It’s been another bad year for the world, but a decidedly good one for Lester Russell Brown.
In addition to State of the World, Brown and his young researchers have published some 80 authoritative studies–on topics ranging from global demographics to decommissioning nuclear power plants. The leitmotif that runs through all of these works is typically one of urgency and imminent crisis. Planet Earth is headed for big trouble. We’re living beyond our means. There are too many mouths to feed. We are reckless with our technology. We are arming ourselves far beyond any imaginable threat. And we are making a terrible mess of the earth’s natural resources–depleting fisheries, increasing carbon-dioxide levels in the atmosphere, contaminating aquifers with toxic chemicals, and enlarging deserts. “It’s not escapist literature,” Brown concedes. “It’s pretty heavy stuff.”
But saving the world from itself can also be a competitive enterprise, and Lester Brown has long been a controversial figure. A lot of influential people in academia and government tend to dismiss Brown as something of a guitar-strumming flake. Reagan officials say he’s read too much Thomas Malthus for his own good. Many distinguished economists and scientists say he doesn’t have the necessary academic grounding to make the kind of herculean projections he routinely makes.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Whatever you make of Lester Brown, he is in many ways the apotheosis of a certain hybrid of the Information Age: the think-tank guru, the protean expert, the free-lance idea man. With uncertain credentials and a shoestring budget, he has carved out his own peculiar niche in the Washington policy game. You might call him the Ralph Nader of the global environment.
There are easily more than 200 think tanks or policy research groups in Washington, and at least 50 organizations that specifically concern themselves with conservation and environmental questions. But few take on a spectrum of issues as wide as Brown’s. And there is probably no research institute in the country that is more the product of one man’s vision.
Brown looks like a middle-aged Cupid, with frosty blue eyes and wild scrolls of silvery hair. He pads around the institute wearing Hush Puppies and a polka-dot clip-on bow tie, his sartorial trademark since the 50s. “Efficiency,” Brown explains. “You can pop them on in about two seconds.”
“You see, the traditional military threat is not what’s determining our security anymore. The Soviets, for example, are realizing that their immense military expenditures are making the USSR the backwater of the industrial world. And in the U.S. we are seeing that our enormous defense budget–with the diversion of financial and scientific resources required to sustain the SDI program–is undermining our competitive position as a world economic power. We are finding it increasingly difficult to compete with countries like Japan that do not exhaust their national resources on arming themselves.
