38+ Lester R. Brown Quotes On Education, Vulnerability And Courage

Lester R. Brown is an American environmentalist, author, and founder of the Worldwatch Institute and the Earth Policy Institute. He is known for his warnings about the consequences of various environmental threats, and has written over 50 books on global environmental issues. He has been awarded numerous honors, including the United Nations Environment Program's Global 500 Award and the Blue Planet Prize. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Lester R. Brown on leadership, education, life.

Top 10 Lester R. Brown Quotes

1. Saving civilization is not a spectator sport.
2. No civilization has survived the ongoing destruction of its natural support systems. Nor will ours.
3. Today, more than ever, we need political leaders who can see the big picture, who understand the relationship between the economy and its environmental support systems.
4. The foundation is being laid for the emergence of both wind and solar cells as cornerstones of the new energy economy.
5. The throwaway economy that has been evolving over the last half-century is an aberration, now itself headed for the junk heap of history.
6. Population growth is exceeding farmers' ability to keep up...Our oldest enemy, hunger, is again at the door.
7. The biggest threat to global stability is the potential for food crises in poor countries to cause government collapse.
8. Nations are in effect ceding portions of their sovereignty to the international community and beginning to create a new system of international environmental governance.
9. In today's integrated world economy, ... eradicating poverty may contribute as much to U.S. security as eradicating terrorism.
10. Farmers...can no longer keep up with rising demand; thus the outlook is for chronic scarcities and rising prices.

Lester R. Brown Short Quotes

• Our numbers expand, but Earth's natural systems do not.
• They have also been adopting fuel efficiency standards for automobiles in China.
• Humanity's greatest challenge may soon be just making it to the next harvest.

Lester R. Brown Famous Quotes And Sayings

We can build an economy that does not destroy its natural support systems, a global community where the basic needs of all the Earth's people are satisfied, and a world that will allow us to think of ourselves as civilized. This is entirely doable. — Lester R. Brown

In Mexico City, Tehran, Kolkata, Bangkok, Shanghai, and hundreds of other cities, the air is no longer safe to breathe. In some cities, the air is so polluted that breathing is equivalent to smoking two packs of cigarettes per day. — Lester R. Brown

Rising oil prices have focused the world's attention on the depletion of oil reserves. But the depletion of underground water resources from overpumping is a far more serious issue. Excessive pumping for irrigation to satisfy food needs today almost guarantees a decline in food production tomorrow. — Lester R. Brown

Our early 21st century civilization is in trouble. We need not go beyond the world food economy to see this. Over the last few decades we have created a food production bubble-one based on environmental trends that cannot be sustained, including overpumping aquifers, overplowing land, and overloading the atmosphere with carbon dioxide. — Lester R. Brown

Children whose developing lungs are particularly vulnerable suffer the most from air pollution. For children, breathing the air in cities with the worst pollution, such as Beijing, Calcutta, Mexico City, Shanghai, and Tehran, is equivalent to smoking two packs of cigarettes a day. — Lester R. Brown

Among the environmental trends undermining our future are shrinking forests, expanding deserts, falling water tables, collapsing fisheries, disappearing species, and rising temperatures. The temperature increases bring crop-withering heat waves, more-destructive storms, more-intense droughts, more forest fires, and, of course, ice melting. We are crossing natural thresholds that we cannot see and violating deadlines that we do not recognize. — Lester R. Brown

Socialism failed because it couldn't tell the economic truth. Capitalism may fail because it couldn't tell the ecological truth. — Lester R. Brown

Nuclear power, once regarded as petroleum's natural heir, has become less and less attractive as its numerous drawbacks come to light. Coal, the other fossil fuel, is ultimately as exhaustible as oil. — Lester R. Brown

Another agricultural trend of growing concern is the increased nutrient content of coastal waters resulting from fertilizer runoff in agricultural regions. Augmented by urban sewage discharge in some situations, this results in huge algal blooms, which, as they die and decay, deplete the oxygen content in the water, leading to the death of the fish. — Lester R. Brown

The 20th century was the time when the world turned to use of fossil fuels and the 21st century will be the century of the renewables. — Lester R. Brown

Saving Greenland is both a metaphor and a precondition for saving civilization. If its ice sheet melts, sea levels will rise 23 feet. Hundreds of coastal cities will be abandoned. The rice growing river deltas of Asia will be under water. There will be hundreds of millions of rising-sea refuges. The word that comes to mind is chaos. If we cannot mobilize to save the Greenland ice sheet; we probably cannot save civilization as we know it. — Lester R. Brown

Global food insecurity is increasing...the slim excess of growth in food production over population is narrowing. — Lester R. Brown

The choice is ours-yours and mine. We can stay with business as usual and preside over a global bubble economy that keeps expanding until it bursts, leading to economic decline. Or we can adopt Plan B and be the generation that stabilizes population, eradicates poverty, and stabilizes climate. Historians will record the choice, but it is ours to make. — Lester R. Brown

Each summer, for example, nitrogen and phosphate washing from farmlands in the Mississippi Valley enter the Gulf of Mexico, creating a massive algal bloom covering some 16,000 square kilometers. As the blooms die off, this area-roughly the size of New Jersey-is so deprived of oxygen that no fish survive. — Lester R. Brown

We know what we have to do. And we know how to do it. If we fail to convert our self-destructing economy into one that is environmentally sustainable, future generations will be overwhelmed by environmental degradation and social disintegration. Simply stated, if our generation does not turn things around, our children may not have the option of doing so. — Lester R. Brown

The transition from coal, oil, and gas to wind, solar, and geothermal energy is well under way. In the old economy, energy was produced by burning something - oil, coal, or natural gas - leading to the carbon emissions that have come to define our economy. The new energy economy harnesses the energy in wind, the energy coming from the sun, and heat from within the earth itself. — Lester R. Brown

The challenge is either to build an economy that is sustainable or to stay with our unsustainable economy until it declines. It is not a goal that can be compromised. One way or another, the choice will be made by our generation, but it will affect life on earth for all generations to come. — Lester R. Brown

A sustainable economy represents nothing less than a higher social order one as concerned with future generations as with our own, and more focused on the health of the planet and the poor than on material acquisitions and military might. While it is a fundamentally new endeavor, with many uncertainties, it is far less risky than continuing with business as usual. — Lester R. Brown

In the Middle East, where populations are growing fast, the world is seeing the first collision between population growth and water supply at the regional level. For the first time in history, grain production is dropping in a geographic region with nothing in sight to arrest the decline. Each day now brings 10,000 more people to feed and less irrigation water with which to feed them. — Lester R. Brown

In this era of tightening world food supplies, the ability to grow food is fast becoming a new form of geopolitical leverage, and countries are scrambling to secure their own parochial interests at the expense of the common good. — Lester R. Brown

If an economy is to sustain progress, it must satisfy the basic principles of ecology. If it does not, it will decline and eventually collapse. There is no middle ground — Lester R. Brown

Yet, most of the readily accessible reserves of oil formed over hundreds of millions of years will be consumed within a single generation, spanning the years from 1960 to 1995. — Lester R. Brown

We are witnessing the beginning of one of the great tragedies of history. The United States, in a misguided effort to reduce its oil insecurity by converting grain into fuel for cars, is generating global food insecurity on a scale never seen before. — Lester R. Brown

One way or another, the choice will be made by our generation, but it will affect life on earth for all generations to come — Lester R. Brown

It takes 1,000 tons of water to produce 1 ton of grain. As water becomes scarce and countries are forced to divert irrigation water to cities and industry, they will import more grain. As they do so, water scarcity will be transmitted across national borders via the grain trade. Aquifer depletion is a largely invisible threat, but that does not make it any less real. — Lester R. Brown

Life Lessons by Lester R. Brown

1. Lester R. Brown's work emphasizes the importance of protecting the environment and understanding the consequences of human activities on the planet.
2. He encourages individuals to take personal responsibility for their environmental footprint and to make sustainable decisions.
3. His work also highlights the need for governments to take a proactive role in protecting the environment and to develop policies that promote environmental sustainability.