Building a Sustainable Society

Written at the beginning of the 1980s by the Head of World Watch, Lester R. Brown, this book, was a clarion call to a nation just beginning to crawl from under the "oil shock" of the mid 70s. With this cautionary tale as the centerpiece of his story, Brown gives us a not so subtle warning of what is likely to happen to us: our modern culture is vectored for an untimely an ignominious death similar to that of the Mayans. When the book was written, he offered a number of helpful suggestions as to how to avoid the impending but almost inevitable coming catastrophe. seas, turning to other renewable sources of energy, family planning, reforestation, development of sustainable transportation systems, etc. However, the best advice of the book appears in the last chapter on the need to change our values from ones of consumption to a new sustainable interdependent worldview. Among the better of these suggestions are: a need to voluntary return to simple living; substituting "conspicuous consumption" for "conspicuous frugality;" redefining national security in terms of environmental threats; and devising a new economic yardstick based on sustainability rather than on obsolescence. A generation later, we have learned to separate our garbage, and select "paper" over "plastic" at the grocery. But otherwise we continue to march lockstep with the corporate interests over the environmental cliff: our gas gulling SUV's get less gas mileage now than they did during the energy-crunch of the mid 70s; salmon fishing has reached its limit; the price of oil is over $110 per barrel; the rain forest of Brazil have all but disappeared; the UN calls for action on global warming continues to be ignored by the largest emitters of hydrocarbons, and so on. Despite all our claims to modern sophistication and advanced intelligence, like the Mayans, we continue to sleepwalk over the same environmental cliff: nothing much has changed over the last 3000 years.