Worldwatch Spotlights Future Ecological Crises

When Worldwatch Institute released a study on soil erosion last fall, it made headlines around the world, including in scores of major newspapers that had reported on the same study eight months earlier when it appeared as a chapter in the research organization’s book, “State of the World 1984.”

Worldwatch’s success in getting ink for recycled research is remarkable in a city in which scores of older, larger and better financed think tanks, including some such as the conservative Heritage Foundation with sharply opposing viewpoints, compete in the marketplace of ideas and clamor for press and public attention. It reflects both the Washington press corps’ high esteem for Worldwatch’s work and journalists’ growing awareness that gradual changes like soil erosion that develop quietly over decades before reaching crisis proportions are fully as newsworthy as yesterday’s State Department briefing.

Identifying emerging threats to human well-being and bringing them to public attention are Worldwatch’s mission. The independent, nonprofit group sees its role as akin to an Old West scout out in front of the wagon train, feeding back warnings of danger ahead. And it sees dangers lurking even behind seeming successes. For instance, where some analysts cite U.S. crop surpluses as a sign of a healthy agriculture, Worldwatch warns that the surpluses are partly the product of careless overplowing that is eroding the soil and undermining the long-term productivity of the land.

“When it began in early 1975, the institute was something of an experiment, an effort to see whether a small team of analysts with a global orientation and representing no particular discipline could provide crisp, useful analyses of the important issues confronting leaders everywhere,” Worldwatch President Lester R. Brown has written. Sixty-five research reports, a dozen books and tens of thousands of press clippings later, the experiment has clearly worked.

Brown and the half dozen researchers who work with him pull together information on environmental, economic, population, natural-resource and other issues that transcend national boundaries. “Just by pulling together information on a global level we can see things that others miss,” Brown said. “We fit the pieces together and make sense of them.”

For instance, studies showing that deforestation in the Amazon was reducing rainfall elsewhere in Brazil led Worldwatch to examine the role of deforestation in Africa. Its finding: Deforestation, overgrazing and other human activities are drying out the continent and causing a breakdown in natural support systems that practically ensures widespread hunger.

Besides looking at the world as a whole, Worldwatch provides a valuable function in providing interdisciplinary research in an age of specialists. Other than Brown himself, Worldwatch researchers have no advanced degrees or special expertise. But they are expert at distilling the essence of the experts’ findings into easily digestible hunks for journalists, policy makers and others who don’t have time to wade through stacks of original research.

“We are really middlemen taking technical material assembled for a very narrow audience and extracting from it the essence of the situation that has importance and relevance for a popular audience,” senior researcher Edward C. Wolf explained.

Worldwatch isn’t content only to synthesize the findings of others, however. It also has a point of view of its own--a strong point of view. In sum, Worldwatch’s message is that the world is not living within its means, that humans’ “security and future well-being may be threatened less by the conflicts among nations than they are by the deteriorating relationship between ourselves, soon to be 5 billion, and the natural systems and resources that sustain us.”

Not only is food production falling behind population growth in Africa and many other areas, according to Worldwatch, but cropland is shrinking in countries in which a third of the world’s people live. It is disappearing under cities and highways and being lost to waterlogging and salinization of irrigated land, desertification, and soil erosion.

Nearly half the world’s cropland is losing topsoil at a rate that Worldwatch says will damage its long-term ability to grow food, a slow-motion disaster that not only is contributing to Africa’s famine but pushing up food prices elsewhere. Even the agriculturally sophisticated United States is suffering soil losses comparable to those of the Dust Bowl 1930s.

Water Supply Problem

Irrigation demands are depleting supplies of water faster than nature can replenish them. “Water tables are falling, aquifers are being exhausted, and inland seas are shrinking--all signs that existing irrigation demands are unsustainable in the long run,” Worldwatch warns.

Each year the world’s forests shrink by an area roughly the size of Indiana. As the demand for firewood exceeds the sustainable yield, Third World people burn crop residues and animal dung, reducing the fertility of already depleted soils and increasing the loss of rainwater to evaporation and runoff.

“The world is engaging in wholesale biological and agronomic deficit financing,” consuming its capital along with the interest, Worldwatch holds. The result in Africa is “a fundamental breakdown between people and natural resource systems” that famine relief by itself won’t reverse, with similar “breaching of the sustainability threshold” a threat elsewhere as well.

Predictably, not everyone shares Worldwatch’s gloomy assessment. Among others, the Heritage Foundation and the Hudson Institute, which was headed by futurist Herman Kahn until his death two years ago, both dispute Worldwatch’s emphasis on environmental destruction and resource depletion, seeing few problems that market-directed economies can’t overcome.

Julian L. Simon, an adjunct scholar at the Heritage Foundation and professor of economics at the University of Maryland, argues in “The Ultimate Resource” that food and other resources are actually becoming more plentiful, population growth is desirable because it increases productivity and living standards, and what the world needs is not family planning programs but more people, the “ultimate resource.”

Deplores Its Views

Simon deplores not only Worldwatch’s views but its knack at disseminating them. In a recent speech, he contended that Worldwatch President Brown’s views “run directly counter to the mainstream of agricultural economists. Yet he remains the most quoted writer on the subject. How come? How come Lester Brown and his colleagues have the entire ear of the press and the nation?”

Although Simon’s question was rhetorical, the answer seems to be that Worldwatch’s products, packaging and promotion have a lot of appeal, especially to journalists. James Risser, who often based stories on Worldwatch reports as Washington bureau chief of the Des Moines Register until his recent appointment as director of the John S. Knight fellowship program for journalists at Stanford University, speaks for many Washington correspondents:

“The reports Worldwatch puts out are solid without being weighted down with technical material. They are usually quite timely, and they’re written in a style and at a length that appeal to journalists who are interested in the subject but don’t want to spend days and days studying a lengthy and dry report.”

The reports Risser refers to are called Worldwatch Papers. Published as booklets of generally 40 to 70 pages, they are replete with footnotes--one paper has 23 pages of them--but are written in a nontechnical, easily accessible style. Worldwatch publishes half a dozen papers a year. This year’s batch covers the expanding role of renewable energy, ways to increase energy efficiency, ways to increase water efficiency, ways to reduce infant mortality, tobacco’s social and economic toll, population-induced climatic change, and steps needed to reverse Africa’s decline.

Produces Many Books

Worldwatch has also produced a dozen books in its decade of existence. Authored individually or collectively, these books are published commercially by W. W. Norton & Co. The most ambitious book project is a series of annual volumes assessing trends in such global issues as food, energy, environment, population and the economy, and measuring worldwide progress in achieving a sustainable society. “State of the World 1984” was the first in the series and “State of the World 1985,” published this February, is the second. In addition to original material, both volumes reprint Worldwatch Papers that were published previously.

Worldwatch also reprints chapters from its books as separate papers from time to time. The object, as with last fall’s paper on soil erosion, is to accommodate readers interested only in that issue and to gain more attention for the issue than press reports covering the many issues discussed in the book were able to give.

In addition to 3,200 subscribers who pay $25 a year to receive Worldwatch Papers and the “State of the World” annual, about 3,000 journalists, university professors, government officials and other “key people” in 120 countries receive complimentary copies of the papers and the “State of the World” annuals. Press briefings held for each new publication generally attract 30 to 40 reporters, about a third of them correspondents for foreign publications and news services.

Generates Stories

Each paper generates scores of stories in major newspapers here and abroad, while each “State of the World” annual has produced more than 500. Worldwatch research also provides grist for editorial writers’ and columnists’ mills. The Los Angeles Times, for one, based editorials on both “State of the World” volumes. Columnists who have based recent columns on Worldwatch findings include James J. Kilpatrick, Joseph Kraft and Richard L. Strout.

More than 80 magazines have condensed, excerpted or serialized Worldwatch reports over the years. Natural History devoted a 24-page centerfold insert in its April issue to a condensation of “State of the World 1985.”

Worldwatch also gets a lot of attention overseas. Its books have been translated into 24 languages. The Chinese edition of “State of the World 1984” had a press run of 50,000 copies, double the U.S. edition’s. “State of the World 1985” is being translated into seven languages, including Chinese.

A number of individuals and groups buy Worldwatch publications in bulk. Broadcaster Ted Turner bought 1,400 copies of “State of the World 1984” to give to congressmen, corporate executives and others. The Canadian Embassy in Washington purchased 2,000 copies of a recent Worldwatch Paper on acid rain to help educate Americans to the effects of acid rain generated in the United States on Canadian forests and lakes.

Worldwatch has increased its income from papers, book royalties and reprint permission fees each year since 1975. Last year’s income of $476,000 covered 58% of the institute’s expenses. Grants from foundations more than made up the difference, leaving a surplus of $208,000.

$2-Million Surplus

Accumulated surpluses now total $2 million, and Worldwatch hopes the investment income from this endowment will eventually grow large enough to make the institute self-supporting, with no further need to rely on foundation support.

Meanwhile, Worldwatch practices the sustainability it preaches. Resisting the temptation offered by its annual budget surpluses to expand, it has internalized the ethic of careful husbanding of resources and living within limits.

“We have consciously held down the size and scope of Worldwatch,” Brown said. “There’s a sense of mission and coherence in a small organization. Our management philosophy is to stay lean. There is a challenge in doing a lot with limited resources.”

Worldwatch practices frugality by squeezing its staff of 12 full-time and three part-time employees into the same offices in downtown Washington that it moved into 10 years ago when its staff was half as large. It uses its combination library/lunchroom for press briefings, setting up folding chairs outside its door for the frequent overflow of reporters.

Brown sets the tone. Informal (he favors open-neck shirts and running shoes), unpretentious (he is not above making his own photocopies and fetching coffee for co-workers), hard-working (60 to 70 hours a week) and productive (besides managing the institute, he has authored or co-authored five books and 13 Worldwatch Papers in 10 years), the lean, curly-haired 51-year-old Brown is the wonder and envy of his younger colleagues.

Son of Sharecropper

Brown’s seemingly limitless energy, and his interest in the land and its limits, are life-long. The son of a sharecropper and domestic servant, Brown grew up on a 40-acre family farm in Southwestern New Jersey. Not content to milk the cows, clean the horse stalls and perform other routine chores, Lester bought an old J. I. Case tractor when he was 15, overhauled it, and used it to raise tomatoes on rented land.

Even after he left home to attend Rutgers University, Lester and his younger brother Carl continued to raise tomatoes. Plowing during spring vacation, planting on weekends and harvesting during the summer recess, the two boys expanded production to 1.5 million pounds of tomatoes a year, hiring up to 50 local school boys, housewives and migrant laborers to pick them.

“I was one of the largest tomato farmers in the East,” Brown recalled. “I fully expected to farm the rest of my life.”

After getting a degree in agricultural science, however, Brown spent six months in India under a farm youth exchange program. Upon his return, “the challenge of growing tomatoes had gone. The world had become the stage.”

Aspiring to become an agricultural attache, Brown earned a master’s degree in agricultural economics from the University of Maryland and later a master’s in public administration from Harvard--no mean accomplishment for the son of elementary school dropouts.

Became Grain Expert

He joined the Agriculture Department as an analyst, became an expert in world grain supply and demand, then an adviser on foreign agricultural policy to then-Secretary Orville Freeman, and finally administrator of the department’s International Agricultural Development Service.

After 10 years with the government, Brown left in 1969 to become the No. 2 man at the newly established Overseas Development Council, a research group concerned with economic development in the Third World. He left five years later to set up his own research group with the even broader mission of monitoring worldwide resource, environment and population problems. A $500,000 grant from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund got Worldwatch Institute started.

Brown’s research assistant at the Overseas Development Council, Erik P. Eckholm, left with him to become a senior researcher at Worldwatch. Eckholm was soon off on a trip to West Africa, India, Pakistan and Nepal to research a book on how deforestation, overgrazing, soil erosion, desert encroachment, silting of irrigation systems and other man-made disasters were threatening the Third World’s capacity to feed itself.

Although the book, “Losing Ground: Environmental Stress and World Food Prospects,” was well received and has since been translated into 10 languages, it was a chapter from it, on the growing scarcity of firewood for home cooking, that attracted the most attention. Published separately as Worldwatch Paper 1, “The Other Energy Crisis: Firewood,” Eckholm’s findings focused attention on a little-recognized crisis afflicting one-third of the world’s people.

Off to Fast Start

The New York Times devoted a front-page story to the paper. The president of the World Bank discussed it. The National Academy of Sciences started its own study. And Worldwatch was off to a fast start.

The impact of the firewood paper made it easier for Worldwatch to line up additional financial support. The Energy Department funded several early papers on energy, although nowadays the institute spurns government support as possibly jeopardizing its credibility overseas.

Beside the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, foundations that supported Worldwatch last year were the Edward John Noble, William and Flora Hewlett, W. Alton Jones and Edna McConnell Clark foundations. David Rockefeller also chipped in, as did the United Nations Fund for Population Activities.

Brown said lining up money is easier than finding qualified researchers. And even when they’re found, they often stay only a few years. Eckholm left for a State Department job and is now a free-lance writer. Denis Hayes left to direct the federal Solar Energy Research Institute and now chairs the Solar Lobby.

Those who stay find the wide latitude they enjoy in choosing and carrying out research projects well worth the long hours and tight deadlines. “I have more independence than a lot of 50-year-old PhDs at Brookings (Institution),” said Christopher Flavin, a 29-year-old Worldwatch researcher who has stayed longer, seven years, than any other except Brown. Flavin particularly values the opportunity to travel; this fall, for instance, he’ll visit China, the Philippines and Thailand to study rural electrification firsthand.

More Awareness

And how has the world fared during Worldwatch’s first decade? “We’re farther from a sustainable world in 1985 than in 1975,” Brown said. “But we also are more aware of that fact.”

“There’s a lot to be discouraged about,” he went on. “The average person in Africa and Latin America is worse off.” Militarization absorbs an ever increasing share of resources, making many Third World nations “better armed and hungrier than ever.” Distribution of wealth within countries remains skewed and has widened among nations. Intergenerational inequality--by which present generations chew into the capital upon which future generations will depend--has “never been worse.”

The Green Revolution has staved off disaster in India, Indonesia and some other countries by increasing crop yields through application of large amounts of fertilizer and water. But soil erosion has worsened in both the agrarian and industrial worlds. And the four natural systems upon which the future of humanity depends--croplands, grasslands, forests and fisheries--have all suffered depletion.

There are bright spots too, of course. Brown’s list includes a shift, however uneven, away from nonrenewable energy sources toward greater reliance on solar, water, wind and other forms of renewable energy. Electric utilities have increased their efficiency, autos have been downsized and made more fuel-efficient, and people in rich countries are consuming less red meat. “We are moving down the food chain,” he said.

Signs of Improvement

Other moves in the right direction include China limiting families to one child, South Korea reforesting denuded mountains, and Japan and Holland recycling nearly half the paper they consume. Brown gives Taiwan a top grade of A-minus on his international report card for redistributing farmland, upgrading agriculture, locating industry throughout the countryside, and extending educational and health services to rural areas. “Taiwan has done more things consistently right than any other country,” he said.

Brown attributes Taiwan’s enlightened policies largely to the fact that the emigres from mainland China who took over its government “knew they had to behave responsibly in order to survive.” In contrast, many governments “will be driven against the wall before they act--and sometimes not even then.”

Brown and his colleagues see reason for optimism in the fact that “every threat to sustainability has been successfully addressed by at least a few countries. Even without any further advances in technology every major problem can be solved, every major need satisfied. The issue is not technology or resources, but awareness and political will.”

Worldwatch would like to see leaders of poor countries show the political will to redirect industrial growth towards meeting the needs of the poor majority, employ jobless rural workers on public works projects, and adopt a “basic needs” development strategy that spreads nutrition, literacy and health care throughout all segments of society. Senior researcher William U. Chandler estimated in a recent report that providing clean drinking water, sanitary waste disposal and primary health care through paramedic workers to the one-third of the world’s people who now lack these essentials would save 5 million to 10 million lives a year.

Economic Improvements

Improving economic and social conditions, along with making income distribution more equitable, would go a long way toward reducing birth rates, even in the absence of specific incentives for smaller families, according to Worldwatch.

As for Africa, “the continuous, continent-wide decline in per-capita food production can be reversed only by tree planting, family planning, soil conservation, and water resource development on a scale and with an urgency exceeding any international collaborative effort since the Allied Powers mobilized during World War II,” Brown and Wolf conclude in “State of the World 1985.” “It demands leaders who will shift the world’s attention, and its resources, from maintaining East-West hostility to restoring the natural systems that ultimately sustain all societies.”