Lester Brown Celebrates 80, but He’s Not Done Yet

If there’s any doubt that Lester Brown is still primed to con­tin­ue his work as one of the world’s lead­ing en­vir­on­ment­al­ists at age 80, con­sider these res­ults from last week­end’s Cherry Blos­som Ten Mile Run in Wash­ing­ton:

“There were only three in the 80-and-over group, and I was second,” Brown said Thursday. His time was 2:23:37, ac­cord­ing to the un­of­fi­cial res­ults pos­ted on the event’s web­site.

On Fri­day even­ing at the Na­tion­al Press Club, Brown and more than 200 of his friends and fam­ily will cel­eb­rate his oc­to­gen­ari­an status, which was reached on March 28. And on Sat­urday morn­ing, Brown will get right back to his lifelong quest to find a path to a sus­tain­able plan­et.

Brown — who foun­ded the World­watch In­sti­tute in 1974 and now leads a smal­ler think tank in Wash­ing­ton that he es­tab­lished in 2001, the Earth Policy In­sti­tute — has been de­scribed by The Wash­ing­ton Post as “one of the world’s most in­flu­en­tial thinkers” and by his crit­ics as a “pro­fes­sion­al alarm­ist.”

His résumé speaks for it­self, with hon­ors ran­ging from the United Na­tions En­vir­on­ment­al Pro­gram Lead­er­ship Medal in 1982 to in­duc­tion in­to the Earth Hall of Fame Kyoto in 2012. He is the au­thor or coau­thor of more than 50 books, start­ing with Man, Land and Food in 1963. His most re­cent, in 2012, was Full Plan­et, Empty Plates: The New Geo­pol­it­ics of Food Scarcity.

It star­ted for Brown grow­ing up on a farm in south­ern New Jer­sey, where he es­pe­cially loved tend­ing the ve­get­ables. “I knew I could grow to­ma­toes all my life, but I began to real­ize that just grow­ing to­ma­toes wouldn’t be ac­com­plish­ing very much,” he said.

He pur­sued a de­gree in ag­ri­cul­tur­al sci­ence at Rut­gers Uni­versity and after gradu­ation spent six months in In­dia, where he learned first-hand the dif­fi­culties provid­ing ad­equate food sup­plies in un­developed coun­tries. Brown joined the U.S. De­part­ment of Ag­ri­cul­ture in 1959 as an in­ter­na­tion­al ana­lyst and took it upon him­self to write his first book on the side, which pro­jec­ted sup­ply and de­mand for food around the globe through the end of the cen­tury.

Asked this week how his pro­jec­tions turned out, Brown ex­claimed, “Sur­pris­ingly close!” The re­search also made him un­der­stand that “erad­ic­at­ing hun­ger was not go­ing to be a simple thing,” he said.

His work caught the at­ten­tion of Ag­ri­cul­ture Sec­ret­ary Or­ville Free­man in 1963 and Brown was el­ev­ated to a top ad­viser on in­ter­na­tion­al ag­ri­cul­ture at USDA headquar­ters. He left gov­ern­ment in 1969 to help es­tab­lish the Over­seas De­vel­op­ment Coun­cil.

In 1974, Brown said, he was sit­ting in a swim­ming pool in As­pen, Colo., with Wil­li­am Deitel, a top man­ager of the Rock­e­feller Broth­ers Fund, dis­cuss­ing the fact that there wasn’t a single en­vir­on­ment­al-re­search in­sti­tute any­where in the world. Shortly after that con­ver­sa­tion, the fund provided Brown with $500,000, and the World­watch In­sti­tute was born in Wash­ing­ton.

Over the years, the in­sti­tute be­came renowned for its ana­lyt­ic­al re­ports on food, pop­u­la­tion, and en­vir­on­ment­al is­sues and its an­nu­al State of the World books be­came must-read pro­gress re­ports on glob­al de­vel­op­ment.

Brown also con­tin­ued re­search­ing and writ­ing, and at one point ex­ploded myths about the pro­spects for ag­ri­cul­ture in the world’s largest na­tion in a 1995 book, Who Will Feed China?

After turn­ing 67 in 2001, Brown de­cided to es­tab­lish a new think tank, the Earth Policy In­sti­tute, which has a simple but lofty mis­sion: “Provid­ing a plan to save civil­iz­a­tion.” Later that year he pub­lished a book, Eco-Eco­nomy: Build­ing an Eco­nomy for the Earth, that laid out his vis­ion for a sus­tain­able plan­et.

A world of work re­mains to be done, Brown said. “We’re already over­us­ing wa­ter in the Great Plains, in In­dia, in China,” he said. “Wa­ter tables are fall­ing in every state of In­dia.”

Pop­u­la­tion growth may be slow­ing, but only be­cause there won’t be enough food to sus­tain an­oth­er 2 bil­lion people, he said. “We’re go­ing to see in­creased mal­nu­tri­tion and rising mor­tal­ity,” he said.

It’s just one more reas­on Brown wants to get back to work after his birth­day cel­eb­ra­tion Fri­day.