Lester Brown’s Plan B 4.0 at the European Parliament
Courtesy Michael Wells' blog.
Michael Wells notes in his blog entry earlier this month (May 6):
Last evening at the European Parliament in Brussels, Lester Brown, the veteran environmentalist, was launching his latest book, Plan B 4.0, Mobilizing to Save Civilization, which gives a scary account of how far down the road of environmental hooliganism we have gone, yet he remains optimistic that there is scope for action. He was hosted by sun-glassed Estonian MEP, Indrek Tarand.
Lester Brown is credited with pioneering the concept of sustainable development, which has become such a buzzword in the green – and not so green – policy environment. At the talk yesterday, he reckoned that ‘food may be the weakest link’ and raised the spectre of food wars when the food bubbles burst. If countries – which presently rely on over pumping (non replenish-able) water for their food production – run out of water, what are they going to do to feed the people? Into the mix add the notion that the melting ice sheets and shrinking mountain glaciers are going to raise the sea level and inundate low-lying rice lands and agriculturally rich river deltas, then the number of hungry people with no place to grow food is going to increase. Lester Brown estimates that there are now one billion hungry humans on our planet.
An Environmentalist in Favor of More Consumption
In the pleasing quietness of his house—a place where Pakistani prayer rugs lie in maroon rectangles on top of clean, white, wall-to-wall Berber carpet—Saleem Ali tends his treasure. There is the soft laughter of his two sons upstairs, “needful treasures in my life,” he calls them in the dedication to his new book, Treasures of the Earth: Need, Greed and A Sustainable Future.
But more traditional treasures lie in wooden display cases against two walls of the dining room: cinnabar and amber; green malachite (“very common stuff,” he says) and uncut opal (“good opal can be more expensive than diamonds,” he says). There’s ruby from Cambodia and an orange slippery shard of salt from his native Pakistan. These and other items he has collected from around the globe are mostly minerals and stones, composed of elements, dug from the earth.
Why do you collect this stuff, I ask him. “The world is such a wondrous place,” he says, turning a glittering nugget to and fro under the display-case light, “And the materials of the world, the natural materials, are so beautiful.”
His collection is not large, nor exceedingly valuable. “I’m not a very organized collector,” he says. But it evokes the many places he has visited—and crystallizes, almost literally, what he believes is a fundamental human desire to collect the earth’s mineral resources. He calls this the treasure impulse. (more…)
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