Plan B 3 0 Mobilizing To Save Civilization Substantially Revised

"How to build a more just world and save the planet....We should all heed Brown's advice."—Bill Clinton In this updated edition of the landmark Plan B, Lester Brown outlines a survival strategy for our early twenty-first-century civilization. The world faces many environmental trends of disruption and decline, including rising temperatures and spreading water shortage. In addition to these looming threats, we face the peaking of oil, annual population growth of 70 million, a widening global economic divide, and a growing list of failing states. The scale and complexity of issues facing our fast-forward world have no precedent With Plan A, business as usual, we have neglected these issues overly long. In Plan B 3.0, Lester R. Brown warns that the only effective response now is a World War II-type mobilization like that in the United States after the attack on Pearl Harbor.

“[Brown’s] ability to make a complicated subject accessible to the general reader is remarkable.”—Katherine Salant, Washington Post As fossil fuel prices rise, oil insecurity deepens, and concerns about climate change cast a shadow over the future of coal, a new energy economy is emerging. Wind, solar, and geothermal energy are replacing oil, coal, and natural gas, at a pace and on a scale we could not have imagined even a year ago. For the first time since the Industrial Revolution, we have begun investing in energy sources that can last forever. Plan B 4.0 explores both the nature of this transition to a new energy economy and how it will affect our daily lives.

Provides alternative solutions to such global problems as population control, emerging water shortages, eroding soil, and global warming, outlining a detailed survival strategy for the civilization of the future.

Foreword by Leon van SchaikIncomplete Urbanism is a dynamic, hybrid interactive concept, which destabilizes the current architectural and urban theories and practices. Its main characteristics are indeterminacy, inconsistency and changeability, which are particularly challenging in the context of the New World Order and the fast emerging global digital network. It is a concept that can be effectively applied to any sizeable section of existing cities without the need for major readjustments and can be implemented at different rates in response to specific local conditions. As for the word ?critical?, I use it deliberately in order to convey the essential need to think creatively and positively in a controversial contesting and social-orientated manner about what we do, as it will constructively influence the way we do things that impact our values and social environment.

Over the past few years Lester R. Brown has written several bestselling works that have made us aware of the need for sustainable development. This latest work shows that we have created a bubble economy, one whose output is artificially inflated by overconsuming the earth's natural capital. The present course, Plan A, will lead to continuing environmental deterioration and eventual economic decline. The alternative is Plan B, a worldwide mobilization to stabilize population and climate before these issues spiral out of control. The goal is to stabilize population close to the United Nation's low projection of 7.4 billion, to reduce carbon emissions by half by 2015, and to raise water productivity by half. Lester Brown puts forward a workable blueprint that can be enacted now.

Provides alternative solutions to such global problems as population control, emerging water shortages, eroding soil, and global warming, outlining a detailed survival strategy for the civilization of the future.

With food supplies tightening, countries are competing for the land and water resources needed to feed their people. With food scarcity driven by falling water tables, eroding soils, and rising temperatures, control of arable land and water resources is moving to center stage in the global struggle for food security. “In this era of tightening world food supplies, the ability to grow food is fast becoming a new form of geopolitical leverage. Food is the new oil,” Lester R. Brown writes. What will the geopolitics of food look like in a new era dominated by scarcity and food nationalism? Brown outlines the political implications of land acquisitions by grain-importing countries in Africa and elsewhere as well as the world’s shrinking buffers against poor harvests. With wisdom accumulated over decades of tracking agricultural issues, Brown exposes the increasingly volatile food situation the world is facing.