Product Description

In this new edition, Lester Brown outlines a survival strategy for our early twenty-first civilization.

The world faces numerous environmental trends of disruption and decline such as rising temperatures, falling water tables, shrinking forests, melting glaciers, collapsing fisheries, and rising sea levels. In Plan B, Lester R. Brown notes that in ignoring nature's deadlines for dealing with these environmental issues we risk the disruption of economic progress.

In addition to these environmental trends, the world faces the peaking of oil, the addition of 70 million people per year, a widening global economic divide, and the spread of international terrorism. The global scale and growing complexity of issues facing our fast-forward world have no precedent.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #862097 in Books
• Published on: 2006-01-23
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 365 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Tension between alarmism and optimism fuels this stimulating treatise on green development, an update of the 2003 edition. Earth Policy Institute president Brown (Who Will Feed China?) surveys the worldwide environmental devastation wrought by breakneck industrialization and the heedless, auto-centric, "throwaway economy": oil and water shortages, pollution, deforestation, soil erosion, desertification, collapsing fisheries, mass extinctions, looming famine and pestilence-and he hasn't even gotten to global warming yet. Fortunately, Brown says, "all the problems we face can be dealt with using existing technologies," at a manageable cost. He spends most of the book touting advances in sustainable agriculture, wildlife and resource conservation, renewable energy, hyper-efficient cars, mass transit and appliances, and recycling (a waterless, composting toilet that produces "essentially odorless" humus, for instance). He totals it all up in a $161 billion yearly budget and adds a prescription for environmental taxes-on everything from gasoline to garbage-to steer the economy toward eco-friendliness. Brown wants to reform and humanize, not abolish, industrial modernity, and keeps the focus on practical, tested measures. He sprinkles many intriguing facts and figures, but they are presented selectively and unsystematically (price data on renewable energy sources, in particular, is inadequate and misleading); his somewhat boosterish approach lacks the meticulous cost-benefit analyses the subject cries out for. But while the book doesn't offer the last word on sustainable economic development, its can-do spirit and lucid exposition of promising proposals make it a good starting point for discussion of this all-important issue.
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About the Author
Lester R. Brown, president of the Earth Policy Institute, is one of the world's most widely published authors with books in more than forty languages. A MacArthur Fellow, he lives in Washington, DC.