Rebuilding the world: an interview with Lester Brown.

• Author: Pal, Amitabh
• Position: Interview

Lester Brown is the oracle of environmentalism. Through his work over more than half a century, especially in the fifty plus books he has authored or co-authored, Brown has been particularly prescient about food, water, and energy.

Brown grew up on a farm with no running water or electricity in New Jersey. As a young man, he spent six months living in the villages of India as part of a farm youth exchange program. In 1959, he joined the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Foreign Agricultural Service, where he played a pivotal role in helping India combat famine a few years later. He helped create in the 1970s the Worldwatch Institute, a leading source of global environmental statistics and trends. He left Worldwatch in 2001 to set up the Earth Policy Institute, which sought to set a course to a sustainable future. The institute closed when Brown retired last summer.

Brown's memoir, Breaking New Ground, was published in 2013. His latest book, published in April, is The Great Transition: Shifting from Fossil Fuels to Solar and Wind Energy. His awards include the United Nations Environmental Prize and a MacArthur fellowship. Bill Clinton and Ted Turner are among his admirers. The Library of Congress is storing his personal papers, while Rutgers University, his alma mater, is building a reading room in his honor.

I interviewed Brown, a competitive distance runner at the age of eighty-one, in September at his Washington, D.C., apartment in a quiet area of town overlooking Rock Creek Park and the national zoo. We bonded over a personal connection, since my granduncle hosted Brown for the better part of a month during his stay in India decades ago. An affable, gracious man, Brown showed me various editions of his many books in an array of languages. Chapters of his upcoming book on water were laid out all over the living room. Over coffee, we chatted about his life and work and the environmental challenges facing our planet.

Q: What are the greatest challenges facing global society?

Lester Brown: The two big issues we are facing are climate change and water shortages. Water shortages are more imminent. They're here now. We suddenly look around and realize that water tables are falling everywhere: throughout the high plains of the United States, for instance, in the Ogallala Aquifer. This is a huge source of water, but it has already been pumped out in Texas-Oklahoma.

Much of the water used in the world comes from aquifers. There are thirty-seven...