Time for Plan B: Our Civilization Is on the Edge of a Systemic Breakdown

Lester Brown talks about whether our civilization can survive the mounting global stresses of rising pollution, starvation, food prices, water shortages and failed states.

March 26, 2011  |  

 

 

"How many failing states before we have a failing global civilization?" asks environmental pioneer Lester Brown in Plan B: Mobilizing to Save Civilization, premiering March 30 on PBS as part of its continuing Journey to Planet Earth series. It's a Gordian knot of a question with no simple answer and nothing but complex, demanding solutions, fearsomely put forth as the fate of humanity totters in the balance.

Based on Brown's book of the same name, Plan B is likely the scariest horror film that was ever disguised as a documentary, despite its calm narration from superstar Matt Damon. That's because the acclaimed environmentalist has deeply studied the variety of environmental and geopolitical tipping points we are fast approaching, and found that we're headed for a seriously dark dystopia if we don't turn civilization as we know it around, and fast. A catastrophic confluence of food and water shortages, overpopulation and pollution, collapsed governments and communities and more natural disasters than Roland Emmerich can dream up await us on the other side of Plan A, which Brown calls "business of usual."

"Environmentalists have been talking for decades about saving the planet, but the planet is going to be around for some time to come," Brown told AlterNet by phone from his Washington D.C. office at the Earth Policy Institute, which he founded at the turn of the century after decades of public and private service in the name of sustainability. "The question is will civilization as we know it be around for some time to come? Can it survive the mounting global stresses of rising pollution, starvation, food prices, water shortages and failed states? 

These are the real threats to our security now, but we're not responding to them."

In a sense, we are without knowing it. Japan's bungled response to a mounting nuclear crisis, thanks to one of Earth’s most destabilizing earthquakes and tsunamis, has in a cosmological eyeblink reset the entire world's nuclear ambition. Uprisings in hotspots like Egypt, Libya, Bahrain, Yemen, Saudi Arabia and more, compounded by America's continuing quagmires in Iraq and Afghanistan, are squarely knitting together civilization's crappy experiments like preemptive war, biofuels and light-speed financial stratagems into one titanic mess that is demanding new theories of cleanup.

It's no longer intellectually feasible to consider any of these events as separate, because they, like the warming climate, are interconnected nightmares that are keeping us more awake than ever, whether we like it or not. And no matter how we spin them, Plan B argues, we're eventually all going to have to work together to survive what is without a doubt an existential crisis of historical proportions. Only the depth and vigor of our mutual efforts and understanding separate us and every other failed civilization in the planet's incomprehensibly expansive history.

But after 77 years spent on Earth, most of them trying to educate its inhabitants on the dangers of taking its astronomically singular bounty for granted, the soft-spoken Brown remains a cautious optimist. That's a comforting sign for those of us at our wits' end and wondering when the rest of civilization will get its ass in gear to forestall what passes for a collective execution.

"Change comes very quickly and unexpectedly sometimes," Brown said. "The question is whether we can turn things around quickly enough. But I don't think we have a lot of time. Time is our scarcest resource."

I picked Brown's deeply experienced brain on geopolitical and environmental change, Japan's nuclear crisis, China's powerhouse green economy, food and water scarcity, technological bandaids like desalination and lab-grown meat and much more. Taken together with Plan B's accessible yet apocalyptic programming, it points the way forward for a civilization on the edge of a systemic breakdown.

Lester Brown: Plan A belongs to another age. There was a time when the market could set prices pretty well and guide the direction of economic development. But in recent decades, and particularly recent years, we have come to realize that many of the indirect costs have not been included in the prices that the market sets. The market is good at setting direct costs. For example, when you buy a gallon of gas, the market includes the costs of pumping, refining and distribution of that gas to your local service station. But the market is not very good at treating the indirect costs of treating respiratory illnesses from breathing polluted air, and certainly not the cost of climate change. The problem with Plan A's system, which worked pretty well a century ago when the world economy was only a twentieth of what it is now, is that these indirect costs are now far larger than the direct ones. So we're being guided by the market, but it's not telling us the truth about the prices or costs. In a nutshell, that's the big challenge we're facing in the world today.

ST: Plan B is arguing that we need to save not the planet, but ourselves.

LB: Environmentalists have been talking for decades about saving the planet, but the planet is going to be around for some time to come. The question is will civilization as we know it be around for some time to come? Can it survive the mounting global stresses of rising pollution, starvation, food prices, water shortages and failed states? These are the real threats to our security now, but we're not responding to them.

ST: Do you think that's because losing civilization is beyond the comprehension of civilization itself?

LB: That's quite possible, when you look at the trends of earlier civilizations whose archaeology we study now. More often that not, food shortages were responsible for their decline and eventual demise. For a long time, I had rejected the idea that food shortages could be the weak link in our modern 21st-century economy. But in fact, I think it is the weak link, and I think that's where the wake-up call is going to come from. Rising prices spreading a hunger to more and more failing states are the manifestations of our mounting stresses. That requires a mindset that's very different than we've had up until now.

ST: This is not encouraging, given our current geopolitical and environmental nightmares.

LB: Well, the other thing I'd like to add is that change comes very quickly and unexpectedly sometimes. I can remember the Berlin Wall coming down, which was the visual manifestation of a political revolution that changed the form of every government in Eastern Europe. Or the collapse and breakup of the Soviet Union, which I had assumed was going to be with us forever. But suddenly, it wasn't there anymore. Right now, we're watching a political phenomenon in Africa and the Middle East that not many of us had anticipated, a grassroots political fervor strong enough to unseat the despots that have been ruling that part of the world for decades. It's interesting because this is not the part of the world where I would have looked for political revolutions, if you will. But they're happening, and on a scale that would have been unimaginable months ago. So these tipping points come every once in a while in places and forms that are new and different. We can probably explain some of this through social networking and the Internet, but nonetheless these are radical changes occurring in a number of countries at the same time.

ST: Many of these despots were assisted into power by the United States in order to keep Plan A alive. Are our current interventions in Africa and the Middle East geostrategic capitalizations on these grassroots revolutions for access to what's left of Earth's fossil fuels? Or are we helping wipe away the 20th century's regimes so we can focus on beating climate change, which is the mammoth task of our new century? 

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