Plenary Speaker

Lester Brown

The Washington Post called Lester Brown "one of the world's most influential thinkers”. The Telegraph of Calcutta refers to him as "the guru of the environmental movement”. In 1986, the Library of Congress requested his personal papers, noting that his writings "have already strongly affected thinking about problems of world population and resources”.

After earning a degree in agricultural science from Rutgers University in 1955, he spent six months living in rural India where he became intimately familiar with the food/population issue. In 1959, Brown joined the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Foreign Agricultural Service as an international agricultural analyst. Brown earned masters degrees in agricultural economics from the University of Maryland and in public administration from Harvard. In 1964, he became an adviser to Secretary of Agriculture Orville Freeman on foreign agricultural policy. In 1966, the Secretary appointed him Administrator of the department's International Agricultural Development Service. In early 1969, he left government to help establish the Overseas Development Council.

In 1974, with support of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Lester Brown founded the Worldwatch Institute, the first research institute devoted to the analysis of global environmental issues. While there he launched the Worldwatch Papers, the annual State of the World reports, World Watch magazine, a second annual entitled Vital Signs: The Trends That are Shaping Our Future, and the Environmental Alert book series. He founded the Earth Policy Institute in 2001 to provide a vision and a road map for achieving an environmentally sustainable economy.

Brown has authored or coauthored 50 books, including Man, Land and Food, World Without Borders, Building a Sustainable Society, Who Will Feed China? and Eco-Economy: Building an Economy for the Earth, and World on the Edge: How to Prevent Environmental and Economic Collapse.

He has received many prizes and awards, including 25 honorary degrees, a MacArthur Fellowship, the 1987 United Nations' Environment Prize, the 1989 World Wide Fund for Nature Gold Medal, and the 1994 Blue Planet Prize for his "exceptional contributions to solving global environmental problems." More recently, he was awarded the Borgström Prize by the Royal Swedish Academy of Agriculture and Forestry, and was selected one of Foreign Policy’s Top Global Thinkers of 2010.

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