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Like many environmentalists, Lester Brown is worried.

In his new book World on the Edge, released this week, Brown says human mankind has pushed civilization to the brink of collapse by bleeding aquifers dry and overplowing land to feed an ever-growing population, while overloading the atmosphere with carbon dioxide.

If we continue to sap Earth's natural resources, "civilizational collapse is no longer a matter of whether but when", said Brown, the founder of Worldwatch and the Earth Policy Institute, which both seek to create a sustainable society.

What distinguishes World on the Edge from his dozens of other books is "the sense of urgency", Brown said. "Things could start unraveling at any time now and it's likely to start on the food front.

"We've got to get our act together quickly. We don't have generations or even decades - we're one poor harvest away from chaos," he said.

"We have been talking for decades about saving the planet, but the question now is, can we save civilization?"

In World on the Edge, Brown points to warning signs and lays out arguments for why he believes the cause of the chaos will be the unsustainable way that human mankind is going about producing more and more food.

Resources are already beginning to be depleted, and that could cause a global "food bubble" created by overusing land and water to meet the exponential growth in demand for food - grain, in particular - to burst.

In Lesotho, the grain harvest has dropped by more than half over the last decade or two because of soil erosion, Brown said. In Saudi Arabia, grain supplies are shrinking as a fossil aquifer drilled in the 1970s to sustain domestic grain production is running dry after years of "overpumping" to meet the needs of a population that wants to consume more meat and poultry.

Global warming is also impacting the global supply of grain, which Brown calls the foundation of the world food economy.

Every one degree rise above the normal temperature results in a 10 percent fall in grain yields, something that was painfully visible in Russia last year, where a seven-week heatwave killed tens of thousands and caused the grain harvest to shrink by 40 percent.

Food prices soared in Russia as a result of the poor harvest, and the country - which is one of the top wheat exporters in the world - cut off grain exports.

Different grains are staple foods in most of the world, and foods like meat and dairy products are "grain-intensive".

It takes 3.2 kg of grain fed to a cow to produce a pound of beef, and around 1.8 kg of grain to produce 450 grams of cheese, Brown said.

In World on the Edge, Brown paints a grim picture of how a failed harvest could spark a grain shortage that would send food prices skyrocketing, cause hunger to spread, governments to collapse and states to fail.

Questions:

1. Who is saying the world is ‘one bad harvest away from chaos’?

2. What are the reasons given?

3. What is the name of Brown’s Book?

Answers:

1. Lester Brown.

2. Overfarming land and overuse of aquifers.

3. World on the Edge.

去聽寫專區(qū)一展身手

（中國日?qǐng)?bào)網(wǎng)英語點(diǎn)津 Helen 編輯）

Todd Balazovic is a reporter for the Metro Section of China Daily. Born in Mineapolis Minnesota in the US, he graduated from Central Michigan University and has worked for the China Daily for one year.