Summary
When the demographer Robert Malthus (1766-1834) famously outlined the brutal relationship between food and population, he never imagined the success of modern scientific agriculture. In the mid-twentieth century, an unprecedented agricultural advancement known as the Green Revolution brought hybrid seeds, chemical fertilizers, and improved irrigation that drove the greatest population boom in history--but left ecological devastation in its wake.
In The End of Plenty, award-winning environmental journalist Joel K. Bourne Jr. puts our race to feed the world in dramatic perspective. With a skyrocketing world population and tightening global grain supplies spurring riots and revolutions, humanity must produce as much food in the next four decades as it has since the beginning of civilization to avoid a Malthusian catastrophe. Yet climate change could render half our farmland useless by century's end.
Writing with an agronomist's eye for practical solutions and a journalist's keen sense of character, detail, and the natural world, Bourne takes readers from his family farm to international agricultural hotspots to introduce the new generation of farmers and scientists engaged in the greatest challenge humanity has ever faced. He discovers young, corporate cowboys trying to revive Ukraine as Europe's breadbasket, a Canadian aquaculturist channeling ancient Chinese traditions, the visionary behind the world's largest organic sugar-cane plantation, and many other extraordinary individuals struggling to increase food supplies--quickly and sustainably--as droughts, floods, and heat waves hammer crops around the globe.
Part history, part reportage and advocacy, The End of Plenty is a panoramic account of the future of food, and a clarion call for anyone concerned about our planet and its people.
Author Notes
Joel K. Bourne Jr. has a BS in agronomy from North Carolina State University and an MS in journalism from Columbia University. A contributing writer for National Geographic, he has written for Audubon, Science, and Outside, among others. He lives in Wilmington, North Carolina.
Publisher's Weekly Review
Concerned agronomist Bourne places us on a trajectory toward what he calls a Malthusian "agricultural Armageddon." In light of the long-term ecological failures of the Green Revolution, he adds the impacts of misguided agriculture policy, chemical damage, biofuel competition, climate change, and the declining purchasing power of the poor to the effects of insufficient food production and exploding population. But Bourne still brings excitement and a guarded optimism to his discussion of projects that hope to confront the crisis head on: Golden Rice, massive aquaculture, desert cultivation and new irrigation techniques, and a return to traditional and organic methods that preserve soil. He also touts creative agricultural subsidy programs even as he maintains that demographic shifts and family planning programs to hasten zero population growth must ultimately be the key factor in avoiding food-related disaster. Bourne thoughtfully lays out a vision of how short-term thinking got us to the current crisis point, and how a longer-term, ecological view, supported by creative science and more careful policy, might still be able to save us. 14 b&w photos. (June) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
Born and raised in farm country in North Carolina, Bourne gradually saw the stark realities of agribusiness and the impact on the economy and the environment. Drawing on his familiarity with farming and his career in journalism, he looks at troubling trends of imbalance between food consumption and production that could lead to more widespread hunger. The green revolution hyper-production of farmland with the aid of pesticides that helped U.S. farmers produce enough yield to feed America and the world came at a steep price in soil depletion and ecological destruction. Bourne points to riots and social unrest in Egypt, Haiti, Cameroon, Bolivia, Mexico, and other nations facing severe food shortages as a result of global changes in trade policy and food production. Noting the brutal truth of Robert Malthus' theories on food and population, Bourne nonetheless highlights promising trends in aquaculture, organic farming, and family planning. Bourne vividly ties history, economics, chemistry, and ecology to this call to action to change the way we look at food production and population.--Bush, Vanessa Copyright 2015 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
THE END OF PLENTY: The Race to Feed a Crowded World, by Joel K. Bourne Jr. (Norton, $16.95.) The world's population is on track to outpace the food supplies on which it depends for survival - a catastrophe that Malthus famously predicted in a seminal essay in the late 1700s, well before the advent of agricultural developments that have accelerated food production. Bourne, an environmental journalist, outlines the efforts of farmers and scientists around the world who are attempting to right the balance. THE SEASON OF MIGRATION, by Nellie Hermann. (Picador, $16.) Hermann's novel focuses on 10 months of Vincent van Gogh's life, starting in 1878, when he ministered to a small mining town in Belgium. His ecclesiastical career stalled, but his time among the miners exposed him to an emotional clarity that later influenced his paintings. The book "is best apprehended not as a conventional novel but as a portrait of a crisis," our reviewer, Leah Hager Cohen, wrote. MULTIPLE CHOICE, by Alejandro Zambra. Translated by Megan McDowell. (Penguin, $15.) Zambra's earlier collection of short stories, "My Documents," showed the author "knows how to turn the familiar inside out, but he also knows how to wrap us up in it," Natasha Wimmer wrote here. This present book, written in the format of a standardized test, is based on the national aptitude tests Chilean students take before applying to universities and poses a series of questions with no right answers. NUMERO ZERO, by Umberto Eco. Translated by Richard Dixon. (Mariner, $14.95.) Colonna, the struggling ghostwriter at the heart of this story, is transfixed by a juicy scoop: that Mussolini was not killed by partisans in 1945, as most believe, but instead survived in hiding. This sly satire, borrowing from outrageous real-life Italian politics, features a larger-than-life leader, conspiracy theories and an almost-corrupt press. DEAR MR. YOU, by Mary-Louise Parker. (Scribner, $16.) This epistolary work is composed of a series of unsent letters addressed to men, fictional and real, from various periods in the author's life. Her recipients include an amalgam of three bad boyfriends folded into a composite character called Cerberus; in another letter, addressed to a future boyfriend for her daughter, she writes, "Make her drunk on happy." CITY ON FIRE, by Garth Risk Hallberg. (Vintage, $17.) Artists and lost children are at the heart of this sprawling debut novel, which our reviewer, Frank Rich, called a "Dickens-size descent" into a bygone New York in the late 1970s, with the citywide blackout in 1977 as a centerpiece of the story. HOLD STILL: A Memoir With Photographs, by Sally Mann. (Back Bay/Little, Brown, $18.99.) The photographer, known for intimate images of her children, reflects on her Southern childhood and upbringing and the call to photography, weaving her drawings and other works into this lyrical account.
Choice Review
The End of Plenty is a look at how world food consumption is set to drastically outpace production. Bourne draws on his background in agronomy and years covering science and rural issues for National Geographic to look at how agriculture has changed over the last seventy-five years. He explores past events, such as food crises and the Green Revolution, as well as current food demands and agricultural practices. His examination of different strategies--from organic farming to aquaculture, from crop diversification to genetically modified crops, and from desert cultivation to new irrigation techniques--provides a compelling look at how farmers are trying to adapt to the greater demand for food. He also discusses how use of crops has changed and the additional pressure exerted on grain crops needed to feed livestock to support diets high in meat content and to produce biofuels to power vehicles. In this important and timely book, Bourne provides not just a history lesson or an agriculture report, but a call to action for those concerned about food shortages, and he provides examples of how some have already started that fight. Summing Up: Essential. All readership levels. --Jenny Katharine Oleen, Western Washington University
Kirkus Review
Hard facts, solid research, multiple viewpoints, and well-told stories combine to give high impact to this compelling look at the challenge of feeding the world's burgeoning population without destroying the planet. Science writer Bourne, who was trained as an agronomist, starts by looking back at the warnings of Malthus, the great Bengal famine of 1943, and the so-called green revolution of the 1960s. The author stresses that while the factors that drove the green revolution have not gone away, crop yields have declined and the damage to soil, water, forests, and climate have increased. At the same time, high demand for grain caused by population growth, biofuels, and meat-heavy diets (the growing Chinese demand for pork rates an entire chapter) has kept food prices high. Bourne chronicles his travels to the Indian state of Punjab, where natural farming is becoming more widespread; to sites in Panama, Vancouver Island, Rhode Island, and Virginia, where aquaculture, a kind of blue revolution, shows promise; and to Ukraine, in his eyes "one of the biggest wastes of agricultural potential on the planet" thanks to civil war and corruption. While water problems get short shriftthere is only a brief section on water-saving technologiesthe author goes much deeper into the pros and cons of genetically modified crops and the growth of the modern organic farming movement, a trend that he views as hopeful for increasing food production without adverse environmental consequences. The take-home message is that there are ways to increase the world's food supply, and smart people are working on the issue, but if population growth is not curbed and if the world continues on its present track, disaster is inevitable. The insertion of notes at the end of each chapter rather than at the back of the book gives it a textbook feel, which may put off some readers. It should not: this call to arms is lucid, informative, and even entertaining, fully deserving a wide readership. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
"This is the story of the race to feed the world without wrecking it," and as journalist Bourne (National Geographic, Audubon, Science, Outside) tells it, a scary story it is. Spiraling world populations-by 2050 there could be ten billion of us-coupled with lagging agricultural productivity point toward a future where grain supplies cannot keep pace with demand, driving food prices higher, hitting the poorest hardest. Social calamity will ensue. The reasons for faltering agricultural systems are multiple and complex, and Bourne, raised a farm boy and trained in agronomy, does a fine job of sorting its many facets and shaping them into an uncommonly readable text. He travels the world-India, China, Eastern Europe, Africa, Brazil, and back here in North America-to report the problems and possible solutions to the looming food crisis. His argument for another "green revolution," without the environmental degradation that resulted from the first, is balanced and thorough. The book begins and ends with consideration of Robert Malthus and his population theories, giving his title a circular structure that neatly reinforces Bourne's principal point: all the agricultural advances in the world will come to naught unless human numbers are controlled. Verdict A hugely important issue receives lucid, compelling treatment in this valuable work.-Robert Eagan, Windsor P.L., Ont. © Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.