Plan B - the Film

I don't know if the DC environmental film festival saved the best for last, but the global premiere of "Plan B" was an excellent picture for the festival's final day. "Plan B" is the film version of the book with the same name by Lester R. Brown. Brown, a renowned environmentalist, travels all over the globe to warn for a collapse of civilization if it continues on the "fossil fuel dependent, automobile centered, throwaway" path it is on. That is Plan A. Plan B is his alternative, world-saving route. This may sound like the next climate alarmist movie, after Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth" or DiCaprio's "11th Hour," and alarmist it sure is, but it's different. Plan B turns your attention to food as the critical link in national and global stability. In multiple countries around the world where the state has failed (e.g., Somalia, Sudan), food insecurity played a pivotal role in the failure. So far, those cases of failing states have been isolated ones that took place in very poor countries, safe to ignore for the developed world. But Brown says we'd better watch them, because they could represent sneak peeks into the future, if global food security is increasingly stressed by a growing population, increased affluence, demand for biofuels and continued insults on production-sustaining natural resources, of which climate change is probably the most urgent one. Wherever he travels, Brown now asks the question: How many failing states does it take before global civilization fails? If Brown is right in that we'll see the number of failed states increase because of larger, systemic, and often environmental, causes that are not confined to the failing state itself, we may find ourselves ever more involved in dealing with social turmoil and conflicts, with ever less resources (attention, money) available to deal with the root causes. Hungry people that turn to the streets to protest, will probably not call for CO2 emissions reductions. The window of opportunity for a gradual and peaceful transition to sustainability may rapidly close. Plan B seems the safer bet to me.