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Heifer All-Stars - Lester Brown


Lester Brown - Environmentalist	Ann Rubin - Knitter	Mel West- Builder	Uzodinma Iweala - Writer

Lester Brown

Lester Brown is a familiar name to many of our readers, and apparently you respect his work and words. No one received more nominations for Heifer Heroes than he did.

Photo by Genesis Photos

Lester Brown is best known these days as founder and president of the Earth Policy Institute (www.earth-policy.org) and author of such books as Eco-Economy: Building an Economy for the Earth and Plan B: Rescuing a Planet Under Stress and a Civilization in Trouble. The environmentalist and author grew up on a farm in New Jersey at a time when the Garden State still lived up to its nickname. From a young age, Brown and his brother grew tomatoes. We’re not talking about a small backyard plot and a card table by the driveway. “By 1958, we were marketing a million-and-a-half pounds of tomatoes a year,” said Brown in a recent interview with World Ark. “I farmed all the way through high school and college.”

Brown studied agricultural science at nearby Rutgers University, planning to parlay his experience into a career. “Some people go to college and they don’t know what they want to do,” he said. “I went to college, and I knew what I was going to be doing for the rest of my life. I was going to be farming, specifically growing tomatoes.”

In 1956, the year after he graduated, Brown spent half a year living in villages in India as part of the now-defunct International Farm Youth Exchange. The trip would change his focus and shape his future. “Just growing more tomatoes for the next 40 years didn’t seem quite that challenging anymore,” he said. “I wanted to work on the world food population problem.”

And so Brown began his career in agricultural policy and environmental advocacy. In 1959, he joined the Foreign Agricultural Service. He worked there for a decade, eventually becoming foreign policy advisor to the secretary of agriculture. He then helped form the Overseas Development Council. Brown later saw a need for an environmental research organization. So with funding from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, he founded Worldwatch Institute, the first of its kind. He remained there as president for 26 years. Not one to be complacent, in 2001 Brown founded the Earth Policy Institute.

The institute is a vigilant voice in the face of an impending crisis. But Brown is no pessimist; he is always quick to offer real-world solutions. So what action can each of us take to effect the greatest change? “The overriding need now is for each of us to become politically active,” Brown said. “Lifestyle changes are fine— shifting from a car to a bike, recycling, switching to compact fluorescent lights. These are all useful and important things, but we’ve got to change the system. And we’ve got to do it fast.”

Brown covers this territory in more depth in his upcoming book, Plan B 3.0. Look for an excerpt from it here, in an upcoming issue of World Ark.