Outgrowing the Earth: The Food Security Challenge in an Age of Falling Water Tables and Rising Temperatures
- Submitted by: Love Knowledge
- Category: Environment
Outgrowing the Earth: The Food Security Challenge in an Age of Falling Water Tables and Rising Temperatures
How human demands are outstripping the earth’s capacities―and what we need to do about it.
Ever since 9/11, many have considered al Queda to be the leading threat to global security, but falling water tables in countries that contain more than half the world’s people and rising temperatures worldwide pose a far more serious threat. Spreading water shortages and crop-withering heat waves are shrinking grain harvests in more and more countries, making it difficult for the world’s farmers to feed 70 million more people each year. The risk is that tightening food supplies could drive up food prices, destabilizing governments in low-income grain-importing countries and disrupting global economic progress. Future security, Brown says, now depends on raising water productivity, stabilizing climate by moving beyond fossil fuels, and stabilizing population by filling the family planning gap and educating young people everywhere.
If Osama bin Laden and his colleagues succeed in diverting our attention from the real threats to our future security, they may reach their goals for reasons that even they have not imagined.
List Price: $ 15.95
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Customer Reviews 28 of 33 people found the following review helpful wake up call, February 27, 2005 By wilson harris (canada) – See all my reviews this is an excellent and well written overview of the many challenges facing the world as it faces increasing demands for food and decreasing food supplies due to factors such as urbanization, global warming, increased population, water shortages. the author presents the issues in a factual and articulate manner without seeking to be too alarmist or anti-business. the book is short on rhetoric but full of relevant data from which the reader can form his/her own conclusions. it makes you think about food in an entirely new perpsective.
 Fascinating Overview of the Food Security Challenge, December 5, 2008 By Daniel Lobo (Washington, DC More often than not.) – See all my reviews Verified Purchase(What’s this?)
Quite the volume to approach the essential and much misunderstood issue of food security. Critical reading to develop an argument for policy chance and avoid, or lessen, the crisis. The book is dated 2004 and like it suggests there is a strong feeling to expand and update figures and analysis in the face of recent developments. Much of that update points to the Earth Policy Institute where Lester Brown is President, but there is much from him, and plenty other authors to add to the debate.
While one is left with little doubt about the severity of the demands on the earth’s capacity, something is lacking by way of helping to make a strong public argument, one that will raise actual social awareness. But that is not so much a flaw of the book as a challenge of a topic that for its importance seems to be placed on the periphery of public concern. On a personal planning note, I am particularly intrigued by the validity of the argument offered by food security regarding urban density. Urban density has been typically misconstrued as an ideological necessity, either romanticizing the idea of the city to support it, or defending individual liberty against central planning to defend sprawl. Here not only the environmental argument is strengthen, but a solid line of thinking emerges since sprawl is an essential cause of the decrease of croplands in particular by the paving for roads, highways, parking lots and its related lifestyle. Density would be a remedy to that, although that would be far from solving on its own the huge sustainability challenges that urbanization faces. enlightening review of the upcoming global food crisis, January 2, 2007 By John G. Curington – See all my reviews 
“Outgrowing the Earth” is another great contribution by Lester Brown. In ten concise chapters the author reviews the relationship between continuing human population growth and the finite land and water resources of the planet. I found the discussion of falling water tables especially interesting and important. I was also glad to see the increasing food needs of China as well as the potential for increasing food production in Brazil were both covered from several angles. There were also extensive endnotes and a decent index, both of which I found useful. In summary, this is another important and well-researched publication for anyone interested in issues of food security in these times of diminishing fuel reserves, rising temperatures, and falling water tables.
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