How Many Earth Days Do We Have Left?

Of all the resources needed to build an economy that will sustain economic progress, none is more scarce than time. That is one of the key messages of PLAN-B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization, the newest book by Lester Brown -- available as a free download at earthpolicy.org.

Plan A -- the western fossil-fuel-based, auto-centered, throwaway economic model -- is not going to work for China, India, or the 3 billion other people in developing countries, and it will not continue to work for the industrial countries either.

It's time for Plan B -- an all-out response at wartime speed proportionate to the magnitude of threats facing civilization.

The four overriding goals of PLAN B 3.0 are to stabilize climate and population, eradicate poverty, and restore the earth's damaged ecosystems. Failure to reach any one of these goals will likely mean failure to reach the others as well.

"We are crossing natural thresholds that we cannot see and violating deadlines that we do not recognize," says Brown. "These deadlines are set by nature. Nature is the timekeeper, but we cannot see the clock."

Lester Brown has been described by the Washington Post as "one of the world's most influential thinkers." After working with the Department of Agriculture in international agricultural development, Brown helped establish the Overseas Development Council, then founded Worldwatch Institute, publishers of annual State of the World and Vital Signs reports. In 2001, he left Worldwatch, founded Earth Policy Institute, and published Eco-Economy: Building an Economy for the Earth.

TERRENCE McNALLY: When you were involved in agriculture in the Kennedy administration, few thought about the environment, unless it was about conservation or wilderness. A bit later, environmentalism was usually local -- a polluting factory or a threatened forest. Yet very early you had a global understanding of environmental issues. How did that happen?

LESTER BROWN: It was probably due to, first, living two and a half years in villages in India in 1956, where I could see the food/population problem beginning to unfold; and second, my training in the sciences, which gave me a feel for how natural systems work.

McNALLY: What has driven you to write Plan B, and then Plan B 2.0 and Plan B 3.0?

BROWN: One of the goals of the Earth Policy Institute is to provide a vision of a kind of world we want and a sense of how we get from here to there. Plan B was the first version of this.

With 3.0, we've changed the subtitle from Rescuing a Planet Under Stress and a Civilization in Trouble to simply Mobilizing to Save Civilization. We used to think about saving the planet, and that's still essential, but what's really at stake now is civilization itself.

We have a growing backlog of unresolved problems in the world: deforestation, collapsing fisheries, expanding deserts, falling water tables, eroding soils, you can go down the list. The fallout from these problems is becoming more and more difficult to manage, especially for governments in developing countries.

A number of countries have developed enough to bring down mortality but not enough to bring down fertility. With a rapid rate of population growth, they're caught in what demographers call "the demographic trap." If you can't break out of it, eventually you begin to break down.

17 of the top 20 failing states have rapid rates of population growth. These are the countries where most of the 70 million people added each year are being born. As this list of failing states grows each year, we have to ask how many failing states before we have a failing civilization? No one knows the answer. We haven't been there before.

On top of traditional environmental problems, we now have new stresses like soaring oil prices that put a lot of pressure on low and middle-income oil-importing countries. Then as the United States converts a growing share of our grain into fuel, we drive world grain prices to all-time highs, creating instability in low- and middle-income countries that import grain. We face the risk that the combination of rising oil and food prices will greatly increase the number of failing states. I think the number of failing states in the world is now the key indicator as to whether civilization is going to succeed or fail.