Lester R. Brown

Lester Brown was the founder and president of the Worldwatch Institute, a non-profit organization dedicated to the analysis of the global environment. He served as advisor to Secretary of Agriculture Orville Freeman and served as administrator of the International Agricultural Service in that department. In 1969, he helped James Grant establish the Overseas Development Council He is the author and coauthor of numerous books.

Approximately a million tons of oil seep into the seas from freighters, tankers, and offshore drilling rigs each year. Several million more tons of crude products in the form of gasoline solvents and waste crankcase oil also pollute the oceans. The Twenty Ninth Day, 1978.

 

It took two million years for human numbers to reach one billion. The second billion took only one hundred years. Successive billions came even faster, At the present rate of increase, the sixth billion will require only a decade. Ibid.

 

The French use a riddle to teach schoolchildren the nature of exponential growth. A lily pond, so the riddle goes, contains a single leaf. Each day the numbers of leaves doubles - two leaves the second day, four the third, eight the fourth, and so on. "If the pond is full on the thirtieth day," the question goes, "at what point is it half full?" Answer: "On the twenty-ninth day." Ibid.

 

Before long, humanity must choose between preserving the oceans as a food source and using them as a waste receptacle. Ibid.

 

Although not all species have been identified and catalogued, biologists estimate that as many as ten million plant and animal species may coexist in the world today. Ibid.

 

Few of the world's political leaders understand that a population expanding at a seemingly innocuous 3 per cent a year will multiply nineteenfold within a century. Ibid.