Lester Brown, the 81-yr-old resource economist risked his career in 1965 when he advised former US prez Lyndon Johnson in saving India from famineLester Brown has spent his career making shrewd projections about the food, water, and energy people need to survive, and pushing governments to respond. None of this math brings tears to his eyes except the time in 1965 he made some calculations and risked his career advising the president of the United States to save India from starving.Brown's eyes misted over as the 81-year-old resource economist recalled the reaction of a US agriculture attache in New Delhi to his discovery that famine was imminent in India that autumn. Few saw it coming, he warned the attache, and the US would have to take extraordinary measures, transporting millions of tons of grain, to prevent mass suffering and death.“If you're right, it's the biggest shipment ever,“ the man told Brown, then 31, in New Delhi. “But if you're wrong, you're going to be a statistical clerk the rest of your life.“Brown, a soft-spoken walking encyclopedia of global natural resources in sports jacket, slacks, and New Balance 785's, isn't prone to displays of emotion. Perhaps, responding to an interview question about his most meaningful accomplishment, he was moved by the audacity of the young man who told Lyndon Johnson to send a nation's worth of food halfway around the world -or just by the impossibly swift passage of half a century .His newest book, The Great Transition, is a counterpunch to the typical environmental gloom and doom, telling of how market forces, often despite policy , are championing renewable energy over the dirtiest fossil fuels.Brown, who grew up on a tomato farm in southern New Jersey , would go on to serve as a foreign policy aid to the secretary of agriculture, Orville Freeman. His breakthrough as a prognosticator came in 1963, when, he wrote a report combining population and food production projections that US News & World Report featured in a cover story .“The conclusion: in most of the world, creeping hunger looms,“ the magazine wrote.When the department received a request from the US Agency for International Development in New Delhi, someone needed to fly over to evaluate a draft of India's five-year economic plan for agriculture. The country's grain production had been failing, with the US sending some of its surplus east to help.Brown describes that 1965 trip to India as if he had walked into a nation-size jigsaw puzzle and started collect ing pieces.The anecdot al evidence piled up and pointed to one conclusion. The country's farmers would fall dramatically short of the grain needed by Indians. Famine was imminent.From whatever data he could assemble, Brown projected a deficit of at least 10 million tonnes of grain below the Indian government 's official demand estimate of 95 million tonnes. Previously India had never imported more than 4 million tons a year. If Brown's calculations were correct, feeding the nation would require a huge mobilization.Working against him, and the clock, was a villain common enough in action movies: bureaucracy . With critical days ticking by , diplomats would not dispatch the message to Washington until they received official permission to do so from their embassy superiors. At last they got it, and Brown's estimate found receptive ears back in Washington.President Lyndon Johnson would say that India's food problem “ought to be attacked as if we were at war,“ according to India and the United States: Estranged Democracies, 1941-1991, by Dennis Kux , who is now a senior policy scholar at the Wilson Center in Washington.The president charged Freeman, and Freeman charged Brown, with drawing up a bilateral agreement that would cover both his shortand long-term concerns. Johnson wanted a policy to solve two problems: avoid the coming disaster, but also set India on a path to independent and stable agriculture. If necessary , he wanted to use the former as a tool to extract the latter. Johnson didn't want to be seen as pressuring India to change its agriculture policies by withholding food aid, though that's what he was doing.In the 1950s and 1960s, India capped food prices so that people in the cities needn't fear emptying their pockets to eat. But the same price cap kept farmers from earning enough to modernize their equipment and practices.They needed the reverse, a price floor. They also needed the state to deregulate fertilizer production.Brown wrote those points into a three-page draft policy for the president, which Johnson immediately adopted and which would eventually be called the Treaty of Rome.The reforms took hold, and the “green revolution“ in Indian food production was under way . “India doubled its wheat harvest in seven years,“ Brown said.