Then a funny thing happened on the way to the market. He spent much of 1956 living and working in villages in India. “I didn’t think it was going to influence me,” he recalls, “but after a year or two, growing tomatoes just wasn’t enough. In India, even then one could sense the coming population pressure on resources. I decided it was a problem worth working on, and that’s what took me from the tomato farm to the [U.S.] Foreign Agricultural Service, where my first assignment was the rice-bowl countries: Burma, Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos.”
In 1963, the same period that saw coverage of the world food issue in such popular publications as U.S. News & World Report, Brown wrote Man, Land and Food, the first of 50 books of which he is author, co-author or editor. It was, he says, “the first systematic effort to project food and population trends to the end of the century.”
In 1974, armed with a half-million-dollar grant from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Brown founded the Worldwatch Institute to research global environmental issues. In 2001, after he’d become chairman of the Worldwatch board, Brown decided he could continue his work more effectively as part of a smaller research team, so he founded the Earth Policy Institute with the goal of providing “a vision and a road map for achieving an environmentally sustainable economy.”
Brown’s pioneering work has brought him international recognition. In addition to two dozen honorary doctorates, his many awards include a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellowship (the “genius” award), the United Nations’ 1987 environment prize, the 1989 World Wide Fund for Nature gold medal, and five years later the Blue Planet Prize for “exceptional contributions to solving global environmental problems.”
Not everyone agrees with Brown—one blog calls him an “environmental liar”—but then Brown doesn’t always agree with his fellow environmentalists. For example, he differs with the Worldwatch Institute, the group he founded, on the promise of ethanol as a substitute for gasoline. “We are facing an epic competition between the 800 million motorists who want to protect their mobility and the 2 billion poorest people in the world who simply want to survive,” he wrote in Fortune last summer. “In effect, supermarkets and service stations are now competing for the same resources.”
This is not to say that Brown is an ecological scaremonger: He sees positive signs, especially abroad. “Sweden is closest to being the model for doing the kinds of things that need to be done. They have major tax restructuring under way whereby they reduce income taxes and offset that with an increase in energy taxes. Germany has done a great job in some areas, forcing companies to recycle the consumer products they manufacture, and we’re doing that now with computers by insisting manufacturers assume responsibility for recycling them.”
Brown notes that “some 40 million Europeans now get their residential electricity from wind farms, and that’s projected to go up by 2020 to 200 million, or half the population of Europe. In Iceland, 89 percent of all the homes are heated with geothermal energy, so they literally import almost no oil now for heating their buildings. Or, if you go to cities such as Amsterdam and Copenhagen, they have designed their urban transport systems to encourage the use of bicycles.”
As for the United States, Brown is pleased by the “boomlet” in the use of electric cars, especially plug-in hybrids. “If we invest in thousands of wind farms across the country, we can largely run our cars on wind energy. The technology is already on the market, and three companies are working on producing plug-in hybrids: Toyota, GM, which is beginning to push hard on this, and Nissan.”
Brown is a man who practices what he preaches—the electric bill for his D.C. apartment averages less than $10 a month. He uses compact fluorescent lightbulbs and overhead fans instead of air conditioning. And when he and his wife divorced decades ago, she took the car. (“She needed it. I got a bicycle.”) But Brown isn’t one to lecture.
Instead, he says, “The most important thing the average citizen can do is to become politically active. Doing something here and there is not enough. We have to change the system, and that means reducing income taxes and raising environmental taxes.”
Brown ponders an uncertain environmental future. “I think we can save it—but we don’t have a lot of time left. I think we may see a citizens’ movement, rather than governmental action, because Americans are more concerned about the future now than at any time I can remember ... [Hurricane] Katrina was a wake-up call, but I’m not sure we have fully grasped its meaning.”
Yet Brown remains optimistic. “Don’t forget, the Berlin Wall did come down—very suddenly and unexpectedly.”
Brown predicts wind energy will eventually be “the centerpiece of the new energy economy. I [received] a phone call from my son some months back. He was driving in West Texas and saw one of the new wind farms. He could see rows of wind turbines receding toward the horizon, and interspersed among them were a scattering of oil wells. He was seeing the transition from fossil fuels to renewable sources of energy. Thirty years from now, those wind turbines will still be turning, but many of the oil wells may not be pumping. Texas, which has historically been our leading oil producer, is now our leading producer of wind energy.”