Other Worldwatch Books
September 1996
Lester R. Brown
ISBN: 0-393-31573-8
159 pages
Food scarcity is emerging as the defining issue of the new era now unfolding, much as ideological conflict was the defining issue of the historical era that recently ended. More fundamentally, food scarcity may be the first major economic manifestation of an environmentally unsustainable global economy.
In Tough Choices: Facing the Challenge of Food Scarcity, Lester Brown observes that prices were climbing because world carryover stocks of grain had fallen to 48 days of consumption, the lowest level on record, and production was falling behind demand. Brown argues that the continually expanding demand for food is colliding with some of the earth's natural limits, including the sustainable yield of oceanic fisheries, the sustainable yield of aquifers that supply irrigation water, and the physiological limits of crop varieties to use fertilizer.
September 1995
Lester R. Brown
ISBN: 0-393-31049-X
163 pages
To feed its 1.2 billion people, China may soon have to import so much grain that this action could trigger unprecedented rises in world food prices. In Who Will Feed China?: Wake-up Call for a Small Planet, Lester Brown shows that even as water becomes scarce in a land where 80 percent of the grain crop is irrigated, as per-acre yield gains are erased by the loss of cropland to industrialization, and as food production stagnates, China still increases its population by the equivalent of a new Beijing each year.
When Japan, a nation of just 125 million, began to import food, world grain markets rejoiced. But when China, a market ten times bigger, starts importing, there may not be enough grain in the world to meet that need ”and food prices will rise steeply for everyone. Analysts foresaw that the recent doubling of income for China's 1.2 billion consumers would increase food demand, especially for meat, eggs, and beer. But these analysts assumed that food production would rise to meet these demands.
October 1994
Christopher Flavin, Nicholas Lenssen
ISBN: 0-393-31199-6
382 pages
"Nearly unnoticed by government and industry, the world energy economy has entered a period of rapid change that may be as far-reaching as the computer and telecommunications revolutions," according to the book Power Surge: Guide to the Coming Energy Revolution, released by the Worldwatch Institute. "The giant oil refineries and coal-fired power plants that energized the twentieth century soon may be relics of the industrial revolution- -as obsolete as the typewriter or Model T Ford."
August 1994
Lester R. Brown, Hal Kane
ISBN: 0-393-31220-8
250 pages
"Constraints imposed by the earth's natural systems, the environmental degradation of land and water resources, and the diminishing backlog of yield-raising agricultural technologies are slowing the growth in world food production, raising questions about the earth's population carrying capacity," says Lester Brown. At the same time, record additions to population are projected. The question now is how many people can the earth feed? And at what level of consumption?
The bottom line, according to authors Lester Brown and Hal Kane, is that the world's farmers can no longer be counted on to feed adequately the projected additions to our numbers. Achieving a humane balance between food and people now depends more on family planners than on farmers.
November 1992
Sandra Postel
ISBN: 0-393-31744-7
240 pages
As we approach the twenty-first century, we are entering a new era—an era of water scarcity. We have taken for granted seemingly endless supplies of water flowing from reservoirs, wells, and diversion projects; access to water has been key to food security, industrialization, and the growth of cities.
In Last Oasis, author Sandra Postel explains that decades of profligacy and mismanagement of the world's water resources have produced signs of shortages and environmental destruction. She writes with authority and clarity of the limits—ecological, economic, and political—of this vital natural resource. She explores the potential for conflict over water between nations, and between urban and rural residents. And she offers a sensible way out of such struggles.
Last Oasis makes clear that the technologies and know-how exist to increase the productivity of very liter of water. But citizens must first understand the issues and insist on policies, laws, and institutions that promote the sustainable use of water.
July 1992
Alan Durning
ISBN: 0-393-30891-0
200 pages
The wildfire advance of the consumer lifestyle around the globe marks the most rapid and fundamental change in day-to-day existence the human species has ever experienced. Over a few short generations, we in the affluent fifth of humanity have become car drivers, television watchers, mall shoppers, and throwaway buyers.
The tragic irony is that while the consumer society has been stunningly effective in harming the environment, it has failed to provide us with a sense of fulfillment. Consumerism has hoodwinked us into gorging on material things because we suffer from social, psychological, and spiritual hungers.
Yet the opposite extreme "poverty" may be even worse for the human spirit and devastates the environment too, as hungry peasants put forests to the torch and steep slopes to the plow.
If the Earth suffers when people have either too little or too much, the questions arise: How much is enough? What level of consumption can the planet support? When do more things cease to add appreciably to human life?
November 1991
Lester R. Brown, Christopher Flavin, Sandra Postel
ISBN: 0-393-30823-5
224 pages
Two decades after the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm, the world faces a choice between reforming its economic and political systems or risking a future of irreversible ecological decline, according to Saving The Planet.
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