us to consider ALL of our global problems simultaneously. One is left with the impression--after reading the first half of the book--that it will take super-human efforts to prevent ecological, economic, political and social catastrophe within this century. But then, in the second half of the book, Brown describes strategies by which all of these problems can be solved. Like his description of the earth's problems, Brown's descriptions of ways to solve those problems are well-researched and convincing. In most cases, aspects of his recommended strategies have already been tried in one country or another, in one place or another, and have been shown to work. The strategies do not require tremendous expenditure (an annual outlay of 1/6 of the world's military budget will be sufficient), nor do they require departures from standard market capitalism. One strategy, of which economists would approve (I believe) involves shifting taxes from income to ecologically destructive activities (thus reflecting the true cost of such activities). Such tax-shifting would not increase the average person's tax burden, but it would create tremendous incentives to reduce environmental destruction. In fact, the strategies outlined by Brown are so feasible (so easy to carry out) and promise to accomplish so much that I found the second half of the book to be exhilarating. In my view, it should be required reading for every inhabitant of our planet. Perhaps the word "required" is too strong. No threat of punishment will be needed to make any of us who start reading this book continue to the end. Brown's writing is forceful and clear, the book is fun to read, and one feels much better after reading it. There _is_ hope for this planet!
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32 of 33 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Best Single Book for Both General Public and Broadly Read Specialists, January 25, 2007
It's a real shame that the publisher did not take the trouble to load the table of contents into the product information section provided by Amazon, because that alone should persuade anyone that gets to this page that the book is a MUST BUY MUST READ MUST SHARE.
Each of the following section titles has six sub-titles that I will not repeat here:
1. Entering a New World
2. Beyond the Oil Peak
3. Emerging Water Shortages
4. Rising Temperatures & Rising Seas
5. Natural Systems Under Stress
6. Early Signs of Decline
7. Eradicating Poverty, Stabilizing Populations
8. Restoring the Earth
9. Feeding Seven Billion Well
10. Stabilizing Climate
11. Designing Sustainable Cities
12. Building a New Economy
13. Plan B: Building a New Future.
Although an updated version of the first edition published in 2003, this version can be said to be both completely new, and finally ready for public consumption now that Al Gore has put Global Warming on the public mind.
I still prefer J. F. Rischard's High Noon 20 Global Problems, 20 Years to Solve Them for the general reader, and I still think E. O. Wilson's The Future of Life is one of the top three in this area, but this book by Lester Brown has the merit of consolidating and structuring detail in a manner I have not seen elsewhere.
I recommend the book be ready in conjunction with books by Herman Daly's Valuing the Earth: Economics, Ecology, Ethics and Paul Hawken's Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution, in part because everyone is now starting to realize that green sustainability is in fact the non-negotiable first step for any business to survive into the next decade--natural capitalism.
Most intriguing to me, and the heart of the book on page 257, is the consolidated Plan B budget totallying $161 billion a year needed to meet all of the goals the author postulates.
BASIC SOCIAL GOALS
12B Universal primary education
04B Adult literacy
06B School lunch in 44 poorest countries
04B Assistant to pregnant women and preschool childen in 44 poorest
07B Reproductive health and family planning
33B Universal health care
02B Closing the condom gap (Bill & Melinda Gates can have this one)
EARTH RESTORATION GOALS
06B Reforesting the earth
24B Protecting topsoil on cropland
09B Restoring rangelands
10B Stabilizing water tables
13B Restoring fisheries
31B Protecting biological diversity
As the author points out on the next page, world military expenditures total $975B a year, with the US alone responsible for $492B (this was published before we all knew of the half trillion dollar cost of the Iraq invasion and occupation). Hence, the $161B a year total is a fraction of the total spent on out-dated military systems, and could be funded by the US alone if we had the right leadership and public consensus.
Personally, and based on other readings, I believe that the author is under-estimating the costs, and avoiding a focus on many other factors including the urgent need to eradicate transnational crime and end inter-state and civil war. This is, however, a superb start and ideally suited as a primer for any level of learning.
Readers interested in seeing a broader perspective that places the ten high-level threats (poverty, infectuous disease, environmental degradation, inter-state conflict, civil war, genocide, other atrocities, proliferation, terrorism and transnational crime) in the context of the twelve policies that must be managed as a whole by all nations (agriculture, debt, diplomacy, economy, education, energy, family, immigration, justice, security, society, and water), and that in turn oriented toward the urgency of keeping the eight challengers (Brazil, China, Indonesia, India, Iran, Russia, Venezuela, Wild Cards) from repeating our mistakes, can check in at Earth Intelligence Network.
Rescuing are planet and our civilization is going to be a great deal harder than the author suggests, and is going to need a massive awakening by the public as to the "true cost" of all that we are doing wrong. I expect that we will succeed, in part from top down efforts by Al Gore and this author among others, and in part by bottom up efforts where individuals can get from the Internet the "true cost" of any good or service in terms of water content, fuel content, sweatshop labor content, and tax avoidance status. Noami Klein's books, No Logo: No Space, No Choice, No Jobs and The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism are recommended in this regard.
Over-all an absolutely superb piece of work that caps the author's decades of advocacy on behalf of the planet. There is no other person that has been focused on this topic with due diligence year after year.
I believe this author should be recognized, along with Herman Daly and Paul Hawken and Anthony Lovins and others, for their total commitment over decades.
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