I was lucky enough to be asked to engage in a conversation with legendary environmental author Lester Brown at the Lannan Foundation’s Readings and Conversations Series last month. This was a thrill for me, not just because past authors in the series include Isabel Allende and Salman Rushdie, but because Lester Brown is a standard bearer for world-wide sustainability who walks the walk as well as talking the talk (he doesn’t own a car). Through impeccable research and coherent solution-sleuthing, this is a guy who has for half a century been trying to beg the world to develop in sync with the ecological systems that sustain us.
He’s a grandfather to all writers who have a connection to the planet, and simply part of the solution for humanity. Sort of Rachel Carson meets a policy wonk. Along with Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma and, of course, Farewell, My Subaru, I think everyone with an interest in there being a few more generations of Homo sapiens on this here planet would do well to read his Plan B 3.0, and then get politically active about its world-wide sustainability plan. The event can be heard here. Don’t worry: you’re supposed to be a little scared when you listen to Lester Brown’s ice-sheets-are-melting-faster-than-we-thought-even-six-months-ago stories (this as opposed to my, “Yeah, but let’s have fun while converting society to sustainability” approach). But at least he also offers solutions. Ones to which I think the non-suicidal among us would do well to listen.