when you look at the trends of earlier civilizations whose archaeology we study now. More often that not, food shortages were responsible for their decline and eventual demise. For a long time, I had rejected the idea that food shortages could be the weak link in our modern 21st-century economy. But in fact, I think it is the weak link, and I think that’s where the wake-up call is going to come from. Rising prices spreading a hunger to more and more failing states are the manifestations of our mounting stresses. That requires a mindset that’s very different than we’ve had up until now.

Excerpted from an important interview, please read it in full, by Lester Brown, interviewed by Scott Thill:

“Scott Thill: The book and television program is called Plan B: Mobilizing to Save Civilization. So let’s start with how Plan A, what you call “business as usual”, bungled the job?

Lester Brown: Plan A belongs to another age. There was a time when the market could set prices pretty well and guide the direction of economic development. But in recent decades, and particularly recent years, we have come to realize that many of the indirect costs have not been included in the prices that the market sets. The market is good at setting direct costs. For example, when you buy a gallon of gas, the market includes the costs of pumping, refining and distribution of that gas to your local service station. But the market is not very good at treating the indirect costs of treating respiratory illnesses from breathing polluted air, and certainly not the cost of climate change. The problem with Plan A’s system, which worked pretty well a century ago when the world economy was only a twentieth of what it is now, is that these indirect costs are now far larger than the direct ones. So we’re being guided by the market, but it’s not telling us the truth about the prices or costs. In a nutshell, that’s the big challenge we’re facing in the world today.

ST: Plan B is arguing that we need to save not the planet, but ourselves.

LB: Environmentalists have been talking for decades about saving the planet, but the planet is going to be around for some time to come. The question is will civilization as we know it be around for some time to come? Can it survive the mounting global stresses of rising pollution, starvation, food prices, water shortages and failed states? These are the real threats to our security now, but we’re not responding to them.

ST: Do you think that’s because losing civilization is beyond the comprehension of civilization itself?

LB: That’s quite possible, when you look at the trends of earlier civilizations whose archaeology we study now. More often that not, food shortages were responsible for their decline and eventual demise. For a long time, I had rejected the idea that food shortages could be the weak link in our modern 21st-century economy. But in fact, I think it is the weak link, and I think that’s where the wake-up call is going to come from. Rising prices spreading a hunger to more and more failing states are the manifestations of our mounting stresses. That requires a mindset that’s very different than we’ve had up until now.

ST: This is not encouraging, given our current geopolitical and environmental nightmares.

LB: Well, the other thing I’d like to add is that change comes very quickly and unexpectedly sometimes. I can remember the Berlin Wall coming down, which was the visual manifestation of a political revolution that changed the form of every government in Eastern Europe. Or the collapse and breakup of the Soviet Union, which I had assumed was going to be with us forever. But suddenly, it wasn’t there anymore. Right now, we’re watching a political phenomenon in Africa and the Middle East that not many of us had anticipated, a grassroots political fervor strong enough to unseat the despots that have been ruling that part of the world for decades. It’s interesting because this is not the part of the world where I would have looked for political revolutions, if you will. But they’re happening, and on a scale that would have been unimaginable months ago. So these tipping points come every once in a while in places and forms that are new and different. We can probably explain some of this through social networking and the Internet, but nonetheless these are radical changes occurring in a number of countries at the same time.

ST: Many of these despots were assisted into power by the United States in order to keep Plan A alive. Are our current interventions in Africa and the Middle East geostrategic capitalizations on these grassroots revolutions for access to what’s left of Earth’s fossil fuels? Or are we helping wipe away the twentieth century’s regimes so we can focus on beating climate change, which is the mammoth task of our new century?

LB: That’s an interesting question. My guess is that rising food prices are leading us to the tipping point for both crises. It’s difficult to convince people of the need to stabilize the climate. When you’re talking about rising carbon dioxide levels going from 280 parts per million at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution to 385 parts per million today, few can relate to that. No one has ever seen, smelled or tasted carbon dioxide; it’s a very abstract thing. But people do understand rising food prices, and they do respond to them. So whether it’s a growing dependence on imported food in North Africa and the Middle East, or rising food prices at the checkout counter in America, we can see how that would lead to change that is at the moment very difficult for us to manage.

ST: I’ve seen reports of scientists engineering meat in labs. Do you think that technocratic solution, or any others, can save our civilization from collapsing because of food shortages, as so many have in the past?

LB: The idea of producing food in labs is a bit beyond at least our commercial reach at the moment. It’s not something that’s close to being economically possible. Plus, it happens that nature devised this process a couple billion years ago called photosynthesis, which uses sunlight to convert water and carbon dioxide to create basic carbohydrates. And we have not come up with any important improvements on that process: It’s still the most efficient way to convert solar energy into biochemical energy.

But in looking at the global picture, it is water that is emerging as the principal constraint on efforts to expand food production. There’s a lot of land in the world that could provide us food, if there was water to go with it. And what we have seen is that there are countries whose rising demand for food have led them to over-pump aquifers and underground water resources. Now, you can over-pump in the short run. But once you’ve depleted the aquifer, then the rate of pumping is necessarily reduced to the rate of aquifer recharge from precipitation. So we’re looking at a situation where a number of countries have artificially inflated their grain production by over-pumping.

ST: And their bubbles are bursting.

LB: These bubbles are in countries that contain over half of the world’s people, and they’re starting to burst. The first is occurring in Saudi Arabia, which was self-sufficient in wheat production for twenty years but whose production has fallen by two-thirds in three years. They’re going to have to phase it out entirely in another year or two, because they were pumping a fossil aquifer, which is like an oil field. Once you pump it out, it’s gone. You’re going to see more of those.

ST: Once we exhaust or deplete these aquifers, and climate change perhaps dries out our glaciers, it seems logical that we will turn to the seas for our water. What are your thoughts on global desalination, and how might that complicate our already heavily complicated problems?

LB: We can de-salt sea water. There’s no question that we have the technology to do that. There are hundreds of desalination plants in the Middle East, particularly in the oil-exporting countries in the Persian Gulf. The problem is that it takes a lot of water to produce food. It takes 1,000 tons of water to produce one ton of grain. To make desalination cheap enough to produce food that we could afford, we’d have to reduce the cost of desalination by a factor of ten. Though we’re getting small percentage increases in desalination efficiency, I don’t know anyone who sees us being able to de-salt seawater at a cost that will make it feasible to irrigate large areas of land.

We don’t drink very much water, so for household uses we can afford desalination. At least, people with reasonably good incomes can; the poorest people in the world can’t even afford that. So desalination is not the answer. We drink in one form or another close to four quarts of water a day, whether that’s in juice, coffee or whatever. But the food we eat requires 2,000 liters of water to produce, 500 times as much. And that’s where the water crunch is going to come from, on the production side of the food equation.”