Breaking New Ground: A Personal History - Hardcover

Brown, Lester R.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0393240061 ISBN 13: 9780393240061

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 2013

Synopsis

An inspirational memoir tracing Lester Brown’s life from a small-farm childhood to leadership as a global environmental activist.

Lester R. Brown, whom the Washington Post praised as “one of the world’s most influential thinkers,” built his understanding of global environmental issues from the ground up. Brown spent his childhood working on the family’s small farm. His entrepreneurial skills surfaced early. Even while excelling in school, he launched with his younger brother a tomato-growing operation that by 1958 was producing 1.5 million pounds of tomatoes.

Later, at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Brown emphasized the need for systemic thinking. In 1963 he did the first global food supply and demand projections to the end of the century. While on a brief assignment in India in 1965, he pieced together the clues that led him to sound the alarm on an impending famine there. His urgent warning to the U.S. and Indian governments set in motion the largest food rescue effort in history, helping to save millions of lives. This experience led India to adopt new agricultural practices, which he helped to shape.

Brown went on to advise governments internationally and to found the Worldwatch and Earth Policy institutes, two major nonprofit environmental research organizations. Both brilliant and articulate, through his many books he has brought to the fore the interconnections among such issues as overpopulation, climate change, and water shortages and their effect on food security. His 1995 book, Who Will Feed China?, led to a broad restructuring of China’s agricultural policy. Never one to focus only on the problem, Brown always proposes pragmatic, employable solutions to stave off the unfolding ecological crises that endanger our future.

16 pages of photographs

About this title

About the Author

Lester R. Brown is the founder of the Earth Policy and Worldwatch Institutes. He has been honored with numerous prizes, including a MacArthur Fellowship, the United Nations Environment Prize, and twenty-five honorary degrees. He lives in Washington, D.C.

Reviews

When a drought-induced famine threatened India in the mid-1960s, perhaps no single person was more responsible for raising the alarm and prompting U.S. leaders to send food relief than Brown, then a little-known staff member for the secretary of agriculture during Lyndon Johnson’s presidency. Since then, Brown has written prolifically on food shortages, founded the highly respected Worldwatch and Earthwatch Institutes, and received widespread recognition as one of the world’s leading environmentalists. Now in his late seventies, Brown was reluctantly persuaded by colleagues to pen this engaging memoir charting his influence on reshaping international agriculture policies. Brown begins with his austere upbringing in rural New Jersey, working on the family farm and growing his own tomatoes, which led to his life-changing participation in a farmer’s exchange program with India, where Brown witnessed food shortages firsthand, spurring his subsequent career. While Brown himself demurs that he’s hardly a born writer, his personal account is straightforwardly captivating and provides invaluable insight into the mind and heart of a true contemporary environmental hero. --Carl Hays

Edition details

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication date: 2013
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0393240061
• ISBN 13: 9780393240061
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 224