In this new edition, Lester Brown outlines a survival strategy for our early twenty-first civilization.

The world faces numerous environmental trends of disruption and decline such as rising temperatures, falling water tables, shrinking forests, melting glaciers, collapsing fisheries, and rising sea levels. In Plan B, Lester R. Brown notes that in ignoring nature's deadlines for dealing with these environmental issues we risk the disruption of economic progress.

In addition to these environmental trends, the world faces the peaking of oil, the addition of 70 million people per year, a widening global economic divide, and the spread of international terrorism. The global scale and growing complexity of issues facing our fast-forward world have no precedent.