This lucid overview of world energy is surprisingly devoid of gloom.
—Nature
Amid all the doom, gloom, and denial, here comes a book that promises some good news regarding viable energy resources in the age of climate change. … By carefully analyzing policies and practices already in place around the world, Brown and his team of researchers demonstrate that new energy sources will be commonplace sooner than we think.
—Booklist
“The Great Transition” reads like a brief, breezy synopsis, … but its selected observations, arguments and conclusions are based in large part on years of observational data and deep research. It holds kernels of what the best and most optimistic future might look like if we pay attention and act in sensible ways with the tools and resources now available.
—Daniel Coffey, San Diego Source
The book reception was held at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace on Friday, April 24, 2015.
Along with the great eats and drinks were brief comments on the book by three of the authors: Lester Brown, Janet Larsen, and J. Matthew Roney.
Our thanks to Cynthia Wagner who became our unofficial photographer!
Copies of the book can be purchased at EPI’s website through June 30, 2015.
Check out our events page to see where Lester, Janet, and Matt will be speaking about the Great Transition.
Cheers!
Reah Janise Kauffman
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The Great Transition, written by EPI’s research team—Lester R. Brown, Janet Larsen, J. Matthew Roney, and Emily E. Adams—focuses on a rapidly evolving global movement toward cleaner sources of energy, driven by policy, economics, and the hard realities of accelerating climate change.
The authors note that as fossil fuel reserves shrink, as air pollution worsens, and as concerns about climate instability cast a shadow over the future of coal, oil, and natural gas, a new world energy economy is emerging. The old economy, fueled largely by coal and oil, is being replaced with one powered by solar and wind energy.
We can see the transition unfolding. For example, in the U.S. Midwest, Iowa and South Dakota are generating 26 percent of their electricity from wind farms. Denmark generates 34 percent of its electricity from wind. Portugal and Spain are above 20 percent. In China, electricity from wind farms now exceeds that from nuclear power plants. And in Australia, 15 percent of homes draw energy from the sun. With solar and wind costs falling fast, their spread is accelerating.
In The Great Transition, Brown and his colleagues explain the environmental and economic wisdom of moving to solar and wind energy and shows how fast change is coming.
“The energy transition will change not only how we view the world but also how we view ourselves,” say the authors. “With rooftop solar panels to both power homes and recharge car batteries, there will be a personal degree of energy independence not known for generations.”
Interested in a sneak peek? Check out Chapter 1. Changing Direction, on our website.
Pre-order a copy with us today for only $15 and get your copy as soon as it comes off the press.
For an additional $5 you can receive Lester Brown's memoir, Breaking New Ground, along with The Great Transition…we’ll even make sure Lester autographs it for you! Order here.
Best,
Julianne
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“After careful consideration of my life at 80 years,” said Brown, “and with profound appreciation to my staff, collaborators and supporters, I have decided to step down as president of the Earth Policy Institute and end its work as of July 1, 2015.”
Brown continued, “I believe the Earth Policy Institute has accomplished what we set out to do when we began in 2001, and now it is time for me to make a shift and no longer carry the responsibility of managing an organization. I plan to continue to research and write on issues that I believe I can add to in some meaningful way.”
Until the end of June, the Institute will continue to publish articles and will also be releasing its fourteenth book. The Great Transition: Shifting from Fossil Fuels to Solar and Wind Energy will be released around April 20, 2015.
Written by Brown and his colleagues, Janet Larsen, Matt Roney, and Emily Adams, the book details the rapid emergence of a new world energy economy. The old economy, fueled largely by coal and oil, is being replaced with one powered by solar and wind energy.
The transition is quietly unfolding. For instance, in the U.S. Midwest, Iowa and South Dakota are generating at least 26 percent of their electricity from wind farms. Denmark generates 34 percent of its electricity from wind. Portugal and Spain are above 20 percent. In China, electricity from wind farms now exceeds that from nuclear power plants. And in Australia, 15 percent of homes draw energy from the sun. With solar and wind costs falling fast, their spread is accelerating.
Sincerely,
Reah Janise Kauffman
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So many people. So many stories. Lester has always been acutely tuned to the need to work with the media, because while an author can publish research books, the media is essential in getting the word out. Two media people share today, along with two former colleagues from Worldwatch Institute, which he founded in 1974 and headed for 26 years.
Steve Curwood is Executive Producer and host of Living on Earth. Steve created the first pilot of Living on Earth in the Spring of 1990. He has interviewed Lester a number of times over the years.
Herbert Girardet is an author, film maker and international consultant. His significant connection to Lester is that he was one of the producers of the documentary series based on State of the World 1999.
Marcy Lowe is President of Datu Research, an economic research firm that applies a global lens to regional and local challenges. She worked with Lester at the Worldwatch Institute before returning to school to further her education.
Michael Renner is a Senior Researcher at the Worldwatch Institute, where he worked with Lester. His work focuses on the connections between environment and employment (green jobs/green economy), and between the environment and peace and conflict.
Woo hoo!
Reah Janise Kauffman
P.S. Our thanks to Moser Media for the great video work.
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Bill suggested that I write up a description of what such an organization would look like and send it to him to critique. It should be short—much like an informal grant proposal. Not long after, I sent him a six-page, double-spaced description of the proposed research institute and how it would function.
Bill responded with a few minor suggestions, and I then formally submitted a request for a $500,000 start-up grant. The grant was approved in June 1974.
At the heart of the staff for this new organization, which we called the Worldwatch Institute, were Erik Eckholm, my ODC research assistant, and Blondeen Duhaney (later Gravely), my administrative assistant. Blondeen was a vital force. In 1965, shortly after graduating from high school in North Carolina as valedictorian, she moved to Washington, DC, and began working in the secretary’s office at the U.S. Department of Agriculture. This is where I met her and we bonded immediately. Her vivacity and energetic work style endeared her to all who worked with her. Worldwatch took our working relationship to another level as she became the institute’s office manager—taking the lead in setting up the new organization—and later vice president for administration. We worked together in various capacities for twenty-nine years until she had to take medical retirement.
Newly recruited researchers included James Fallows, former editor of the Harvard Crimson; Kathleen Newland, a recent graduate of the Princeton master’s program in public affairs; and Denis Hayes, the coordinator of Earth Day in 1970. I convinced Bruce Stokes, whom I had met at the 1974 World Food Conference in Rome, to abandon his master’s program at the Columbia School of Journalism to head up our office of information.
Kathleen Courrier, a freelancer, was our part-time editor in the early years. When she took a full-time job, Linda Starke, who was on our outreach staff, became our editor. She went on to edit all our books and monographs. Shortly after she left in 1982 to begin her own freelance editing business, I enlisted her for the annual State of the World reports that we launched in 1984. With those reports under her belt, she was very much in demand to edit various international commission reports, in effect becoming a jet-set editor.
Felix Gorrell, who was comptroller of the Brookings Institution, advised us during the early years and also served as our treasurer. His assistance with investing and accounting was invaluable. Orville Freeman agreed to serve as chairman of the board. In late November 1974 we moved into our new quarters on the seventh floor of 1776 Massachusetts Avenue NW, just across the street from Brookings and the Overseas Development Council.
These early years were exciting. We were fashioning a new genre of research institute, one that did interdisciplinary research. This would not be a traditional economic or international affairs research institution, but rather one whose research centered on the environment broadly defined but that also included food, energy, population, water, and particularly the relationship between the environment and the economy. Our goal was to make our published material accessible to lay readers, publishable in scientific magazines, useful to the media, and indispensable to policymakers. We were caught up in the excitement of this challenge.
We also envisioned Worldwatch serving a worldwide constituency, a goal that only added to the complexity of the challenge. It is one thing to study global issues; it is another to reach a global population with the research results.
Erik wrote our first book, Losing Ground: Environmental Stress and World Food Prospects, which was released in early 1976. Losing Ground broadened the near-exclusive focus in the environmental community on industrial pollution in the developed world to include deforestation, overgrazing, soil erosion, desertification, and other environmental threats in the developing world.
While the book was at our publisher, Erik pulled material from it on the fast-growing demand for firewood, expanding it into the first in the monograph series. Entitled The Other Energy Crisis: Firewood, Worldwatch Paper 1 was published in September 1975. It was a huge media hit, generating a ton of stories, including a front-page story in The New York Times. The key to its success was the juxtaposition of the firewood crisis—affecting a third of humanity, but largely below the radar—with the oil crisis—of which the industrial countries were, at a time of quadrupling oil prices, keenly aware.
To read more of Lester Brown's life, purchase a copy of Breaking New Ground .
Best,
Reah Janise Kauffman
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The ceremony was held Monday, November 16, at Iran’s EPA in Tehran and was the first Iranian festival of environmental books. The award was presented by Mrs. Ebtekar, the Vice President of Iran and President of the EPA. Our own Janet Larsen met Mrs. Ebtekar when she gave presentations in Iran some ten years ago.
Meanwhile, last month we learned that Breaking New Ground, Lester Brown’s memoir, had received the Santa Monica Public Library’s Green Prize for Sustainable Literature.
Cheers,
Reah Janise Kauffman
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"In 1968 when Richard Nixon was elected president, I had been heading the International Agricultural Development Service at the U.S. Department of Agriculture for two years. I knew that I did not want to work in a Nixon administration, so I resigned, leaving office a week before Nixon was inaugurated in January 1969. Much to my regret, Nixon dismantled the IADS. The reason given was that U.S. farmers did not want the USDA helping other countries to develop their agriculture, thus creating competition for them.
I walked away from the Nixon administration, but not from my life’s work. I had been approached by James P. Grant, a senior official at the Agency for International Development (AID) and someone I had worked with a few years earlier when he was the AID mission director in Turkey. Jim had been contacted by a group of U.S. opinion leaders who wanted to start a research organization to focus on third-world development and the U.S. role in it, and asked if he would head it.
After the extraordinary success of the Marshall Plan and the enthusiasm it generated, U.S. public support for international development was waning. The group wanted to create an organization, the Overseas Development Council (ODC), to try to reverse this trend and restore U.S. support for international development efforts. These goals meshed nicely with my sense of what needed to be done.
Jim said he would take this position if I would join him. Jim offered me the position of vice president, but having just been in a management position I indicated a preference for being a senior fellow and concentrating on research. At this point there were many issues that I had been thinking about and wanting to write about. Jim understood. Within a few weeks, we signed a lease for space at 1717 Massachusetts Avenue NW in the heart of Washington’s Think Tank Row, and in January 1969 the ODC was born.
This period was a particularly yeasty time in U.S. history. It was in 1969, that the country made good on Kennedy’s bold 1961 promise that the United States would land a man on the moon during the decade. The photograph of the earth taken from outer space reminded us that political boundaries, not visible from space, are mere human constructs."
While at the ODC, Lester authored Seeds of Change (1970), Man and His Environment: Food (with Gail Finsterbusch) (1972), World Without Borders (1972), In the Human Interest (1974) (for the World Population Conference), and By Bread Alone (with Erik Eckholm) (1974) (for the World Food Conference).
The New Yorker described World Without Borders as “an encyclopedic, lucid assessment of some of the world’s persistent problems … and some carefully documented, highly plausible suggestions for solving them. [Brown] persuasively argues … that the day of the militaristic nation state is over, and that a unified global society is the only hope for survival.” This book was about globalization well before the concept was widely used.
The United Nations Population Fund had asked Lester to write a book for the World Population Conference. “They wanted a book that dealt with the many dimensions of the population issue, including not only food but other resources and the relationship between social conditions and fertility levels.” This became In the Human Interest.
Because no other official document providing an overview of the food situation was delivered to the World Food Conference, By Bread Alone “became the leading source of information for anyone looking for an up-to-date account of the world food situation and future prospects for eradicating hunger.” By Bread Alone and In the Human Interest were written and published just months apart.
To read more of Lester Brown's life, purchase a copy of Breaking New Ground .
Best,
Reah Janise Kauffman
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The Japanese edition was recently released at IKARI’s 55th anniversary event where each of the 600 people in attendance received a copy. According to our publisher, Soki Oda of World Watch Japan, they were “delighted to receive copies and even more delighted to learn that it was Lester’s autobiography.” IKARI sponsored this edition.
Some of the panelists at the symposium, many of whom had shared a podium with Lester Brown in the past, said that “the book gave them renewed respect for him.”
Translation, especially to make it an enjoyable read, is never simple. The Japanese edition is especially readable and was done by volunteers, to whom we send our thanks: Hitomi Tsunekawa, Yuka Kinoshita, Hikaru Hamazaki, Tomomi Takaki, Yukari Kimura, Osamu Kusumoto, and Kunihiro Doi.
The photo (right) is of Masatsugu Kurosawa, head of IKARI, with the book. IKARI has long supported the publication of EPI’s books in Japan. In fact Toshishige and Masatsugu Kurosawa regularly distribute thousands of copies of each book to Japanese opinion leaders, including members of the Diet and corporate leaders.
And in case you missed it, the Hungarian edition is available electronically in PDF.
Other languages in which the autobiography is being released include Chinese, Dutch, Farsi, Italian, Spanish, and Swedish.
Cheers,
Reah Janise Kauffman
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The article and book generated an enormous outcry from China and dozens of conferences, seminars, and studies, as he writes in his autobiography, Breaking New Ground.
"In 1994 I wrote an article for the September/October issue of World Watch magazine titled “Who Will Feed China?” The late August press conference releasing it generated only moderate coverage. But when the article was reprinted that weekend on the front of the Washington Post’s Outlook section with the title “How China Could Starve the World,” it unleashed a political firestorm in Beijing. …
The World Watch article attracted more attention than anything I have ever written. In addition to appearing in our magazine’s five language editions—English, Japanese, Chinese (Taiwan), German, and Italian—it also appeared in abridged form in many of the world’s leading newspapers, including the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and the International Herald Tribune. It was syndicated internationally by both the Los Angeles Times and The New York Times. Among the other major news organizations covering the analysis were the Associated Press and The Wall Street Journal, including the Asian edition. …
One of the most interesting responses was in Washington, DC, where the National Intelligence Council, the umbrella over all the U.S. intelligence agencies, analyzed the effect of China’s growing demand for grain on world agriculture and any security threats that it might pose. A panel of prominent researchers, led by Michael McElroy, then head of the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Harvard, produced a first-rate study of several hundred pages. …
Meanwhile, within China, every few weeks another study was released attempting to demonstrate why my analysis was wrong. These critiques came from such disparate sources as a scientist from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, an official from the Ministry of Agriculture, and an independent academic scholar. Not long after, an enterprising Chinese publisher took a copy of the original World Watch magazine article and a collection of the critiques of it and published them in a book titled The Great Debate Between Lester Brown and China. …
Over time, China’s leaders came to both appreciate and acknowledge how Who Will Feed China? had helped change their thinking. A late 1998 issue of Feedstuffs, a weekly agribusiness newspaper, quotes Lu Mai, an agricultural economist and senior fellow at a government think tank in Beijing, as saying, “Brown seems to have been accorded guru status in high places. ‘He’s like the monk from outside who knows how to read the Bible.’” …
Lester proved prescient in his analysis. China is a leading importer of grain and it imports a staggering 60 percent of all soybeans entering world trade—and it looks like it will continue. The problem is not so much population growth, but China’s rising affluence, which is allowing its population to move up the food chain, consuming more grain-intensive livestock, poultry, and farmed fish.
Janet Larsen, EPI’s director of research, wrote last year on the Chinese purchase of Smithfield, the world’s leading pork producer. She has also written on how China’s meat consumption has grown to double that of the United States where meat consumption is falling.
Essentially, twenty years later, we are still wondering who will feed China?
Lester has written a number of articles over the last dozen years about China, which are available on Earth Policy Institute’s website. Below are some highlights.
Cheers,
Reah Janise Kauffman
P.S. For those of you in the DC area, on Tuesday, September 30, he will be speaking at the Wilson Center in Washington, DC, on “China’s Quest for Safe + Secure Food: Boon for U.S. Business?” RSVP here.
Can the World Feed China?
http://www.earth-policy.org/plan_b_updates/2014/update121
China’s Rising Soybean Consumption Reshaping Western Agriculture
http://www.earth-policy.org/data_highlights/2013/highlights34
Peak Water: What Happens When the Wells Go Dry?
http://www.earth-policy.org/plan_b_updates/2013/update115
Learning from China: Why the Existing Economic Model Will Fail
http://www.earth-policy.org/data_highlights/2011/highlights18
Iowa Eclipses Canada in Grain Production, Challenges China in Soybean Production
http://www.earth-policy.org/data_highlights/2011/highlights16
Can the United States Feed China?*
http://www.earth-policy.org/plan_b_updates/2011/update93
Learning from China: Why the Western Economic Model Will Not Work for the World
http://www.earth-policy.org/plan_b_updates/2005/update46
China's Shrinking Grain Harvest: How its Growing Grain Imports Will Affect World Food Prices
http://www.earth-policy.org/plan_b_updates/2004/update36
China Losing War with Advancing Deserts
http://www.earth-policy.org/plan_b_updates/2003/update26
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There were a number of terrific people who talked about working with Lester. In this post, we are including videos from people who knew Lester as a farmer and who worked through the academic and non-profit sectors.
Angela Kendall was a member of the International Farm Youth Exchange group that sailed from New York to India in the fall of 1956.
Larry Suydam was an agricultural student with Lester at Rutgers. Sometimes he would spend his weekends helping Lester work his tomato farm.
Mohan K. Wali is Professor Emeritus in the school of environment and natural resources (SENR) at Ohio State University (OSU) in Columbus. At OSU since 1990, he served as director both of SENR, and of the OSU’s multi-college environmental science graduate program.
Felix Kramer is a writer and serial entrepreneur working on cleantech. He founded the nonprofit California Cars Initiative (CalCars.org) in 2002 to bring plug-in hybrid cars like the Chevy Volt to market.
Bill Ryerson is president of the Population Media Center and travels around the world. Since 2008, he has also served as Chair and CEO of Population Institute in Washington, DC, which works in partnership with Population Media Center.
Tom Weis founded and heads Climate Crisis Solutions. In 2010, he completed a 2,500-mile "rocket trike" ride from Boulder, CO to Washington, DC, calling for a goal of 100% renewable electricity for the U.S. by 2020.
Always more to share, so stay tuned!
Reah Janise Kauffman
P.S. Our thanks to Moser Media for the great video work!
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On June 22, Emily Adams kicked off the Washington Youth Summit on the Environment with a discussion on food and our global environment. This group of 250 high school students from across the United States and asked lots of informed questions, ranging from what they can do to help the food situation to global policies on population growth. A Summit intern live-tweeted the event. (By the way, the intern had attended Emily’s 2013 Summit presentation and plans to pursue environmental policy when she starts her college career.)
Later that week, Emily spoke to the Global Young Leaders Conference in Arlington, Virginia where she was peppered with more thoughtful questions from high school students, this time from across the globe. The international audience provided the bonus of hearing a diverse set of perspectives on global environmental issues. The next generation of environmental leaders is ready to make Plan B a reality!
On June 27, Janet Larsen spoke at the Climate Security Roundtable at the American Legion in Washington D.C. Rod Clifton, the American Legion member who organized the event had been influenced by EPI’s research, particularly Plan B, in his post’s efforts to mobilize to “support local renewable energy alternatives and green jobs in support of our U.S. Armed Forces, U.S. Veterans, and our Nation.” He is developing “Carbon War Bonds” and sent the fourth issued draft bond to Lester Brown.
A goal that emerged from the meeting is to further engage with other posts of the American Legion and the Veterans of Foreign Wars on the issue of climate change as a major threat to national security. The number of statements from high ranking military and intelligence leaders taking the climate change threat seriously provides ammunition for a rapid mobilization like EPI calls for in Plan B.
In late July, Matt Roney spoke at the third annual Earth 2100 Conference at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. His talk on transitioning the global economy from fossil fuels to renewable energy highlighted in particular the fast-growing contributions of wind and solar power worldwide. Organized by Our Task—a non-profit group dedicated to helping young adults become leaders in creating a more sustainable world—the two-day event featured speakers and representatives from many other organizations as well, including: Climate Progress, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Sierra Club, Chesapeake Climate Action Network, Center for a New American Dream, Population Institute, United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, and Worldwatch Institute. More information, including video of the talks and panel discussions, is available here.
And topping off this busy summer, Lester spoke at the annual ARE Day Summit in Aspen, Colorado in early August. This year’s Summit was titled “Accelerating Solutions for the Great Transition.” The mission was to promote the rapid deployment of renewable energy and energy efficient strategies. Speakers and attendees included Ted Turner, T. Boone Pickens, Colorado Senator Michael Bennet, actress Daryl Hannah, and Dr. Sylvia Earle of Mission Blue. Lester spoke on transitioning from fossil fuels to renewable energy, the focus of his forthcoming book, The Great Transition: Shifting from Fossil Fuels to Solar and Wind Power.
For upcoming speaking engagements, check out our Events page. See Lester Brown at the New York Society for Ethical Culture on September 20 when he takes part in A Global Climate Treaty: Why the United States Must Lead.
Best,
Julianne Simpson
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Of all the crops that we could grow, Carl and I chose tomatoes. Why? For one thing, the growing season of the tomato meshed well with the academic year. That is not to say there was no overlap, because the tomato fields had to be planted in April or, at the latest, early May—well before school was out. At the other end of the season, when school started in the fall, there were still tomatoes in the field. This too was scramble time for us.
At the same time, tomatoes are fun to grow. They are so responsive and productive. Displaying its fruit—some ripe, some ripening, and some still green—a tomato plant is a work of art. And I like the distinctive aroma of a tomato plant. To this day when I see a tomato plant I cannot resist smelling it.
One of the challenges for us was how to finance our ever-expanding tomato operation. My brother and I had an understanding with Pop. As long as we did our chores and got everything done and done well, Pop did not care what we did with the rest of our time. So in the spring, for example, my brother assumed the responsibility of milking not only the cows he was responsible for, but also mine. I, meanwhile, would run a mile and a half to a local farm to spend a couple of hours before school helping the farmer cut his four acres of asparagus. He paid $1 an hour, enabling us to accumulate some cash. It also provided some training, since I was running the mile on the school’s track team.
In addition to picking strawberries and cutting asparagus for other farmers, we would also help at hay baling time using an old truck we had bought to haul hay bales from the field to the haymow. Farmers liked to hire Carl and me because we worked so hard. We also competed with each other. I was the first to pick 100 baskets of tomatoes (thirty-five pounds each) in one day. Then Carl took it to 102. After that, the record went back and forth between us: 105, 107, 108, and then 110. It was no accident that I won the Cumberland County Junior Tomato Picking Championship in 1949! Nor that Carl was selected as a New Jersey Star Farmer by the Future Farmers of America!
In 1949 we bought our first tractor—a J.I. Case two-plow, mid-size tractor of ancient vintage—largely with earnings from picking tomatoes for other farmers. At 10¢ a basket for picking tomatoes, it took 2,000 baskets to pay for the tractor.
In late August 1951, on the weekend before I was to report to Rutgers University for freshman orientation, we faced a logistical problem. While I had a driver’s license, Carl did not. Once I left for Rutgers, Carl would still need to get tomatoes from our farm to the cannery a dozen or so miles away. The problem wasn’t so much the lack of a license, really, because young people on a farm often drove locally before they were licensed. The problem was that Carl had never driven a truck laden with tomatoes stacked five baskets high.
With this in mind, we decided to take a load to the cannery on Saturday, the day before I left. Loading over 200 baskets of tomatoes onto a truck is an art in itself. The body of a tomato truck is designed so the tomato baskets can be stacked in an extended pyramid, stretching from the front to the back. The sideboards enabled us to put another layer of baskets leaning in against the pyramid on both sides to stabilize it. It was a tried-and-true way of moving tomatoes from the farm to the processing plant. Our aging 1935 Chevrolet truck carried at least four tons of tomatoes.
We decided that Carl would drive the truck to the cannery and I would follow in the pickup soon after. He would have to get it in line, because there was always a long line of trucks waiting for hours to be unloaded.
The last stretch of road of five miles or so to the cannery was straight. Carl driving the heavily loaded truck came up behind a local farmer who was drawing two or three implements behind his tractor. Carl prepared to pass and was already well onto the left side of the road when he realized the farmer was going to move out into the center of the road to make a right turn into his driveway. The truck’s wheels went over onto the dirt shoulder and the truck began to lean with its heavy load. Carl pulled it back onto the road, but not all the tomatoes made it back with him. Part of the load tumbled off, leaving tomatoes strewn several inches deep across a swath of the road. He pulled over to assess the damage and wait for me.
By the time I arrived, cars had already driven over the road—and through the tomatoes. But as though they were driving through newly fallen snow, the drivers had kept to one lane, carefully using the same ruts to minimize the damage.
Someone suggested we call our field agent at P.J. Ritter. We called from the farmer’s house and the agent arrived quickly. Taking stock of the situation, he saw that most of the tomatoes on the road were still in good condition. Many were bruised and some were cracked, but it was obvious we had picked them carefully and that they were of unusually high quality. He suggested that we borrow a couple of shovels or scoops from the farmer to get as many of the tomatoes back on the truck as we could, preferably without sand or gravel. He said we wouldn’t be able to get all of them, but we could get most of them.
He requested that we then ask the farmer if we could park the truck behind his barn out of public view, since these cracked tomatoes could become a public relations issue for Ritter. And he told us to bring the truck into the plant the next morning at 5:30 a.m., when they would unload it immediately to minimize the chance of the cracked tomatoes spoiling.
Despite the loss of a small part of this load, we delivered many other loads and did well that year. We were officially tomato farmers. And since we did most of the work ourselves, much of the check that we got in November for all the tomatoes we had delivered put us in a position to buy another tractor—a brand-new one. My brother and I knew exactly what we wanted, a new Ford two-plow tractor. I suggested that he go ahead and buy it. Carl had worked hard and I wanted him to have the experience and satisfaction of buying the tractor.
He went to the local farm equipment dealer, who obviously knew us, but who was not well prepared to sell to a fourteen-year-old. It took him awhile to realize that my brother was serious and that he wanted not only a tractor but also the plow and cultivators to go with it. We bought that tractor in the fall of 1951 for $2,100 with an initial down payment of $700 and with the remainder to be paid in $700 installments in the fall of each of the next two years, a typical arrangement for farmers.
We had started growing tomatoes just when the industry was on the verge of rapid change. After a couple of years of planting by hand, we got a mechanical transplanter. The transplanter, on which four people could ride, planting two rows of tomatoes at a time, was drawn behind the tractor. Mounted on each side of the tractor hood were two drums filled with water that contained a liquid fertilizer. Thus, as each plant was going into the ground, roughly half a cup of water would be released at the same time to provide moisture around the roots of the plant as well as the essential nutrients: nitrogen, phosphate, and potassium. This helped to get plants off to a faster start than with traditional hand-planting.
As our tomato-growing operation grew, we shifted from the local tomato processor, P.J. Ritter, to Campbell Soup, which could readily handle our larger harvests. It is hard to believe today that we were producing and delivering tomatoes to the Campbell Soup plant in Camden, New Jersey, for $34 a ton.
During our first year of tomato growing with only seven acres, Carl and I picked nearly all the tomatoes ourselves. But as I expanded the acreage, eventually to seventy acres (280,000 plants) in 1958, we needed a lot of help with the picking. Our pickers included classmates, friends, and, as we grew larger, seasonal workers from nearby Salem and even some from Puerto Rico via a contract with the Puerto Rico Department of Labor.
In 1958, I marketed 1.5 million pounds of tomatoes, becoming one of the largest tomato growers in New Jersey.
The eight-year tomato-growing period of my life, 1951 through 1958, began during my senior year in high school, spanned the four years at Rutgers, the months I lived in villages in India in 1956, and two years beyond that. I had developed an attachment to the land. Even now whenever I return to Stow Creek for family visits, driving through the countryside with its fertile, sandy loam fields, patches of woodland, and creeks, I enjoy a sense of peacefulness and of being grounded."
To read more of Lester Brown's experiences growing tomatoes as well as other parts of his life, purchase a copy of Breaking New Ground today for our special sale price of $15.00.
Best,
Reah Janise Kauffman
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Lester’s involvement dates to before the founding of the World Future Society (WFS) when he and Edward (Ed) Cornish and their families attended the Cedar Lane Unitarian Church in Bethesda, Maryland.
Ed Cornish established the WFS in 1966 as a nonprofit educational and scientific organization in Washington, D.C. It has members in more than 80 countries around the world.
As noted on its website, the WFS “investigates how social, economic and technological developments are shaping the future. It helps individuals, organizations, and communities observe, understand and respond to social change appropriately and investigates the benign effects of applying anticipatory thinking to society.
“Through its magazine The Futurist, media, meetings, and dialogue among its members, it raises awareness of change and encourages development of creative solutions. The Society takes no official position on what the future may or should be like. Instead it provides a neutral forum for exploring possible, probable, and preferable futures.”
Lester often spoke at their conferences and published articles in WFS’s magazine, The Futurist. His first piece, which appeared in the August 1969 issue, was entitled “The Optimistic Outlook for World Food Production.” His most recent article, “Food, Fuel, and the Global Land Grab,” was in the January-February 2013 issue.
When Lester launched the Worldwatch Institute, he invited Ed to be a member of the Board of Directors as he wanted to have someone with expertise in publishing and marketing.
“When I started working at the World Future Society, one of the first authors I worked with was Lester Brown,” says Futurist editor Cindy Wagner (left). “He wrote urgently and eloquently in The Futurist about the need to make more sustainable choices in our lifestyles. I took what Brown wrote to heart when I decided to move to an apartment building that was within walking distance of the office.”
At the conference, Lester also delivered a presentation on “The Great Transition: Shifting from Fossil Fuels to Wind and Solar” after which he signed copies of his memoir, Breaking New Ground.
Cheers,
Reah Janise Kauffman
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The following is an excerpt from Breaking New Ground: A Personal History that describes this time in Lester’s life.
"One of the hallmarks of the USDA during the Kennedy-Johnson era, the eight-year span when Orville Freeman was secretary of agriculture, was the department’s growing involvement in international agricultural development. In 1964 the USDA, working with the AID, had created a new agency—the International Agricultural Development Service (IADS). Matthew Drosdoff, an agronomist who had been the Food and Agricultural Officer for the AID in Vietnam since 1962, became the first agency head. In contrast to the Foreign Agricultural Service, whose responsibility was to develop markets for U.S. farm products, the purpose of the IADS was to help develop agriculture in third-world countries. In many countries the AID subcontracted the agricultural part of their program to the IADS.
In 1966, it was decided that the agency should be playing more of a policy role, and Secretary Freeman appointed me the IADS administrator. I had no idea this was coming, but I was both pleased and honored.
Two years earlier the agency had been cobbled together very quickly, with personnel donated from other agencies in the USDA. Unfortunately, this meant that the various agencies often sent employees who were about to retire and not their most productive. To help make it a more effective agency, I hired some talented young staffers from outside the department, including I. M. Destler (who got his masters in public administration from Princeton), William Abbott (a White House fellow who had edited the Harvard Law Review), and William Jones, editor of Development Digest. From within the department, I hired Lyle Schertz and Dana Dalrymple.
As the youngest agency head in government, I needed to learn a lot quickly. To help me, I recruited the experienced Mollie Iler from the embassy in Rome, the one who had typed each draft of our agreement with India, as my administrative assistant.
We had a huge range of on-the-ground projects going in thirty-nine countries, including expanding rice production in Senegal, breeding higher-yielding corn varieties in Kenya, organizing farm co-ops in Brazil, and helping the Maasai in Tanzania improve their herd management. Managing the IADS was complicated, simply because we were working with the AID, the host-country government, and officials and farmers within the country.
I headed the IADS for two years, then in 1968 Richard Nixon was elected president. I knew that I did not want to work in a Nixon administration. I resigned, leaving office a week before Nixon was inaugurated in January 1969. Much to my regret, Nixon dismantled the IADS. The reason given was that U.S. farmers did not want the USDA helping other countries to develop their agriculture, thus creating competition for them."
Stay tuned!
Reah Janise Kauffman
P.S. Our thanks to Moser Media for the great video work!
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Today’s release, however, is not from the formal event. Lester has not just been a researcher on global environmental issues over the course of his life. He has been a tomato farmer, a college student, headed a division of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and founded two think tanks. He has worked with the media and he has published over 50 books in over 40 languages.
We invited our national and international publishers to the celebration. Alas, only a few were able to attend. But we wanted to honor these individuals for their commitment over the years, and sometimes decades. So we held a lunch in their honor and asked them to share their stories.
We’d like to share some of them with you.
Gilberto Rincon of CEID, a Colombian research institute, has been publishing the Spanish edition of our books for eight years.
Kiril Ivanov, founder and head of Paper Tiger, a publishing house in Bulgaria, has been publishing since the 1990s.
Wei Lin represented his father Lin Zixin, who began publishing books by Lester in the 1980s when he worked with the International Scientific and Technical Information Center. Since his retirement, he has secured publishing houses and headed the translation team for Lester’s books published in this century.
Amy Cherry representing W.W. Norton and Company, our U.S. publisher, noted that they had been publishing books by Lester and his organizations for forty years.
Some of our publishers who could not attend, posted messages in the birthday guestbook on our website. Please check them out … and possibly add your OWN sharing of how Lester’s work has influenced you.
Cheers,
Reah Janise Kauffman
P.S. Our thanks to Michael Moser of Moser Media for his great video work!
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