About Plan B & The Earth Policy Institute

In 1974, Lester Brown founded the Worldwatch Institute, a research center that focuses on promoting an ecologically sustainable society that meets the needs of all people. With the annual reports of the Worldwatch Institute Brown is a driving force in the debate on many issues, from deforestation to food shortages.

Plan B

In 2001 he founded the Earth Policy Institute. The goal is make a practical road map to a sustainable future. He focused his research on increasing the coherence between environmental issues and economic and political processes that have gripped the world today. Lester Brown's Plan B focuses on the following major objectives: to curb global warming, combat poverty, slow population growth and the ecosystems. He doesn’t formulate from what is politically feasible, but of what is needed.

Download Plan B:

• one can download here the full book for free.
• the Dutch summary of Plan B

Our civilization is seriously threatened

According to Lester Brown, we run a serious danger that our civilization will fail. We are dealing with an ever growing list of unresolved issues. First we saw the advance of desertification and deforestation, then we found that the fish stocks are depleted, then came the threat of water shortages and now we are in the grip of global warming. Especially in developing countries these problems are strengthen due to the problem of demographic growth, while soil erosion and land shortages have also increased.

Water shortages lead directly to food shortages, a problem that we will see increasing in the coming years. Lester Brown points to the history where the reason for the disappearance of civilizations often had to do with food. It may be that the weakness in our economy again will be the food supply.

Plan B is a cry for help, but also a plan of hope.

With Plan B Lester Brown tries to address a cluster of problems simultaneously. It is a plea for an approach beyond any conventional schemes. According to Brown the known schemes aren’t able to meet the immense challenges we face. Plan B is an attempt to get going by on four areas simultaneously. Preventing the warming-up by reducing CO2 emissions by eighty percent by 2020. Restoring ecosystems, which simultaneously softens the warming and make our food production sustainable. Stabilizing the population and fighting poverty are two issues that are very closely related.

Plan B is a “plan of hope” because the necessary technology, economic instruments and financial resources are all available -for competing global warming, demography, poverty and restoring ecosystems. The encouraging is that if you manage to do something on one of the four domains, you simultaneously have a positive impact on a different domain. By helping women out of poverty to help them through education, you also brake down the population growth. By restoring the biodiversity, you fight also extreme poverty. By installing a low carbon economy, you improve the climate. The problems are related, but also the solutions.

International negotiation processes seems to be outdated

Given the speed with which the situation evolves, Brown sees international climate change negotiation processes as obsolete. Ratify an agreement lasts years. We don’t have this time. He finds it great that individual countries acting steps by themselves to do what they think should happen.

Brown explains the slowness of the response from politicians on the issue by the complexity of the society. He cites Joseph Tainter, Professor at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, who state in his book "The collapse of complex societies' that to the extent that societies evolve, they increasingly become more complex until they are at a point where they are can not manage the complexity any longer.

Brown thinks that we are approaching this point. We constantly bounce on the interaction of three systems: the economic, the ecosystem of the earth and the political-social system. Each of these three systems is very complex. Even if you only look at the earth's ecosystem and the climate problem, you can imagine how difficult it is to fixe it. To identify and address all these problems simultaneously could exceed our capacity.

Mobilizing the masses like it is war

Lester Brown thinks that we should mobilize as if we at war. We see together with Lester Brown that the complexity is huge, that the need for immediate action is high and that we can not just rely on conventional forms of organization.

Our answer

As an alternative way of managing the international negotiating processes we rely on the wisdom and the will of the masses / crowd and we want to mobilize these forces in an online collaboration platform. To guide the mobilization we opt for Plan B. We want a marketplace for Plan B projects achieve. This marketplace of knowledge and organizations together and is a combination of knowledge sharing (think of the success of Wikipedia), linking people together (think LinkedIn) and matching supply and demand (think E-bay).