This book was assigned to me in a liberal studies program long ago. Lester Russell Brown, to give his full name, is a former farmer and has worked with the Department of Agriculture. He is head of the Worldwatch Institute (or was when this book was published). The overall argument is that creating a sustainable society will require fundamental economic priorities and population policies. This was a slow read for me and took quite some time to get through. It is a good read but Brown throws in too many figures and tables. He is trying very hard to persuade lawmakers to adopt his ideas and apparently wrote it as short cut for lawmakers so they did not have to wade through all the position papers the Worldwatch Institute had issued. Simply put, the book is pro-ecology, pro-self-sustaining, pro-family planning, pro-solar power. He is opposed to nuclear power, oil power and coal power. He is clear opposed to the military and writes anti-militarist passages in his book. He is also opposite to the materialism that is pervasive in American society, and also argues against our industrial society. He is pro-agricultural in his writing extensively about food and farming. He talks much about a renewable energy economy and rejects the oil, gas, coal, and nuclear interests that still control much of our society and economy. Furthermore, Brown has the ideology of a globalist political philosopher. He talks of the need to get rid of nationalist ideas into order to make for a sustainable society worldwide. Among his other books is World Without Borders.
Brown argues, among other issues, that our escalating food demands are leading to top soil losses that are eroding the foundation of civilization itself. He deals with deforestation, overgrazing, over fishing -- these are all shrinking the economy's resource base. He believes the oil wells are going dry, but oilmen deny this. He wishes to describe the essential character of a sustainable society, to provide a sense of direction for planners and policymakers who are too busy to do all the reading and research needed to make decisions. The writer draws on his own agricultural roots as a former farmer, who also lived in Indian villages. He has also worked in world agricultural development.
He argues that the managerial elite of our economy is blind to the signs of our times. He lays out the threats to our contemporary civilization by discussing soil erosion, converting agricultural lands to other other uses, the threats of urban sprawl, village expansion, highway construction, and other aspects of urbanism that he clearly detests. He discusses the unsustainable relationship that has developed between our contemporary civilization and the biological systems that support it. Thus he supports birth control and family planning. He also fears the potential depletion of oil reserves before alternative energy sources are developed.
All of these arguments tie back into the subject of food, its prospects of availability and the system that creates it. Who is going to feed all those babies that the conservatives keep on insisting must be born.
On the whole, I found the book to be a good read, but also slow and took me a long time to finish it.
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