Plan B : Rescuing a Planet Under Stress and a Civilization in Trouble
Lester R. Brown
(New York: W.W. Norton, 2003, 275pp.)

Lester Brown, who founded the Worldwatch Institute in Washington DC in 1974 and who more recently created the Earth Policy Institute, has been warning of ecological dangers and the misuse of natural resources for many years.  There must be moments when he feels like Casandra - fated to see the future and not be believed by those whom she warns.  Brown warns that "We are cutting trees faster than they can be regenerated, overgrazing rangelands and converting them into deserts, overpumping aquifers, and draining rivers dry.  On our croplands, soil erosion exceeds new soil formation, slowly depriving the soil of its inherent fertility.  We are taking fish from the ocean faster than they can reproduce."

To counter these trends, we need awareness and vision, an ethical standard which has the preservation of nature at its heart, and the political leadership to bring about the socio-economic changes needed.  For the moment, awareness and vision are unequally spread.  In some countries, ecological awareness has led to beneficial changes and innovative technologies.  In others, the governmental and social structures are disintegrating due to disease, population pressure upon limited resources, and a lack of social leadership.  Worldwide, military spending, led by the USA, dwarfs spending on ecologically-sound development and the necessary expansion of education and health services.

As Brown notes, "The sector of the economy that seems likely to unravel first is food.  Eroding soils, deteriorating rangelands, collapsing fisheries, falling water tables, and rising temperatures are converging to make it more difficult to expand food production fast enough to keep up with demand… Food is fast becoming a national security issue as growth in the world harvest slows and as falling water tables and rising temperatures hint at future shortages."

Yet there are agricultural techniques which can raise protein efficiency, raise land productivity, improve livestock use and produce second harvests on the same land.  However, unless we quickly reverse the damaging trends that we have set in motion, we will see vast numbers of environmental refugees - people abandoning depleted aquifers and exhausted soils and those fleeing advancing deserts and rising seas.

The title of the book comes from a strategic planning vocabulary.  Plan A is basically continuing things as they are.  However there is really no "Plan A" - no planners and no agreed-upon direction.  While some people may have an overview of one particular segment - such as oil production or wheat production - there is no agency, neither the United Nations nor private corporations, which have an overall vision, much less the means to influence different economic sectors.  The recent breakdown of the World Trade Organization's efforts at structuring negotiations in a few crucial areas indicate the difficulties of world planning.

Plan B in Brown's outline would be a series of related efforts to counter environmental threats, especially threats to soil and water.  Brown quotes approvingly David Seckler of the International Water Management Institute "Many of the most populous countries of the world - China, India, Pakistan, Mexico, and nearly all the countries of the Middle East and North Africa - have literally been having a free ride over the past two or three decades by depleting their groundwater resources.  The penalty of mismanagement of this valuable resource is now coming due, and it is no exaggeration to say that the results could be catastrophic for these countries, and, given their importance, for the world as a whole."

Unfortunately, the International Water Management Institute does not manage the world's use of water but can only study water use.  While there are some planners who would like to be able to tax or make people pay for water, most water use is uncontrolled.  Payment for water is a way that governments or private companies have to get more revenue, but the welfare of farmers is usually not a very high priority for them.

Thus, ecologically sound development cannot be the result of a plan, A, B, C, but rather of millions of individual actions to protect soil, conserve water, plant trees, use locally grown crops, reduce meat from their diets, protect biological diversity in forest areas, cut down the use of cars by increasing public transportation and living closer to one's work.  We need to stabilize and then reduce world population and to encourage better distribution of the world's population through planned migration and the creation of secondary cities to reduce the current growth of megacities.  We need to encourage wise use of rural areas by diversifying employment in rural areas.  We also need to develop ecological awareness through education so that these millions of wise individual decisions can be taken.  As Lester Brown stresses, "Environmentally responsible behaviour also depends to a great extent on a capacity to understand basic scientific issues, such as the greenhouse effect or the ecological role of forests.  Lacking this, it is harder to grasp the link between fossil fuel burning and climate change or between tree cutting and the incidence of flooding or the loss of biological diversity…The deteriorating relationship between the global economy and the earth's ecosystem requires an all-out effort to bring literacy to all adults in order to break the poverty cycle and stabilize population."

Education and vision require leadership, and it is ecologically sound political leadership that is badly lacking today.  Brown cites the statement of UK Prime Minister Tony Blair who called for "a new international consensus to protect our environment and combat the devastating impact of climate change."  But it is likely that Blair will remain better known for participating in a war on Iraq than for leading governments to greater efforts to curb global warming.

Ecological or Green Parties are non-existent in most of the 191 members of the United Nations, and where they exist, they are marginal political forces.  Some environmental-friendly ideas have been taken over by political parties in power, but they are rarely ideas that demand sacrifice or real mass action.  However, poverty reduction, which requires both sound ecological planning and increased efforts to stabilize population, is one of the chief aims of the Millennium Development Goals to which governments pledged themselves at the UN General Assembly Summit of the year 2000 "to free our fellow men, women and children from the abject and dehumanizing conditions of extreme poverty."

Plan B  holds out hope that action to reverse negative trends can be taken if there is wise leadership and a redirection of financial resources.  It is a useful action guide for those already active in ecologically-sound development and will hopefully help to swell the ranks.

René Wadlow