 | Outgrowing The Earth |
The Food Security Challenge in an Age of Falling Water Tables and Rising Temperatures
Amazon Book Description
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.
Review
Sustainability and food security are issues that face everyone in an era of political uncertainty and evironmental challenge. This book focuses in ten concise chapters on threats such as water tables, finite amounts of land, and increasing food needs in countries such as China.
Lacking from the book are charts showing statistics about world hunger, starvation, amine, nutrition and food prices. Instead it focuses on
- dust storms
- global warming
- grain stocks
- water tables
- world population
 | "Japan Syndrome" Pattern of rapid industrialization followed by rising grain consumption, shrinking grainland and falling grain production.
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Actual trends in the last 50-100 years that do not support the thesis of this book:
- falling food prices
- better diets
- improved nutrition
- better access to clean water
- less hunger
- less famine
- increasing agricultural productivity
- increasing agricultural efficiency.
More to the point of current problems would be to look at geopolitical interference in the distribution of foods and natural resources.
Related book categories
Nonfiction > Current Events > Poverty > Social Services & Welfare
Professional & Technical > Professional Science > Earth Sciences > Environmental Science
Science > Earth Sciences > Environmental Science
Science > General
About the Author
Lester R. Brown, president of the Earth Policy Institute, is one of the world's most widely published authors with books in more than 40 languages.
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