Environmental advocate to lecture on world population

An environmental advocate who The Washington Post has called “one of the world’s most influential thinkers” will give a free public lecture on Thursday, April 20, at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

Lester Brown will speak at 7:30 p.m. in 272 Bascom Hall, 500 Lincoln Drive, on world population and other topics covered in his latest book, “Plan B 2.0: Rescuing a Planet Under Stress and a Civilization in Trouble.”

Brown, the founder and president of the Washington, D.C.-based Earth Policy Institute, helped pioneer the concept of environmentally sustainable development. Educated in agriculture, economics, and public administration, he has studied global issues related to food, population, water, climate change and renewable energy. His writings on those and other subjects have been translated into some 40 languages.

For 26 years, Brown was president of the Worldwatch Institute, the first independent research organization devoted to global environmental issues, which he founded in 1974. While there, he launched the World Watch Papers, the Worldwatch/Norton books, the annual “State of the World” report, the bimonthly magazine World Watch and the annual publication “Vital Signs.”

His many prizes and awards include more than 20 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.”

Brown’s UW–Madison lecture is the fourth in a series honoring the late Wisconsin governor and U.S. Sen. Gaylord Nelson, a lifelong champion of environmental stewardship and the founder of Earth Day, which is celebrated annually on April 22.

The lecture is sponsored by the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies, with support from the Holstrom Environmental Endowment and the Kemper K. Knapp Bequest. For more information, contact Tom Sinclair at (608) 263-5599 or tksincla@wisc.edu.