Lester R. Brown (1934 – )
American founder, president and senior researcher, Earth Policy Institute

Lester Brown is a highly respected and influential authority on global environmental issues. He founded the Worldwatch Institute in 1974 and served as its president until 2000. In 2001 he launched a new initiative, the Earth Policy Institute Brown is an award-winning author of many books and articles on environmentally sustainable economic development and on environmental, agricultural, and economic problems and trends.

Brown was born in Bridgeton, New Jersey, and during high school and college, he grew tomatoes with his younger brother. At this time he developed his appreciation for nature's ability, if properly treated, to supply us with food on a regular and sustainable basis. After earning a degree in agricultural science from Rutgers University in 1955, he spent six months in rural India studying and working on agricultural projects. In 1959, he joined the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Foreign Agricultural Service as an international agricultural analyst. After receiving an M.S. in agricultural economics from the University of Maryland and a master's degree in public administration from Harvard, he went to work for Orville Freeman, the Secretary of Agriculture, as an advisor on foreign agricultural policy in 1964. In 1969, Brown helped establish the Overseas Development Council and in 1974, with the support of the Rockefeller Fund, he founded the Worldwatch Institute to analyze world conditions and problems such as famine , overpopulation, and scarcity of natural resources .

In 1984, Brown launched Worldwatch's annual State of the World report, a comprehensive and authoritative account of worldwide environmental and agricultural trends and problems. Eventually published in over 30 languages, State of the World is considered one of the most influential and widely read reports on public policy issues. Other Worldwatch publications initiated and overseen by Brown included Worldwatch, a bimonthly magazine, the Environmental Alert book series, and the annual Vital Signs: The Trends That Are Shaping Our Future. Brown has written or co-authored over a dozen books and some two dozen Worldwatch papers on various economic, agricultural, and environmental topics. Among his many awards, Brown has received a $250,000 "genius award" from the MacArthur Foundation, as well as the United Nation's 1987 environmental prize. The Washington Post has described him as "one of the world's most influential thinkers."

Brown has long warned that unless the United States and other nations adopt policies that are ecologically and agriculturally sustainable, the world faces a disaster of unprecedented proportions. In Worldwatch's yearly State of the World report, Brown tracked the impact of human activity on the environment , listing things like the percentage of bird species that were endangered, the number of days China's Yellow River was too depleted to irrigate fields in its lower reaches, the number of females being educated worldwide, and the number of cigarettes smoked per person. His reports made the ecological dimension of global economics clear and concrete. Often these reports were dire. The 1998 report, for example, discussed socalled demographic fatigue. This referred to places where population was falling, not because of a birthrate held in check by family planning but because many people were dying through famine, drought , and infectious disease. Conventional economics paid little heed to the environmental cost of development, leading to what a reviewer for the Financial Times called "a kind of cosy belief that the Earth's resources are unlimited...." Brown struggled to unseat that belief. He also wrote about a way out of the doom his work often foresaw. His 2001 Eco-Economy: Building an Economy for the Earth argued that creation of a new, ecologically aware economy, with emphasis on renewable energy , tax reform, redesign of cities and transportation , better agricultural methods and global cooperation, could alleviate much of the world's ills. Through the Earth Policy Institute's Earth Policy Alerts, Brown continued to add to the themes of his book. The mission of Brown's new organization was to reach policy makers and the public with information about building an environmentally sustainable economy.

[Lewis Regenstein ]

RESOURCES

BOOKS

Brown, Lester. Eco-Economy: Building an Economy for the Earth. New York: W.W. Norton, 2001.

PERIODICALS

Hager, Mary. "How 'Demographic Fatigue' Will Defuse the Population Bomb"Newsweek (November 2, 1998): 12.

"Lester Brown's Eco-Economy"Mother Earth News (February/March 2002): 1.

McWilliam, Fiona. "Sign of the Times"Geographical Magazine 70, no. 7. (July 1998): 25.

Tickell, Christian. "The Hidden Costs of Life on Earth"Financial Times (February 16, 2002): 4.

ORGANIZATIONS

Earth Policy Institute, 1350 Connecticut Ave. NW, Washington, DC USA 20036 (202) 496-9290, Fax: (202) 496-9325, Email: [email protected], http://www.earth-policy.org