The Smithsonian’s Lemelson Center presents a special program featuring renowned author and global environmentalist Lester Brown. This latest installment in the Center’s “Portrait of Invention” series offers participants the unique opportunity to engage Brown, founder and president of the Earth Policy Institute, in a conversation about the challenges of sustaining civilization.

Lester Brown, “one of the world’s most influential thinkers” (Washington Post), has been hailed as “the guru of the environmental movement” (Telegraph of Calcutta). Through this oral history-style interview and subsequent conversation, visitors will get to see Brown’s strong influence on the early environmental movement and learn about solutions to today’s environmental problems.

His unique work in monitoring the health of global ecosystems has allowed him to foresee pending crises and to offer holistic solutions. His farming background, training in the agricultural sciences, and a stint living in the villages of India enabled him to focus on the food/population equation. This later expanded into a broad range of environmental concerns, such as eroding soils, falling water tables, shrinking forests, disappearing species, and melting of the mountain glaciers that feed the world’s rivers.

In 1974, with support of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Brown founded the Worldwatch Institute, the first research institute devoted to the analysis of global environmental issues. While there he launched the Worldwatch Papers, the annual State of the World reports, World Watch magazine, a second annual entitled Vital Signs: The Trends That are Shaping Our Future, and the Environmental Alert book series.

Marc Pachter, former director of the National Portrait Gallery, will host the program. A cultural historian, Pachter is an innovator in the field of biography through his "Living Self Portraits" public interview series. He is the editor of Telling Lives: The Biographer's Art in which seven acclaimed biographers interpret the art of biography. Pachter has conducted public interviews for the Smithsonian with such notable figures as Agnes de Mille, William L. Shirer, Umberto Eco, Katharine Graham, and Walter Cronkite.

The Lemelson Center has a longstanding interest in environmental history and practice. In 1998, it presented a symposium on “Inventing for the Environment,” the proceedings of which were published by MIT Press in 2003 (Inventing for the Environment, Arthur Molella and Joyce Bedi, eds.). Art Molella and the Lemelson Center have since held several other programs both here and abroad and produced publications on the environment and town planning.

Lester Brown’s work complements that of the Lemelson Center in its focus on the connections between the economy and the environment. The environment and the environmental movement have also been important collecting areas for the Museum’s Division of Science and Medicine.

This program will allow the Museum to raise questions about invention and economics in the context of making progress toward solving environmental problems facing the world today.

Mr. Brown will autograph copies of his latest book, Plan B 3.0:Mobilizing to Save Civilization, following the program. Also on sale will be related books produced by the Lemelson Center: Inventing for the Environment, Invented Edens—Techno-Cities of the 20th Century, and The Spirit of Invention.