Global production of soybeans and palm oil has increased enormously in the tropics over the last two decades. The Tropical Oil Crop Revolution provides a broad synthesis of the major supply and demand drivers in their production; their economic, social, and environmental impacts; and the future outlook to 2050. The planting of these crops is controversial because they are often sown on formerly forested or savanna lands, rely on large farmers and agribusiness rather than smallhold...

Seeds of Sustainability is a groundbreaking analysis of agricultural development and transitions toward more sustainable management in one region. An invaluable resource for researchers, policymakers, and students alike, it examines new approaches to make agricultural landscapes healthier for both the environment and people.The Yaqui Valley is the birthplace of the Green Revolution and one of the most intensive agricultural regions of the world, using irrigation, fertilize...

People power your business--and success can hinge on your hiring, inspiring, and keeping the right ones. As a manager, are you cultivating this vital resource? Is there more you could be doing? Are you just winging it? Every HR executive has a laundry list of things they wish managers knew: best practices that would enable the entire organization to operate more effectively...transforming those managers into exceptional--and highly promotable--leaders. Now in this accessible and practical ...

An Inconvenient Truth of water.“Imagine a world in twenty years, in which no substantive progress has been made to provide basic wastewater service in the Third World, or to force industry and industrial agriculture production to stop polluting water systems, or to curb the mass movement of water by pipeline, tanker and other diversion, which will have created huge new swaths of desert."“Desalination plants will ring the world’s oceans, many of them run by nuclear ...

Paul Roberts, the best-selling author of The End of Oil, turns his attention to the modern food economy and finds that the system entrusted to meet our most basic need is failing.In this carefully researched, vivid narrative, Roberts lays out the stark economic realities behind modern food and shows how our system of making, marketing, and moving what we eat is growing less and less compatible with the billions of consumers that system was built to serve.At the heart of The...

Soaring income inequality and unemployment, expanding populations of the displaced and imprisoned, accelerating destruction of land and water bodies: today’s socioeconomic and environmental dislocations cannot be fully understood in the usual terms of poverty and injustice, according to Saskia Sassen. They are more accurately understood as a type of expulsion—from professional livelihood, from living space, even from the very biosphere that makes life possible.This hard-headed crit...

In this international bestseller, currently available in more than a dozen countries, Maude Barlow and Tony Clarke describe the real and worsening global water crisis, and reveal the plans of transnational corporations to profit from it. The authors present both a compelling case and a practical plan for fighting back against the corporate takeover of this most precious natural resource.

Stop Being Manipulated by the Animal Foods IndustryStop the meat industry from eating into your wallet. Few Americans are aware of the realities of the economic system that supports our country's supply of animal foods. Yet these forces affect us in ways we can hardly imagine. Though we only fork over a few dollars per pound of meat products at the grocery store, we end up paying much more than that in tax dollar-fueled government subsidies—$38 b...

“[Brown’s] ability to make a complicated subject accessible to the general reader is remarkable.”—Katherine Salant, Washington PostAs fossil fuel prices rise, oil insecurity deepens, and concerns about climate change cast a shadow over the future of coal, a new energy economy is emerging. Wind, solar, and geothermal energy are replacing oil, coal, and natural gas, at a pace and on a scale we could not have imagined even a year ago. For the first time since the Industrial R...

The politics of food is changing fast. In rich countries, obesity is now a more serious problem than hunger. Consumers once satisfied with cheap and convenient food now want food that is also safe, nutritious, fresh, and grown by local farmers using fewer chemicals. Heavily subsidized and underregulated commercial farmers are facing stronger push back from environmentalists and consumer activists, and food companies are under the microscope. Meanwhile, agricultural success in Asia has spur...

With food supplies tightening, countries are competing for the land and water resources needed to feed their people.With food scarcity driven by falling water tables, eroding soils, and rising temperatures, control of arable land and water resources is moving to center stage in the global struggle for food security. “In this era of tightening world food supplies, the ability to grow food is fast becoming a new form of geopolitical leverage. Food is the new oil,” Lester R. Brown wri...

Hunger is a daily reality for a billion people. More than six decades after the technological discoveries that led to the Green Revolution aimed at ending world hunger, regular food shortages, malnutrition, and poverty still plague vast swaths of the world. And with increasing food prices, climate change, resource inequality, and an ever-increasing global population, the future holds further challenges.In One Billion Hungry, Sir Gordon Conway, one of the world's fo...