Time for Plan B: Our Civilization Is on the Edge of a Systemic Breakdown

"How many failing states before we have a failing global civilization?" asks environmental pioneer Lester Brown in Plan B: Mobilizing to Save Civilization, premiering March 30 on PBS as part of its continuing Journey to Planet Earth series. It's a Gordian knot of a question with no simple answer and nothing but complex, demanding solutions, fearsomely put forth as the fate of humanity totters in the balance.

Based on Brown's book of the same name, Plan B is likely the scariest horror film that was ever disguised as a documentary, despite its calm narration from superstar Matt Damon. That's because the acclaimed environmentalist has deeply studied the variety of environmental and geopolitical tipping points we are fast approaching, and found that we're headed for a seriously dark dystopia if we don't turn civilization as we know it around, and fast. A catastrophic confluence of food and water shortages, overpopulation and pollution, collapsed governments and communities and more natural disasters than Roland Emmerich can dream up await us on the other side of Plan A, which Brown calls "business of usual."

"Environmentalists have been talking for decades about saving the planet, but the planet is going to be around for some time to come," Brown told AlterNet by phone from his Washington D.C. office at the Earth Policy Institute, which he founded at the turn of the century after decades of public and private service in the name of sustainability. "The question is will civilization as we know it be around for some time to come? Can it survive the mounting global stresses of rising pollution, starvation, food prices, water shortages and failed states? These are the real threats to our security now, but we're not responding to them."

In a sense, we are without knowing it. Japan's bungled response to a mounting nuclear crisis, thanks to one of Earth’s most destabilizing earthquakes and tsunamis, has in a cosmological eyeblink reset the entire world's nuclear ambition. Uprisings in hotspots like Egypt, Libya, Bahrain, Yemen, Saudi Arabia and more, compounded by America's continuing quagmires in Iraq and Afghanistan, are squarely knitting together civilization's crappy experiments like preemptive war, biofuels and light-speed financial stratagems into one titanic mess that is demanding new theories of cleanup.

It's no longer intellectually feasible to consider any of these events as separate, because they, like the warming climate, are interconnected nightmares that are keeping us more awake than ever, whether we like it or not. And no matter how we spin them, Plan B argues, we're eventually all going to have to work together to survive what is without a doubt an existential crisis of historical proportions. Only the depth and vigor of our mutual efforts and understanding separate us and every other failed civilization in the planet's incomprehensibly expansive history.

But after 77 years spent on Earth, most of them trying to educate its inhabitants on the dangers of taking its astronomically singular bounty for granted, the soft-spoken Brown remains a cautious optimist. That's a comforting sign for those of us at our wits' end and wondering when the rest of civilization will get its ass in gear to forestall what passes for a collective execution.

"Change comes very quickly and unexpectedly sometimes," Brown said. "The question is whether we can turn things around quickly enough. But I don't think we have a lot of time. Time is our scarcest resource."

I picked Brown's deeply experienced brain on geopolitical and environmental change, Japan's nuclear crisis, China's powerhouse green economy, food and water scarcity, technological bandaids like desalination and lab-grown meat and much more. Taken together with Plan B's accessible yet apocalyptic programming, it points the way forward for a civilization on the edge of a systemic breakdown.