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Regenesis. Jak wyżywić świat nie pożerając planety
A co, jeśli największym problemem nie jest to skąd bierzemy energię, tylko to w jaki sposób się żywimy?
Na całym świecie uprawy roli i hodowla zwierząt wyniszczają naturalne siedliska zwierząt, zmniejszają zasoby wody pitnej, zanieczyszczają oceany i przyspieszają zjawisko ocieplenia klimatu. Rolnictwo jest największą na świecie przyczyną niszczenia środowiska. Mimo to miliony ludzi nadal głodują, a ceny żywności rosną szybciej niż kiedykolwiek.
George Monbiot, dziennikarza „Guardiana”, aktywista i ekspert klimatyczny oraz bestsellerowy autor przekonuje, że nie uratujemy klimatu, jeśli nie dokonamy rewolucji żywnościowej oraz pokazuje jak możemy to zrobić. Niezbędną technologię mamy już na stole.
Autor podróżuje po świecie, aby poznać ludzi, którzy kochają ziemię i przyrodę oraz odkrywają rewolucyjne metody uprawy owoców, warzyw i zbóż wieloletnich. Spotyka się też z naukowcami, będących pionierami w syntetyzowaniu nowych form białka i tłuszczów, dzięki którym możemy produkować obfite, tanie i zdrowe pożywienie, jednocześnie przywracając naturze rozległe i dzikie połacie ziemi.
Regenesis to zapierająca dech w piersiach wizja przyszłości żywienia ludzkości. Monbiot pokazuje jak lepsze zrozumienie świata może pozwolić nam na wyprodukowanie większej ilości żywności i znacząco ograniczyć szkodliwość rolnictwa.
Na całym świecie uprawy roli i hodowla zwierząt wyniszczają naturalne siedliska zwierząt, zmniejszają zasoby wody pitnej, zanieczyszczają oceany i przyspieszają zjawisko ocieplenia klimatu. Rolnictwo jest największą na świecie przyczyną niszczenia środowiska. Mimo to miliony ludzi nadal głodują, a ceny żywności rosną szybciej niż kiedykolwiek.
George Monbiot, dziennikarza „Guardiana”, aktywista i ekspert klimatyczny oraz bestsellerowy autor przekonuje, że nie uratujemy klimatu, jeśli nie dokonamy rewolucji żywnościowej oraz pokazuje jak możemy to zrobić. Niezbędną technologię mamy już na stole.
Autor podróżuje po świecie, aby poznać ludzi, którzy kochają ziemię i przyrodę oraz odkrywają rewolucyjne metody uprawy owoców, warzyw i zbóż wieloletnich. Spotyka się też z naukowcami, będących pionierami w syntetyzowaniu nowych form białka i tłuszczów, dzięki którym możemy produkować obfite, tanie i zdrowe pożywienie, jednocześnie przywracając naturze rozległe i dzikie połacie ziemi.
Regenesis to zapierająca dech w piersiach wizja przyszłości żywienia ludzkości. Monbiot pokazuje jak lepsze zrozumienie świata może pozwolić nam na wyprodukowanie większej ilości żywności i znacząco ograniczyć szkodliwość rolnictwa.
472 pages, Paperback
First published August 2, 2022
About the author
George Monbiot
33 books950 followersGeorge Joshua Richard Monbiot is a British writer known for his environmental and political activism.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 387 reviews
June 24, 2022
We have the resources to end world hunger. We have the means to farm sustainably and to protect the environment. We have the means to regenerate the natural word we continue to destroy. The answers are all right in front of us. Monbiot sees them too and he offers a highly compelling case for them. I urge you to listen and to adopt them where you can.
The truth is we could end so many of the word’s problems by adopting a plant-based diet. We would save on resources, land usage and pollution. Not to mention the ending of animal death on an unimaginable scale. Although there has been a huge amount of progress in accepting these facts over the last decade, I still find it baffling that they receive so much resistance. What stops us from understanding that change is needed? Why can’t we evolve and become better? The future of life on earth is at risk.
The situation is made even worse when we consider the mass bail out we provide to the animal agricultural industry. Farm subsidies are paid out every year by the world’s governments to landowners who are farming the most unsustainable of foods: animals. The taxpayer is bailing out the failing industry, which is testimony to the inefficient and uneconomic process it provides. Why are we doing this? Why are we sticking to this backwards and destructive system that really needs to go? These payments are the most regressive use of public spending on earth today.
Central to this book is a strong feeling of annoyance and frustration, and it has come from the knowledge that we have the means to change but we are slow to do so. The answers are here right in front of us, and we need to wake up and listen to them. I find it hard to talk about this topic without becoming annoyed myself because the situation is just so absurd. And it is great to see so many writers addressing this subject and promoting the benefits of plant-based living. Things are slowly changing.
This is an exceptionally well researched and argued piece of writing, free from bias and written by a journalist who has considered all the facts. It's persuasive and it offers a compelling case about the necessity of change.
___________________________________
You can connect with me on social media via My Linktree.
__________________________________
The truth is we could end so many of the word’s problems by adopting a plant-based diet. We would save on resources, land usage and pollution. Not to mention the ending of animal death on an unimaginable scale. Although there has been a huge amount of progress in accepting these facts over the last decade, I still find it baffling that they receive so much resistance. What stops us from understanding that change is needed? Why can’t we evolve and become better? The future of life on earth is at risk.
The situation is made even worse when we consider the mass bail out we provide to the animal agricultural industry. Farm subsidies are paid out every year by the world’s governments to landowners who are farming the most unsustainable of foods: animals. The taxpayer is bailing out the failing industry, which is testimony to the inefficient and uneconomic process it provides. Why are we doing this? Why are we sticking to this backwards and destructive system that really needs to go? These payments are the most regressive use of public spending on earth today.
Central to this book is a strong feeling of annoyance and frustration, and it has come from the knowledge that we have the means to change but we are slow to do so. The answers are here right in front of us, and we need to wake up and listen to them. I find it hard to talk about this topic without becoming annoyed myself because the situation is just so absurd. And it is great to see so many writers addressing this subject and promoting the benefits of plant-based living. Things are slowly changing.
This is an exceptionally well researched and argued piece of writing, free from bias and written by a journalist who has considered all the facts. It's persuasive and it offers a compelling case about the necessity of change.
___________________________________
You can connect with me on social media via My Linktree.
__________________________________
November 13, 2022
Regenesis is an extremely well researched and hard-hitting book. It is far more comprehensive on what has happened to the surface of our planet than any other book I have read. There are a lot of new ideas – all of which are worth exploring and of vital importance for governments, food industry, farmers and food consumers.
George Monbiot starts with a fascinating look at our soil – the richness of life it contains (bugs, bacteria etc) which most of us are largely unaware of. Ploughing, fertilizers, livestock and poor planning has degraded the planet’s surface to an alarming degree. While meeting the food demands of a growing population is by itself challenging, it will be even more so with global warming set to take a toll. However, though we have the means to avert it, progress is limited. The meat industry is one of the biggest culprits but is extremely influential with governments and very cleverly keeps people hooked to their products. In contrast to plant protein, beef and lamb protein requires 80 times the land, and degrades the atmosphere with methane emissions and uses up foodgrains which could feed people. The evidence also points to plant protein being healthier. But the industry has deep pockets and is able to bulldoze governments for subsidies – so is able to sell products fairly cheap. In contrast, plant alternative startups face an unequal playing field. As a result, healthy eating is today 3-5 times more expensive. Monbiot mentions that if the government were to subsidize fruit, vegetables and nuts – we would have a far healthier planet with fewer obese people and also cut many serious ailments. The same holds for dairy – milk has been positioned as a vital health drink but only about ~3.5% of the volume has any nutritional value. The meat industry also plays on the fact that habits are difficult to change and most people approach their food habits like religion; however unhealthy it is – they defend it and try to convert others to their ways. Monbiot says that typically the tipping point is reached after the % of population manages to reach 25%.
Monbiot meets several experts and farmers who are trying new ideas. This makes for fascinating reading and a lot of it is also surprising – ploughing and fertilizers may not be necessary and there are other ways to keep your soil healthy and increase your yield. There are also some interesting facts – farmers irrigating their land in East India and Bangladesh lead to some additional rainfall in East Africa! If you grow your own food or aspire to, some of the later sections have new ideas well worth pursuing.
The below is a quote I came across recently.
“Don't eat anything your great grandmother wouldn't recognize as food” – Michael Pollan
Monbiot also refers to this and takes off on this and argues that we need to make use of the new knowledge we acquire rather than this premise. I agree with him but think he is missing an important point in the intent behind this quote – processed food, industrialized farming has wreaked havoc on our planet.
This book was an eye-opener in many ways and would say is vital reading. The arguments in the book for an urgent need for change is very compelling.
Thanks to Netgalley, the publisher and author for a free electronic review copy.
George Monbiot starts with a fascinating look at our soil – the richness of life it contains (bugs, bacteria etc) which most of us are largely unaware of. Ploughing, fertilizers, livestock and poor planning has degraded the planet’s surface to an alarming degree. While meeting the food demands of a growing population is by itself challenging, it will be even more so with global warming set to take a toll. However, though we have the means to avert it, progress is limited. The meat industry is one of the biggest culprits but is extremely influential with governments and very cleverly keeps people hooked to their products. In contrast to plant protein, beef and lamb protein requires 80 times the land, and degrades the atmosphere with methane emissions and uses up foodgrains which could feed people. The evidence also points to plant protein being healthier. But the industry has deep pockets and is able to bulldoze governments for subsidies – so is able to sell products fairly cheap. In contrast, plant alternative startups face an unequal playing field. As a result, healthy eating is today 3-5 times more expensive. Monbiot mentions that if the government were to subsidize fruit, vegetables and nuts – we would have a far healthier planet with fewer obese people and also cut many serious ailments. The same holds for dairy – milk has been positioned as a vital health drink but only about ~3.5% of the volume has any nutritional value. The meat industry also plays on the fact that habits are difficult to change and most people approach their food habits like religion; however unhealthy it is – they defend it and try to convert others to their ways. Monbiot says that typically the tipping point is reached after the % of population manages to reach 25%.
Monbiot meets several experts and farmers who are trying new ideas. This makes for fascinating reading and a lot of it is also surprising – ploughing and fertilizers may not be necessary and there are other ways to keep your soil healthy and increase your yield. There are also some interesting facts – farmers irrigating their land in East India and Bangladesh lead to some additional rainfall in East Africa! If you grow your own food or aspire to, some of the later sections have new ideas well worth pursuing.
The below is a quote I came across recently.
“Don't eat anything your great grandmother wouldn't recognize as food” – Michael Pollan
Monbiot also refers to this and takes off on this and argues that we need to make use of the new knowledge we acquire rather than this premise. I agree with him but think he is missing an important point in the intent behind this quote – processed food, industrialized farming has wreaked havoc on our planet.
This book was an eye-opener in many ways and would say is vital reading. The arguments in the book for an urgent need for change is very compelling.
Thanks to Netgalley, the publisher and author for a free electronic review copy.
August 9, 2022
Wow. Remarkable, unnerving, maddening, compelling, thought-provoking, impressively researched & sourced, and most of all, persuasive.
If you're not familiar with Monbiot (whose syndicated column, if I'm correct, is most easily found in The Guardian), he's well worth reading, and this is as good a place as any to start.
If you're open to (1) learning and thinking and (2) changing your behavior - for example, eating less (or, hopefully, no) beef ... or rebalancing your diet (think more beans & lentils, and less rice) - this book will offer you exhaustive, compelling information and ammunition. [Conversely, here's my personal tip: if you're a climate change denier, if you believe that a higher being bestowed upon you an inalienable right to consume unlimited quantities of beef, or that your sense of self or family or love or success or contentment is defined by a steak or an all-beef hamburger, don't bother. Seriously.]
And, just to be clear, meat/beef is merely the most obvious, easiest first step ... and it's particularly worthwhile because the beef/cattle industry is so much more harmful than others, and, frankly, the substitutes are not only (often more) healthy but plentiful and satisfying/gratifying.... But the book's focus is far broader ... and Monbiot's thesis persuasively suggests that giving up meat/beef is (sorry for the relevant pun) merely the lowest of the low hanging fruit.
This is a serious book discussing serious, challenging issues and complex problems. It's not a light (or a quick) read, and citations (both footnotes and endnotes) and the index account for a third of the pages. And, frankly, it's depressing but also - at its most optimistic - inspirational.
I can't recommend it enough.
If you're not familiar with Monbiot (whose syndicated column, if I'm correct, is most easily found in The Guardian), he's well worth reading, and this is as good a place as any to start.
If you're open to (1) learning and thinking and (2) changing your behavior - for example, eating less (or, hopefully, no) beef ... or rebalancing your diet (think more beans & lentils, and less rice) - this book will offer you exhaustive, compelling information and ammunition. [Conversely, here's my personal tip: if you're a climate change denier, if you believe that a higher being bestowed upon you an inalienable right to consume unlimited quantities of beef, or that your sense of self or family or love or success or contentment is defined by a steak or an all-beef hamburger, don't bother. Seriously.]
And, just to be clear, meat/beef is merely the most obvious, easiest first step ... and it's particularly worthwhile because the beef/cattle industry is so much more harmful than others, and, frankly, the substitutes are not only (often more) healthy but plentiful and satisfying/gratifying.... But the book's focus is far broader ... and Monbiot's thesis persuasively suggests that giving up meat/beef is (sorry for the relevant pun) merely the lowest of the low hanging fruit.
This is a serious book discussing serious, challenging issues and complex problems. It's not a light (or a quick) read, and citations (both footnotes and endnotes) and the index account for a third of the pages. And, frankly, it's depressing but also - at its most optimistic - inspirational.
I can't recommend it enough.
June 1, 2022
An incendiary page-turner, Regenesis argues farming is destroying the planet and explores lower-impact solutions. Read my full review at https://inquisitivebiologist.com/2022...
August 21, 2022
George Monbiot is one of my favourite writers, and I pre-ordered this book when it was first announced as I was very excited for George to look deeply at the modern food system.
As expected, the book shines when looking at the overall challenges of feeding the world, and how modern agriculture is the most environmentally destructive practice on earth - specifically the rearing of livestock. George's requirement that we evaluate all food practices through the lens of "high yield, lowest environmental impact" forces him to confront uncomfortable truths repeatedly in the alternative agriculture domain. Agroecology and organic farming are dismissed because of the challenges with low yields, George pushes back against the "eat local" movement, the lunacy of urban farming, and he even calls organic pasture-raised beef the most destructive agricultural product on earth.
Unfortunately, I had to rate the book poorly because the solution set presented was almost fantasy. Working in the environmental movement, I am no stranger to unicorn thinking, but the book positioned itself as having strong solutions to the dilemma of feeding the world without destroying the planet. If anything, I am more disheartened about the state of agriculture.
The main case studies focused on a farmers/horticulturalists who were making big strides in increasing soil fertility, but each time George concluded there was a massive yield gap between where they currently are versus mainstream practices. A deep dive with Ian Tolley is an inspiring look at a passionate mad scientist for soil - but then you find out he is earning $70/week and a third of his land is unfarmed for 2 out of every 7 years.
The solutions for the future hinged on two developments - perennial crops and food made from bacteria. Perennial crops may provide a solution to long-term soil health and lowering the need for herbicides, pesticides, and repeated tilling. But the book admits that selective breeding to develop crops on par with today's highest yielding plants would require continued research and development for 30 years. And from there significant time would be required to understand the impact and yield of the plants as they exist in the fields over time - probably another decade or two, if not more.
Food created from fermented bacteria steals the show as a potential means for humans to liberate themselves from farms altogether. Monbiot looks at the potential of using hydrogen to create bacteria cultures that are continuously harvested and provide a source of protein for humanity. In a complete shocker, there is a moment when Monbiot even contemplates 4th generation nuclear reactors creating the hydrogen through electrolysis to feed the world. It is a stunning vision of returning land to nature, as humans eat food concocted from electricity in industrial vats and factories, but again one would have to assume that the development of such an industry would take 50-100 years to become both mainstream and affordable.
There is a massive disconnect between how the book positions the world - on the edge of climate catastrophe and also the collapse of the global agricultural system - and the solutions presented here. I appreciate the honesty and credibility Monbiot brought to the book, but I ended in a vastly different position than him with respect to the future.
As expected, the book shines when looking at the overall challenges of feeding the world, and how modern agriculture is the most environmentally destructive practice on earth - specifically the rearing of livestock. George's requirement that we evaluate all food practices through the lens of "high yield, lowest environmental impact" forces him to confront uncomfortable truths repeatedly in the alternative agriculture domain. Agroecology and organic farming are dismissed because of the challenges with low yields, George pushes back against the "eat local" movement, the lunacy of urban farming, and he even calls organic pasture-raised beef the most destructive agricultural product on earth.
Unfortunately, I had to rate the book poorly because the solution set presented was almost fantasy. Working in the environmental movement, I am no stranger to unicorn thinking, but the book positioned itself as having strong solutions to the dilemma of feeding the world without destroying the planet. If anything, I am more disheartened about the state of agriculture.
The main case studies focused on a farmers/horticulturalists who were making big strides in increasing soil fertility, but each time George concluded there was a massive yield gap between where they currently are versus mainstream practices. A deep dive with Ian Tolley is an inspiring look at a passionate mad scientist for soil - but then you find out he is earning $70/week and a third of his land is unfarmed for 2 out of every 7 years.
The solutions for the future hinged on two developments - perennial crops and food made from bacteria. Perennial crops may provide a solution to long-term soil health and lowering the need for herbicides, pesticides, and repeated tilling. But the book admits that selective breeding to develop crops on par with today's highest yielding plants would require continued research and development for 30 years. And from there significant time would be required to understand the impact and yield of the plants as they exist in the fields over time - probably another decade or two, if not more.
Food created from fermented bacteria steals the show as a potential means for humans to liberate themselves from farms altogether. Monbiot looks at the potential of using hydrogen to create bacteria cultures that are continuously harvested and provide a source of protein for humanity. In a complete shocker, there is a moment when Monbiot even contemplates 4th generation nuclear reactors creating the hydrogen through electrolysis to feed the world. It is a stunning vision of returning land to nature, as humans eat food concocted from electricity in industrial vats and factories, but again one would have to assume that the development of such an industry would take 50-100 years to become both mainstream and affordable.
There is a massive disconnect between how the book positions the world - on the edge of climate catastrophe and also the collapse of the global agricultural system - and the solutions presented here. I appreciate the honesty and credibility Monbiot brought to the book, but I ended in a vastly different position than him with respect to the future.
February 18, 2022
With 'Feral', George Monbiot had the same influence on rewilding in Britain that Rachel Carson's 'Silent Spring' had on the use of pesticides worldwide. Can Monbiot do it again with the global agriculture industry?
I hope so. 'Regenesis' is a book that I won't be able to forget, although I am already one of the converted. Even so, my mind was blown within the first few pages, and numerous times after that. I consider myself to be fairly keyed up on the various ways in which agriculture damages the environment, and how the agricultural industry today fails to deliver adequately nutritious food to many. However, I still learned a huge amount, and much that made me furious at how things have gone so wrong. I am not someone given to optimism, and I am keen to see what scientists and other relevant analysts make of the technologies and approaches that Monbiot champions for reforming our food production - but his arguments come across as rational, nuanced, and exciting.
'Regenesis' is much less memoir-ish than 'Feral', although there are enough autobiographical vignettes to give a personable edge to Monbiot's analysis. His visit to a foodbank is particularly poignant to read, and timely considering Jack Monroe's recent Twitter-sparked campaign on food accessibility. It is not quite all doom and gloom; the book opens with a truly beautiful chapter on the soil organisms that Monbiot finds in a spadeful of soil from his community orchard (that's where my brain had its first explosion of wonder).
My one criticism of the book was the omission of the potential to scale up insect farming. If Monbiot feels that insect protein is a dead-end avenue, okay, but I would have liked to know why this is. 'Regenesis' is otherwise an incredibly thorough book (100 of the 350 pages of my PDF version are the notes/references alone), and I am delighted that he has written it - I reckon it'll be the most important book published this year.
(With thanks to Penguin and NetGalley for this ebook in exchange for an honest review)
I hope so. 'Regenesis' is a book that I won't be able to forget, although I am already one of the converted. Even so, my mind was blown within the first few pages, and numerous times after that. I consider myself to be fairly keyed up on the various ways in which agriculture damages the environment, and how the agricultural industry today fails to deliver adequately nutritious food to many. However, I still learned a huge amount, and much that made me furious at how things have gone so wrong. I am not someone given to optimism, and I am keen to see what scientists and other relevant analysts make of the technologies and approaches that Monbiot champions for reforming our food production - but his arguments come across as rational, nuanced, and exciting.
'Regenesis' is much less memoir-ish than 'Feral', although there are enough autobiographical vignettes to give a personable edge to Monbiot's analysis. His visit to a foodbank is particularly poignant to read, and timely considering Jack Monroe's recent Twitter-sparked campaign on food accessibility. It is not quite all doom and gloom; the book opens with a truly beautiful chapter on the soil organisms that Monbiot finds in a spadeful of soil from his community orchard (that's where my brain had its first explosion of wonder).
My one criticism of the book was the omission of the potential to scale up insect farming. If Monbiot feels that insect protein is a dead-end avenue, okay, but I would have liked to know why this is. 'Regenesis' is otherwise an incredibly thorough book (100 of the 350 pages of my PDF version are the notes/references alone), and I am delighted that he has written it - I reckon it'll be the most important book published this year.
(With thanks to Penguin and NetGalley for this ebook in exchange for an honest review)
May 21, 2022
Everyone read this now! If we are to have any future on this planet, we must understand our relationship with food better, and its production!
There's not a moment to lose.
There's not a moment to lose.
July 10, 2022
For thousands of years, the farmer has been portrayed as our stalwart friend, our enduring hero, our selfless savior. From preschool books to endless tv shows, farmers are held up as the paragons of virtue. From low commodity prices to high debt and little or no financial benefits for themselves, farmers have our sympathy and appreciation. They are a public relations agent’s dream.
But George Monbiot is here to burst that bubble. In Regenesis, Monbiot picks apart the farmer’s role, status, and responsibilities in the rapid deterioration of the natural world. Farmers, he says, have an outsized responsibility for our problems. They are not the solution, at least the way things are structured today. It’s time someone exposed farming for what it really is – totally destructive.
In nine tight chapters, Monbiot explains how soil performs at its optimum, how farmers work hard to ensure it works at its worst, how crops fail, how agribusiness has mangled our foods to near worthlessness, how the rich sit on land and collect huge agriculture subsidies (where the only requirement is that the land be stripped bare), and how innovators are discovering ways to return the land to health while providing ever better results.
It’s a lot to absorb, but through it all, it’s the math that is memorable. “You would have to ship a kilo of dried peas roughly one hundred times around the world before its greenhouse gases matched those of a kilo of local beef,” Monbiot says, in one of far too many examples to list here. He says stopping farming is the single most effective move to reduce Man’s carbon footprint. More than cars, more than plastics, more than anything, farming pollutes.
Livestock is the worst. Using the UK, where he lives, and its famous focus on sheep, Monbiot has found that nearly a quarter of agricultural land has been set aside for sheep. That area is twice the areas built up for human habitation – yet results in just 1% of British food. If you consider all livestock together, it requires 51% of arable land. This includes endless acres planted solely for animal feed.
Here’s how the land grab shakes out: “To produce 100 grams of soy protein, eaten by humans in the form of tofu, requires just over two square meters of land. To raise 100 grams of egg protein requires just under six square meters. Chicken protein needs seven, and pork ten square meters. Chickens and pigs need more land than tofu does because they cannot turn everything they eat into meat, as they have to sustain themselves and build other body parts. Milk … requires an average of 27 square meters, beef 163 and lamb 185. Lamb protein, in other words, requires 84 times as much land to grow as soy protein.” Because of all the land an animal requires, it is simply not possible raise enough of them to feed the world the meat it demands more and more of. The numbers just don’t work. By dropping meat and dairy from farm production, we would reduce land requirements by 76% and greenhouse gases by 60%. Livestock is by far the biggest contributor putting Man at risk of raising the global temperature by more than 1.5°C. We cannot achieve the temperature goal as long as farming remains as is. Farming will take us all down.
But it’s worse. Only 4% of animals are wild any more – the rest are domesticated. Farming, Monbiot says, is the biggest cause of habitat destruction. Of 28,000 species at risk of extinction, 24,000 are due to farming, he found.
“I believe farmers have too many rights and freedoms: the right to build giant chicken barns without environmental permits or use vast tracts of land to produce tiny amounts of food; the freedom to trash the soil, pollute the rivers and intimidate neighbors who object. But in other countries, they have too few, and can easily be evicted by land-grabbers. While the rights of big companies are guaranteed by international treaties, local people often have no protection, and governments and businesses sometimes collude to throw them off their land.” So it’s complicated, and no one solution fits all.
It wouldn’t be so bad if the system worked, but it doesn’t. Monbiot spends the first chapter outlining how soil actually works without farmers improving it, and it can be astounding.
Soil operates much like coral reefs do in the oceans – harboring innumerable lifeforms, co-operating with others, building with still others. Monbiot says “The soil might be the most complex of all living systems. Yet we treat it like dirt.” (Yes, he said like dirt.) There is not a single soil ecology institute in the world, he maintains, and all the grant money available is for how to destroy it, not foster it.
Soil is a complex being. It has several layers we never think about. For example, the rhizosphere layer harbors the roots of annual plants. He calls it their external guts. A whole civilization of bacteria, insects, and microbes make their livings there, and nowhere else. And it is totally symbiotic. Plants attract those other beings for the benefits they offer, and the insects and microbes flourish there, while also acting as predators or nutrient providers. Trees make specific cavities for certain insects. Fungi string astoundingly long lines of communication between and along the root systems, even connecting trees which use those lines to communicate chemical changes and warnings to each other. Plowing the plants under takes all the lifeforms along to their deaths as well.
Ants make extensive and complex tunnel systems, which collect moisture and save it, preventing the soil from drying out. Same for worms. Separately, they all reinforce their tunnels and holes with homemade cements, giving the soil shape, firmness and springiness. Compare this to tilled soil, which blows away as dust. Eight hundred earthworms per square meter is a desirable achievement, not a call for pesticides. But that’s how farms operate.
Tilled soil is dead, sterile and useless as is. It loses all its nutrient value as the same crops are replanted year after year, draining it of its variety and attractiveness to other life. Which leads to terrific over-fertilizing, almost all of which is wasted: “There is no correlation between agrochemical use and productivity or profitability,” Monbiot cites in a 2019 paper in Scientific Reports. It also pollutes rivers on the way to polluting the oceans, as most forms of life cannot withstand the amounts of nitrogen choking the waters. So farm roadkill include all kinds of fish and crustaceans downstream, a thousand miles away. For example, the USFDA specifies no one should eat more than four Gulf (of Mexico) shrimp in any 30 day period (a shrimp cocktail contains five), as they have become toxic to humans from runoff in the cornfields of the Midwest. Ask a farmer in Iowa and he will tell you: “Not my problem.”
Monbiot can also be colorful. Farmers are not who you think they are. To make this point, he took a mirror image of his own principles. It’s worth citing in full, because this is the state of the art:
“Let’s shut down the food factories. Let’s replace the food they make by catching some wild animals—aurochs, wild boar, jungle fowl and a woolly ruminant from Mesopotamia would do—modifying them drastically and breeding them in stupendous numbers. Let’s separate the young from their mothers, castrate them, dock their tails, clip their beaks, teeth and horns without anesthesia, herd them into barns and cages, subject them to extreme boredom and sensory deprivation for their short, distressing lives, then corral them into giant factories where we stun them, cut their throats, skin, pluck and hack their bloody flesh into chunks that you, the lucky customer, will want to eat (oh yes you will!). I’ve done the sums—we’d need to slaughter only 75 billion animals a year.
“Let’s kill the baby aurochs, extract a chemical from the lining of their fourth stomachs and mix it with milk from lactating mothers of the same species, to create a wobbly mass of fat and protein. We’ll stir in some live bacteria to digest this mass, then let their excrements sit till they go hard and yellow and start to stink. You’re really going to want this!
“Let’s fell the forests, drain the wetlands, seize the wild grasslands, expel the indigenous people, kill the large predators, exclude the wild herbivores, trigger the global collapse of wildlife, climate breakdown and the destruction of the habitable planet. Let’s fence most of this land for our captive animals to graze, and plant the rest with crops to make them fat. Let’s spray the crops with biocidal toxins and minerals that’ll leach into the soil and water. Let’s divert the rivers and drain the aquifers. Let’s pour billions of tons of shit into the sea. Let’s trigger repeated plagues, transmitted to humans by the animals we’ve captured, and destroy the efficacy of our most important medicines.
“Sure, it will trash everything after a while, but think of the fun we’ll have. Come on, you know you want this.”
The last half of the book deals with people discovering ways around the mess. Monbiot details examples of land management that works. Using predators to control pests (if you have aphids, you have a predator problem, not an aphid problem, he discovers. Spraying for aphids is the wrong response). And most promising: a perennial version of wheat called kernza, whose roots grow to over three feet (as far down as the plant is tall) as they participate in the underground society of shared strength and resistance. Nor do they need to be replanted, or refertilized annually, and they fight off pests themselves. Also taste better. Imagine that.
And yet, the innovators get stymied. Big Ag doesn’t want innovation. It wants uniformity and consistency. It specifies plants, seeds, pesticides, warehousing and husbandry. It forces farmers to buy specific goods and services, and finances them, keeping farmers on the hook, disabled from making improvements that might make them different.
There is some movement. In recent years, more and more plant-based meats have become not so much an oddity, but highly sought grocery products. Monbiot found scientists who employ microbes to substitute for meats. They can be grown in hours instead of years, in what amount to breweries. And again, this meat not only tastes as good, but better.
He says milk is almost entirely water, and its key ingredients can be made right now without resorting to cows. Plant-based cheeses and milks are very hot items. He said if he was in the dairy farm business, he’d get out right now. Dairy farms are an anachronism. We can already do this much better than dairy farms do. Meat is next.
But the pressure is on from the old school. Trade associations sue to prevent the new products from using words like milk, butter or cheese, burgers, sausages or hotdogs. Governments award subsidies to traditional farmers and giant agribusinesses, not to innovators. Land clearing is considered a valuable act and is rewarded, while rewilding gets nothing. The incentives are all perfectly wrong, to the tune of half a trillion dollars’ worth, every year.
It’s a complex story with lots backs and forths, ups and downs, thanks to an entrenched industry that has had a chokehold on mankind for 3000 years. And just as most people don’t know where food comes from, they also don’t know this ugly backstory. Regenesis makes up for a lot of that, in a very personal, hopeful and engaging way. Just know that farming is not benign.
David Wineberg
If you liked this review, I invite you to read more in my book The Straight Dope. It’s an essay collection based on my first thousand reviews and what I learned. Right now it’s FREE for Prime members, otherwise — cheap! Reputed to be fascinating and a superfast read. And you already know it is well-written. https://www.amazon.com/Straight-Dope-...
But George Monbiot is here to burst that bubble. In Regenesis, Monbiot picks apart the farmer’s role, status, and responsibilities in the rapid deterioration of the natural world. Farmers, he says, have an outsized responsibility for our problems. They are not the solution, at least the way things are structured today. It’s time someone exposed farming for what it really is – totally destructive.
In nine tight chapters, Monbiot explains how soil performs at its optimum, how farmers work hard to ensure it works at its worst, how crops fail, how agribusiness has mangled our foods to near worthlessness, how the rich sit on land and collect huge agriculture subsidies (where the only requirement is that the land be stripped bare), and how innovators are discovering ways to return the land to health while providing ever better results.
It’s a lot to absorb, but through it all, it’s the math that is memorable. “You would have to ship a kilo of dried peas roughly one hundred times around the world before its greenhouse gases matched those of a kilo of local beef,” Monbiot says, in one of far too many examples to list here. He says stopping farming is the single most effective move to reduce Man’s carbon footprint. More than cars, more than plastics, more than anything, farming pollutes.
Livestock is the worst. Using the UK, where he lives, and its famous focus on sheep, Monbiot has found that nearly a quarter of agricultural land has been set aside for sheep. That area is twice the areas built up for human habitation – yet results in just 1% of British food. If you consider all livestock together, it requires 51% of arable land. This includes endless acres planted solely for animal feed.
Here’s how the land grab shakes out: “To produce 100 grams of soy protein, eaten by humans in the form of tofu, requires just over two square meters of land. To raise 100 grams of egg protein requires just under six square meters. Chicken protein needs seven, and pork ten square meters. Chickens and pigs need more land than tofu does because they cannot turn everything they eat into meat, as they have to sustain themselves and build other body parts. Milk … requires an average of 27 square meters, beef 163 and lamb 185. Lamb protein, in other words, requires 84 times as much land to grow as soy protein.” Because of all the land an animal requires, it is simply not possible raise enough of them to feed the world the meat it demands more and more of. The numbers just don’t work. By dropping meat and dairy from farm production, we would reduce land requirements by 76% and greenhouse gases by 60%. Livestock is by far the biggest contributor putting Man at risk of raising the global temperature by more than 1.5°C. We cannot achieve the temperature goal as long as farming remains as is. Farming will take us all down.
But it’s worse. Only 4% of animals are wild any more – the rest are domesticated. Farming, Monbiot says, is the biggest cause of habitat destruction. Of 28,000 species at risk of extinction, 24,000 are due to farming, he found.
“I believe farmers have too many rights and freedoms: the right to build giant chicken barns without environmental permits or use vast tracts of land to produce tiny amounts of food; the freedom to trash the soil, pollute the rivers and intimidate neighbors who object. But in other countries, they have too few, and can easily be evicted by land-grabbers. While the rights of big companies are guaranteed by international treaties, local people often have no protection, and governments and businesses sometimes collude to throw them off their land.” So it’s complicated, and no one solution fits all.
It wouldn’t be so bad if the system worked, but it doesn’t. Monbiot spends the first chapter outlining how soil actually works without farmers improving it, and it can be astounding.
Soil operates much like coral reefs do in the oceans – harboring innumerable lifeforms, co-operating with others, building with still others. Monbiot says “The soil might be the most complex of all living systems. Yet we treat it like dirt.” (Yes, he said like dirt.) There is not a single soil ecology institute in the world, he maintains, and all the grant money available is for how to destroy it, not foster it.
Soil is a complex being. It has several layers we never think about. For example, the rhizosphere layer harbors the roots of annual plants. He calls it their external guts. A whole civilization of bacteria, insects, and microbes make their livings there, and nowhere else. And it is totally symbiotic. Plants attract those other beings for the benefits they offer, and the insects and microbes flourish there, while also acting as predators or nutrient providers. Trees make specific cavities for certain insects. Fungi string astoundingly long lines of communication between and along the root systems, even connecting trees which use those lines to communicate chemical changes and warnings to each other. Plowing the plants under takes all the lifeforms along to their deaths as well.
Ants make extensive and complex tunnel systems, which collect moisture and save it, preventing the soil from drying out. Same for worms. Separately, they all reinforce their tunnels and holes with homemade cements, giving the soil shape, firmness and springiness. Compare this to tilled soil, which blows away as dust. Eight hundred earthworms per square meter is a desirable achievement, not a call for pesticides. But that’s how farms operate.
Tilled soil is dead, sterile and useless as is. It loses all its nutrient value as the same crops are replanted year after year, draining it of its variety and attractiveness to other life. Which leads to terrific over-fertilizing, almost all of which is wasted: “There is no correlation between agrochemical use and productivity or profitability,” Monbiot cites in a 2019 paper in Scientific Reports. It also pollutes rivers on the way to polluting the oceans, as most forms of life cannot withstand the amounts of nitrogen choking the waters. So farm roadkill include all kinds of fish and crustaceans downstream, a thousand miles away. For example, the USFDA specifies no one should eat more than four Gulf (of Mexico) shrimp in any 30 day period (a shrimp cocktail contains five), as they have become toxic to humans from runoff in the cornfields of the Midwest. Ask a farmer in Iowa and he will tell you: “Not my problem.”
Monbiot can also be colorful. Farmers are not who you think they are. To make this point, he took a mirror image of his own principles. It’s worth citing in full, because this is the state of the art:
“Let’s shut down the food factories. Let’s replace the food they make by catching some wild animals—aurochs, wild boar, jungle fowl and a woolly ruminant from Mesopotamia would do—modifying them drastically and breeding them in stupendous numbers. Let’s separate the young from their mothers, castrate them, dock their tails, clip their beaks, teeth and horns without anesthesia, herd them into barns and cages, subject them to extreme boredom and sensory deprivation for their short, distressing lives, then corral them into giant factories where we stun them, cut their throats, skin, pluck and hack their bloody flesh into chunks that you, the lucky customer, will want to eat (oh yes you will!). I’ve done the sums—we’d need to slaughter only 75 billion animals a year.
“Let’s kill the baby aurochs, extract a chemical from the lining of their fourth stomachs and mix it with milk from lactating mothers of the same species, to create a wobbly mass of fat and protein. We’ll stir in some live bacteria to digest this mass, then let their excrements sit till they go hard and yellow and start to stink. You’re really going to want this!
“Let’s fell the forests, drain the wetlands, seize the wild grasslands, expel the indigenous people, kill the large predators, exclude the wild herbivores, trigger the global collapse of wildlife, climate breakdown and the destruction of the habitable planet. Let’s fence most of this land for our captive animals to graze, and plant the rest with crops to make them fat. Let’s spray the crops with biocidal toxins and minerals that’ll leach into the soil and water. Let’s divert the rivers and drain the aquifers. Let’s pour billions of tons of shit into the sea. Let’s trigger repeated plagues, transmitted to humans by the animals we’ve captured, and destroy the efficacy of our most important medicines.
“Sure, it will trash everything after a while, but think of the fun we’ll have. Come on, you know you want this.”
The last half of the book deals with people discovering ways around the mess. Monbiot details examples of land management that works. Using predators to control pests (if you have aphids, you have a predator problem, not an aphid problem, he discovers. Spraying for aphids is the wrong response). And most promising: a perennial version of wheat called kernza, whose roots grow to over three feet (as far down as the plant is tall) as they participate in the underground society of shared strength and resistance. Nor do they need to be replanted, or refertilized annually, and they fight off pests themselves. Also taste better. Imagine that.
And yet, the innovators get stymied. Big Ag doesn’t want innovation. It wants uniformity and consistency. It specifies plants, seeds, pesticides, warehousing and husbandry. It forces farmers to buy specific goods and services, and finances them, keeping farmers on the hook, disabled from making improvements that might make them different.
There is some movement. In recent years, more and more plant-based meats have become not so much an oddity, but highly sought grocery products. Monbiot found scientists who employ microbes to substitute for meats. They can be grown in hours instead of years, in what amount to breweries. And again, this meat not only tastes as good, but better.
He says milk is almost entirely water, and its key ingredients can be made right now without resorting to cows. Plant-based cheeses and milks are very hot items. He said if he was in the dairy farm business, he’d get out right now. Dairy farms are an anachronism. We can already do this much better than dairy farms do. Meat is next.
But the pressure is on from the old school. Trade associations sue to prevent the new products from using words like milk, butter or cheese, burgers, sausages or hotdogs. Governments award subsidies to traditional farmers and giant agribusinesses, not to innovators. Land clearing is considered a valuable act and is rewarded, while rewilding gets nothing. The incentives are all perfectly wrong, to the tune of half a trillion dollars’ worth, every year.
It’s a complex story with lots backs and forths, ups and downs, thanks to an entrenched industry that has had a chokehold on mankind for 3000 years. And just as most people don’t know where food comes from, they also don’t know this ugly backstory. Regenesis makes up for a lot of that, in a very personal, hopeful and engaging way. Just know that farming is not benign.
David Wineberg
If you liked this review, I invite you to read more in my book The Straight Dope. It’s an essay collection based on my first thousand reviews and what I learned. Right now it’s FREE for Prime members, otherwise — cheap! Reputed to be fascinating and a superfast read. And you already know it is well-written. https://www.amazon.com/Straight-Dope-...
June 26, 2022
[Just below is the beginning of my review of and response to George Monbiot’s new book. My entire review and response is much too long for GoodReads and also contains many hyperlinks and video clips. To view that entire review and response please go to my Regenetarianism blog at this url:
lachefnet.wordpress.com/2022/06/22/mo...
===========================================================
With so much dietary and political tribalism nowadays, I find it is very important to listen to and read varying viewpoints including many opposing points of view that challenge my own. So, I picked-up and read a copy of George Monbiot's new book, Regenesis. Not sure I was expecting any great insights, but still I felt it was important to read Monbiot's book cover to cover (as well as some of his references) to understand where he was coming from before offering any sort of critique.
While I appreciated Monbiot's realization as to the importance of soil health and shared his concerns about the worst aspects of agricultural production, the short version of my review is that I didn't find much of what Monbiot had to offer very insightful or challenging. Most of the arguments he puts forth in his book, he's written about in his Guardian column and stated in debates for the past two or three years. I've also previously critiqued some of those arguments in three previous blog posts. So, aside from a wrinkle or two, at least for me there wasn't much if any new ground covered in Monbiot's new agenda driven book. Additionally, with his vilification of livestock, and his push for synthetic meat alternatives, much (not all) of Monbiot's messaging aligns with Bill Gates's agenda and investment strategies. Gates's philacapitalist foundation The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation [BMGF] just "coincidentally" made a significant donation to The Guardian.
As explained in an article in The Nation, philacapitalist organizations like BMGF donate a small percentage of their income to maintain their non-profit status. They do this strategically to media outlets, institutions and researchers that will generate favorable content (news stories, editorials, policies, and research) that can be used to manufacture consent for their intellectual property [IP] controlled investment strategies.
As for a longer version of my review and response to Monbiot's book, please continue reading. Monbiot got so many things wrong and ass backwards that one could write another book just correcting all of his mistakes and biases. So my apologies, in advance, for the length of the below reply.
After Monbiot made discoveries about soil health, the complexity of soil ecosystems, and illustrated a few of the many problems with agricultural food production, in his new book, Monbiot very absolutely and confidently proposed solutions to all of these problems he described. He does this despite his rather shallow understanding of pretty much all the topics he discussed in Regenesis. Being so self-assured and bordering on arrogant about topics he barely knows anything about, seems to be Monbiot's modus operandi. This Dunning-Kruger Effect is especially pronounced in regards to his understanding of soil science, botany, nutritional science, agricultural food production, paleontology, range science and atmospheric chemistry. Though to people relatively new to these topics, especially soil science and the adverse impacts of industrial agriculture, Monbiot's self-assured absolutism may be mistaken for actual learning. It isn't.
In order to write this book, Monbiot claims to have read 5,000 papers and a half a shelf of other books on these subjects. Unfortunately though, it's painfully obvious that Monbiot doesn't possess the critical analytical ability or sufficient background to properly understand or assess much of the research that he read. He especially didn't understand the methodological limitations all the papers he read to confirm his biases. Those biases include his adamant belief that any and all livestock is inherently destructive, and that any sort of regenerative system inherently will produce lower yields than industrial systems of food production. So rather than more nuanced discussions, based on an honest concerted objective effort to search for best agricultural practices, readers are left with over generalizations, worst case scenarios, out of context statistics, a new techno-optimistic meta-narrative and Monbiot's never ending neo-colonial mythological pursuit of pristine wilderness. This pursuit of myth along with Monbiot's propensity to use out of context statistics are especially ironic given Monbiot's admonitions toward the end of his book regarding the need to contextualize numbers and not rely on myths. What's even more ironic is Monbiot's insistence on system thinking when Monbiot seems completely incapable of any in depth holistic thought.
A large part of Monbiot's problem is his over reliance on meta-analysis from ivory tower researchers who share his white hat biases. These researchers also think livestock is the root of all evil. More importantly many of these researchers in their ivory towers seem to be even more disconnected from their topics of research (food production) than Monbiot. So keyword searches on computer screens replace any in situ empiricism while activism masquerades as science. Some of this disconnection is amusing, though most just borders on satire.
Monbiot directs some of his most vicious vitriol toward pastured or extensive management especially holistic or regenerative grazing. Regenerative grazing is a tool to restore soil and ecosystem health. So naturally Monbiot claims that such grazing management is the absolutely worst kind possible. Why? This form of grazing management undermines Monbiot's mission. Monbiot's mission is to spare land for his myth of pristine wilderness and position precision fermentation as an alternative to meat. To achieve those goals, he cites predictable references to "prove" that extensive or pastured livestock systems are the worse systems imaginable. I note "predictable" since these references are the ones typically cited to "debunk" any form of regenerative grazing system that uses or integrates livestock. So these references include papers by the usual suspects including Hayek, Garnett, Briske and Poore on issues ranging from land use, environmental degradation, soil carbon sequestration and, of course, enteric methane. More specifically in regards to methane, Monbiot also demonstrates that he doesn't understand how the new GWP* metric works. How carbon actually cycles and hydroxyl oxidation works seem to be beyond Monbiot's limited ability to system think.
To get a better sense of how Monbiot's arguments against regenerative grazing systems are nothing but a house of cards, it helps to look at some of the specific references that he cited. So, let's start with a 2018 paper co-authored by animal rights activist Matthew Hayek. This paper basically argued that there's not enough land to produce the same amount of beef in extensive pastured systems as is currently produced in feedlot production. This paper relied on slaughter weight calculations as well as forage data from two prior studies by Gidon Eshel (Eshel et al 2014, Eshel et al 2017) another proponent of plant based diets and getting rid of beef production. Both authors parsed existing data based on a set of assumptions that excluded best practices of forage production as Eshel notes in his introduction as follows:
"...such beef production changes would be accompanied by enhanced grassland productivity (for example, direct integration of cattle ranching with agricultural, enhanced rotations or increased reliance on legume enriched paddocks) and embedded or broader structural changes that take nimble advantage of resource multi-purposing (for example, high yield silvopasture systems in which beef and timber share the same land. Here, however, we set out to explore the narrower problem of quantifying "sustainable" beef availability under existing conditions and practices..."
Hayek made a similar qualification:
"...Statistical and processed-based modeling can assess under performing areas, which could be optimized through better fertilizing, soil conditioning, and rotational management. Currently, less than 2% of all agricultural lands in the US undergo a rotation between cropland and pasture, though this type of management is known to increase forage productivity. The required 30% increase in the overall cattle population must be accompanied by large increases in the productivity of existing pastures, on the order of 40%–370%, to avoid clearing additional native vegetation or competition with the human food supply...."
These two aren't soil or range scientists. They're also not agroecologists. So neither, in their respective data analysis, accounted for the current state of soil and land degradation. Thus they didn't account for the increased quality and amount of forage production that's possible with improved soil health, better grazing management, and the increased utilization of integrated systems. With integrated systems (silvopasture, cover crop grazing, pasture cropping, etc), crops, specialty crops and livestock can all be raised on the SAME land. With higher quality forage (more nutrient dense), higher average daily gains [ADG] can be achieved.
Instead these two, in order to push their agenda, used low numbers for average daily gains [ADG] and nowhere near optimal numbers for forage production. I corresponded with several grazing experts (Dr. Jason Rowntree, Dr. Allen Williams, and Dale Strickler) who all independently noted that with adaptive multi-paddock [AMP] grazing management, an ADG of 2.7 to 3.0 could be easily obtained. AMP is another term for holistic planned grazing [HPG]...though not the same thing as short duration grazing [SDG]. Now what figure did Hayek and Eshel use? An ADG of 1.4. An ADG of 1.4 versus 2.8 doubles the finishing times for grass finished cattle. Thus an ADG of 1.4 will take a lot more forage and time (30 months) than an ADG of 2.7 to 3 that will require instead around 18 to 21 months. So with better grazing management during all phases of beef cattle production, better grazing management can greatly reduce the amount of forage (and land) needed as well as the gross methane emitted. I will discuss methane further below.
[My review and response continues at my Regenetarianism blog at this url:
lachefnet.wordpress.com/2022/06/22/mo...
My blog also includes my full list of references]
lachefnet.wordpress.com/2022/06/22/mo...
===========================================================
With so much dietary and political tribalism nowadays, I find it is very important to listen to and read varying viewpoints including many opposing points of view that challenge my own. So, I picked-up and read a copy of George Monbiot's new book, Regenesis. Not sure I was expecting any great insights, but still I felt it was important to read Monbiot's book cover to cover (as well as some of his references) to understand where he was coming from before offering any sort of critique.
While I appreciated Monbiot's realization as to the importance of soil health and shared his concerns about the worst aspects of agricultural production, the short version of my review is that I didn't find much of what Monbiot had to offer very insightful or challenging. Most of the arguments he puts forth in his book, he's written about in his Guardian column and stated in debates for the past two or three years. I've also previously critiqued some of those arguments in three previous blog posts. So, aside from a wrinkle or two, at least for me there wasn't much if any new ground covered in Monbiot's new agenda driven book. Additionally, with his vilification of livestock, and his push for synthetic meat alternatives, much (not all) of Monbiot's messaging aligns with Bill Gates's agenda and investment strategies. Gates's philacapitalist foundation The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation [BMGF] just "coincidentally" made a significant donation to The Guardian.
As explained in an article in The Nation, philacapitalist organizations like BMGF donate a small percentage of their income to maintain their non-profit status. They do this strategically to media outlets, institutions and researchers that will generate favorable content (news stories, editorials, policies, and research) that can be used to manufacture consent for their intellectual property [IP] controlled investment strategies.
As for a longer version of my review and response to Monbiot's book, please continue reading. Monbiot got so many things wrong and ass backwards that one could write another book just correcting all of his mistakes and biases. So my apologies, in advance, for the length of the below reply.
After Monbiot made discoveries about soil health, the complexity of soil ecosystems, and illustrated a few of the many problems with agricultural food production, in his new book, Monbiot very absolutely and confidently proposed solutions to all of these problems he described. He does this despite his rather shallow understanding of pretty much all the topics he discussed in Regenesis. Being so self-assured and bordering on arrogant about topics he barely knows anything about, seems to be Monbiot's modus operandi. This Dunning-Kruger Effect is especially pronounced in regards to his understanding of soil science, botany, nutritional science, agricultural food production, paleontology, range science and atmospheric chemistry. Though to people relatively new to these topics, especially soil science and the adverse impacts of industrial agriculture, Monbiot's self-assured absolutism may be mistaken for actual learning. It isn't.
In order to write this book, Monbiot claims to have read 5,000 papers and a half a shelf of other books on these subjects. Unfortunately though, it's painfully obvious that Monbiot doesn't possess the critical analytical ability or sufficient background to properly understand or assess much of the research that he read. He especially didn't understand the methodological limitations all the papers he read to confirm his biases. Those biases include his adamant belief that any and all livestock is inherently destructive, and that any sort of regenerative system inherently will produce lower yields than industrial systems of food production. So rather than more nuanced discussions, based on an honest concerted objective effort to search for best agricultural practices, readers are left with over generalizations, worst case scenarios, out of context statistics, a new techno-optimistic meta-narrative and Monbiot's never ending neo-colonial mythological pursuit of pristine wilderness. This pursuit of myth along with Monbiot's propensity to use out of context statistics are especially ironic given Monbiot's admonitions toward the end of his book regarding the need to contextualize numbers and not rely on myths. What's even more ironic is Monbiot's insistence on system thinking when Monbiot seems completely incapable of any in depth holistic thought.
A large part of Monbiot's problem is his over reliance on meta-analysis from ivory tower researchers who share his white hat biases. These researchers also think livestock is the root of all evil. More importantly many of these researchers in their ivory towers seem to be even more disconnected from their topics of research (food production) than Monbiot. So keyword searches on computer screens replace any in situ empiricism while activism masquerades as science. Some of this disconnection is amusing, though most just borders on satire.
Monbiot directs some of his most vicious vitriol toward pastured or extensive management especially holistic or regenerative grazing. Regenerative grazing is a tool to restore soil and ecosystem health. So naturally Monbiot claims that such grazing management is the absolutely worst kind possible. Why? This form of grazing management undermines Monbiot's mission. Monbiot's mission is to spare land for his myth of pristine wilderness and position precision fermentation as an alternative to meat. To achieve those goals, he cites predictable references to "prove" that extensive or pastured livestock systems are the worse systems imaginable. I note "predictable" since these references are the ones typically cited to "debunk" any form of regenerative grazing system that uses or integrates livestock. So these references include papers by the usual suspects including Hayek, Garnett, Briske and Poore on issues ranging from land use, environmental degradation, soil carbon sequestration and, of course, enteric methane. More specifically in regards to methane, Monbiot also demonstrates that he doesn't understand how the new GWP* metric works. How carbon actually cycles and hydroxyl oxidation works seem to be beyond Monbiot's limited ability to system think.
To get a better sense of how Monbiot's arguments against regenerative grazing systems are nothing but a house of cards, it helps to look at some of the specific references that he cited. So, let's start with a 2018 paper co-authored by animal rights activist Matthew Hayek. This paper basically argued that there's not enough land to produce the same amount of beef in extensive pastured systems as is currently produced in feedlot production. This paper relied on slaughter weight calculations as well as forage data from two prior studies by Gidon Eshel (Eshel et al 2014, Eshel et al 2017) another proponent of plant based diets and getting rid of beef production. Both authors parsed existing data based on a set of assumptions that excluded best practices of forage production as Eshel notes in his introduction as follows:
"...such beef production changes would be accompanied by enhanced grassland productivity (for example, direct integration of cattle ranching with agricultural, enhanced rotations or increased reliance on legume enriched paddocks) and embedded or broader structural changes that take nimble advantage of resource multi-purposing (for example, high yield silvopasture systems in which beef and timber share the same land. Here, however, we set out to explore the narrower problem of quantifying "sustainable" beef availability under existing conditions and practices..."
Hayek made a similar qualification:
"...Statistical and processed-based modeling can assess under performing areas, which could be optimized through better fertilizing, soil conditioning, and rotational management. Currently, less than 2% of all agricultural lands in the US undergo a rotation between cropland and pasture, though this type of management is known to increase forage productivity. The required 30% increase in the overall cattle population must be accompanied by large increases in the productivity of existing pastures, on the order of 40%–370%, to avoid clearing additional native vegetation or competition with the human food supply...."
These two aren't soil or range scientists. They're also not agroecologists. So neither, in their respective data analysis, accounted for the current state of soil and land degradation. Thus they didn't account for the increased quality and amount of forage production that's possible with improved soil health, better grazing management, and the increased utilization of integrated systems. With integrated systems (silvopasture, cover crop grazing, pasture cropping, etc), crops, specialty crops and livestock can all be raised on the SAME land. With higher quality forage (more nutrient dense), higher average daily gains [ADG] can be achieved.
Instead these two, in order to push their agenda, used low numbers for average daily gains [ADG] and nowhere near optimal numbers for forage production. I corresponded with several grazing experts (Dr. Jason Rowntree, Dr. Allen Williams, and Dale Strickler) who all independently noted that with adaptive multi-paddock [AMP] grazing management, an ADG of 2.7 to 3.0 could be easily obtained. AMP is another term for holistic planned grazing [HPG]...though not the same thing as short duration grazing [SDG]. Now what figure did Hayek and Eshel use? An ADG of 1.4. An ADG of 1.4 versus 2.8 doubles the finishing times for grass finished cattle. Thus an ADG of 1.4 will take a lot more forage and time (30 months) than an ADG of 2.7 to 3 that will require instead around 18 to 21 months. So with better grazing management during all phases of beef cattle production, better grazing management can greatly reduce the amount of forage (and land) needed as well as the gross methane emitted. I will discuss methane further below.
[My review and response continues at my Regenetarianism blog at this url:
lachefnet.wordpress.com/2022/06/22/mo...
My blog also includes my full list of references]
March 5, 2023
Regenesis: Feeding the World Without Devouring the Planet proved to be rather an emotional rollercoaster, albeit a very informative and thoughtful one. The first chapter explores soil in a spirit of curiosity and joy, which I found fascinating. Then chapters two and three are bleak to the point of being devastating:
It took me a while to get through these two chapters, as I already have quite a lot of environmental concerns and issues with food. The combination thereof made this difficult reading. However, after delivering a horrifying diagnosis of the dysfunctional and destructive food system, Monbiot moves onto potential improvements via a series of vivid case studies. He is amusingly sardonic about urban vertical farming:
The examples of lower-environmental impact farming and farm-free food production are fascinating. I'd never heard of precision fermentation before and in principle it has massive potential to produce protein much more quickly, cheaply, and efficiently than farming. This would make it much easier to be vegan, which Monbiot more or less takes for granted is environmentally necessary. I appreciated the discussion of food insecurity in the UK, which was especially fitting to read while we're experiencing shortages and rationing of salad veg. It's grim as hell to see BBC articles on vegetables you can rely on amid shortages.
In the final chapter, Monbiot lays into the romanticisation of agriculture, blaming poets and children's books for spreading idyllic propaganda that impedes change. Despite this and the bleakness of chapters two and three, Regenesis: Feeding the World Without Devouring the Planet is ultimately a hopeful book. There are technologies and practises that could change agriculture significantly, reducing its environmental toll and potentially improving the quality of food we eat. Monbiot synthesises an impressive breadth of research in a relatively short book, 90 pages of which consists of notes and citations. I found it a really thought-provoking and worthwhile read.
Campaigners, chefs, and food writers rail against 'intensive farming', and the harm it does to us and our world. But the problem is not the adjective, it's the noun.
Farming is the world's greatest cause of habitat destruction, the greatest cause of global loss of wildlife, and the greatest cause of the global extinction crisis. It's responsible for around 80% of the deforestation that's happened this century. Food production (including commercial fishing) is the main reason why the world population of wild vertebrate animals has fallen by 68% since 1970. Of 28,000 species known to be at risk of extinction, 24,000 are threatened by farming. Only 29% of the weight of birds on Earth consists of wild species: all the rest are poultry. Chickens alone weigh more than all other birds put together, including farmed ducks and turkeys. Just 4% of the world's mammals, by weight, are wild; humans account for 36%, and livestock are the remaining 60%. This is caused not by intensive farming or extensive farming, but a disastrous combination of the two.
It took me a while to get through these two chapters, as I already have quite a lot of environmental concerns and issues with food. The combination thereof made this difficult reading. However, after delivering a horrifying diagnosis of the dysfunctional and destructive food system, Monbiot moves onto potential improvements via a series of vivid case studies. He is amusingly sardonic about urban vertical farming:
I'm not saying it's impossible. There are some thriving farms in my city, neatly integrated into people's homes, expensively equipped with lights, pumps, and temperature controls, growing crops to precise specifications. Every so often they're busted, and the farmers led away in handcuffs.
Skunk can be grown this way because it's among the few farm products - all of which are illegal in most jurisdictions - that justifies the outlay.
[...]
Almost uniquely, in this field repeated failure appears to be no deterrent. At first sight, it's one of life's great mysteries, comparable to the Tardis-like properties of tupperware or the current whereabouts of my phone. But I think it reflects two things: how little most tech entrepreneurs understand farming, and the determined belief in magic that food production inspires.
The examples of lower-environmental impact farming and farm-free food production are fascinating. I'd never heard of precision fermentation before and in principle it has massive potential to produce protein much more quickly, cheaply, and efficiently than farming. This would make it much easier to be vegan, which Monbiot more or less takes for granted is environmentally necessary. I appreciated the discussion of food insecurity in the UK, which was especially fitting to read while we're experiencing shortages and rationing of salad veg. It's grim as hell to see BBC articles on vegetables you can rely on amid shortages.
In the final chapter, Monbiot lays into the romanticisation of agriculture, blaming poets and children's books for spreading idyllic propaganda that impedes change. Despite this and the bleakness of chapters two and three, Regenesis: Feeding the World Without Devouring the Planet is ultimately a hopeful book. There are technologies and practises that could change agriculture significantly, reducing its environmental toll and potentially improving the quality of food we eat. Monbiot synthesises an impressive breadth of research in a relatively short book, 90 pages of which consists of notes and citations. I found it a really thought-provoking and worthwhile read.
June 8, 2022
This is the best nonfiction book I've read for several years, and should change the world for the better. It could have been a dull polemic, an angry article padded into book length, but George moves fluidly between chapters of lyrical nature writing, half-chapters of reference-heavy argument, and introductions to odd and interesting people doing something with farming, with the occasional tasteful but pretty funny joke. About 40% of it by length is actually notes and references, so it's a short book packed with content.
What's also clear is that Monbiot has done a lot of stuff and been to a lot of places and listened to a lot of people, but he doesn't come across as pompous or affected about it. There's a very clear distinction made between "this is an anecdote / this is what this person has found and believes" and "this is fact, insofar as science has currently established it".
I'm also pretty sure there is something for everyone to disagree with. I think Monbiot's about 98% right and should say it because the status quo is wrong, and his passionate plea for getting good data towards the end of the book is to my tastes. He avoids the obvious traps of science-skepticism, and goes out of his way to be open-minded about technology (electric bolt weeding machines, anyone?). He's slightly more baseline chemical-averse than I am, and sometimes his general suspicion of capitalism shows through, but I never get the impression this is just a polemic and honestly I'm involved enough in Farming Discourse to think that if his critics had a point they'd have made it by now. The book is a triumph and should change the way we all think about farming.
What's also clear is that Monbiot has done a lot of stuff and been to a lot of places and listened to a lot of people, but he doesn't come across as pompous or affected about it. There's a very clear distinction made between "this is an anecdote / this is what this person has found and believes" and "this is fact, insofar as science has currently established it".
I'm also pretty sure there is something for everyone to disagree with. I think Monbiot's about 98% right and should say it because the status quo is wrong, and his passionate plea for getting good data towards the end of the book is to my tastes. He avoids the obvious traps of science-skepticism, and goes out of his way to be open-minded about technology (electric bolt weeding machines, anyone?). He's slightly more baseline chemical-averse than I am, and sometimes his general suspicion of capitalism shows through, but I never get the impression this is just a polemic and honestly I'm involved enough in Farming Discourse to think that if his critics had a point they'd have made it by now. The book is a triumph and should change the way we all think about farming.
May 31, 2022
As others have pointed out, Regenesis has the potential to do for food and farming what Feral did for rewilding. This fascinating book is one of hope and shows how we can transform the farming of crops to feed the world without trashing the soil and nature. Similarly technology exists to replicate the taste of meat, which could ultimately upend livestock farming. As such, Monbiot has outlined a feasible route forward for food production, which is in our best interests to take, for ethical, economic and environmental reasons.
May 25, 2022
Having read George Monbiot’s journalism, I knew Regenesis would be a brilliantly argued and carefully researched read on the challenges of providing enough food, and protecting the climate, by reimagining farming. What I hadn’t anticipated was the lyrical beauty of the writing.
In the opening chapter Monbiot describes in gorgeous detail his (community-run) orchard, the blossom, the fruit, and the mysterious ecosystem that is soil. He discusses the creatures, bacteria and mycorrhizal fungi (drawing on Merlin Sheldrake’s brilliant Entangled Life) and how maintaining and improving soil is an essential, and overlooked, part of the challenge.
Unfortunately, much of contemporary farming worldwide actively damages soil, air and water. Monbiot looks at how government subsidies, introduced to ensure food security, actively encourage environmentally damaging practices, returning to the theme of his Rivercide documentary on how chicken waste pollutes rivers. Farmers, he argues provocatively, no longer farm food, but subsidies. Their most lucrative fields are on spreadsheets.
The problem isn’t that we can’t produce enough food. In principle, the world already produces enough food for 10-14 billion people. The issue is in the distribution, fragile international supply chains, and the fact that industrial farming is incompatible with mitigating climate change.
Once he has outlined the problem, Monbiot goes on to describe a number of potential solutions. He visits one vegetable grower who emphasises working with and improving the soil, making friends with weeds, because they build soil structure. Another farmer sows crops without ploughing. These aren’t commercially profitable, but then neither, remember, is industrial farming, it is propped up by subsidies that pay people to harm, rather than protect, animals, the land and the climate.
Other chapters look at alternatives to farming as we know it, such as growing protein from bacteria or developing perennial cereal crops, and outline the work of groups such as Fareshare in the UK which distribute food which would otherwise be wasted.
There is some humour too, in Monbiot’s critique of the way we romanticise farms, from children’s fiction to Sunday night comfort TV like Countryfile. He is not afraid to take aim at, er, sacred cows, such as pasture-fed meat – which, he argues, is actually be more damaging in climate terms because of the extra land needed to feed each animal. He also says that locally-sourced food isn’t necessarily better – because transport represents such a small proportion of the carbon cost of food.
Regenesis is a fascinating and thought-provoking read, packed with insight and testament to Monbiot’s commitment to detail (he holds others to the same high standard, even allies who make idyllic claims but can’t provide the evidence to back them up). It is unflinching in outlining the problem, but also inspiring in the solutions it offers.
*
I received a copy of Regenesis from the publisher via Netgalley.
In the opening chapter Monbiot describes in gorgeous detail his (community-run) orchard, the blossom, the fruit, and the mysterious ecosystem that is soil. He discusses the creatures, bacteria and mycorrhizal fungi (drawing on Merlin Sheldrake’s brilliant Entangled Life) and how maintaining and improving soil is an essential, and overlooked, part of the challenge.
Unfortunately, much of contemporary farming worldwide actively damages soil, air and water. Monbiot looks at how government subsidies, introduced to ensure food security, actively encourage environmentally damaging practices, returning to the theme of his Rivercide documentary on how chicken waste pollutes rivers. Farmers, he argues provocatively, no longer farm food, but subsidies. Their most lucrative fields are on spreadsheets.
The problem isn’t that we can’t produce enough food. In principle, the world already produces enough food for 10-14 billion people. The issue is in the distribution, fragile international supply chains, and the fact that industrial farming is incompatible with mitigating climate change.
Once he has outlined the problem, Monbiot goes on to describe a number of potential solutions. He visits one vegetable grower who emphasises working with and improving the soil, making friends with weeds, because they build soil structure. Another farmer sows crops without ploughing. These aren’t commercially profitable, but then neither, remember, is industrial farming, it is propped up by subsidies that pay people to harm, rather than protect, animals, the land and the climate.
Other chapters look at alternatives to farming as we know it, such as growing protein from bacteria or developing perennial cereal crops, and outline the work of groups such as Fareshare in the UK which distribute food which would otherwise be wasted.
There is some humour too, in Monbiot’s critique of the way we romanticise farms, from children’s fiction to Sunday night comfort TV like Countryfile. He is not afraid to take aim at, er, sacred cows, such as pasture-fed meat – which, he argues, is actually be more damaging in climate terms because of the extra land needed to feed each animal. He also says that locally-sourced food isn’t necessarily better – because transport represents such a small proportion of the carbon cost of food.
Regenesis is a fascinating and thought-provoking read, packed with insight and testament to Monbiot’s commitment to detail (he holds others to the same high standard, even allies who make idyllic claims but can’t provide the evidence to back them up). It is unflinching in outlining the problem, but also inspiring in the solutions it offers.
*
I received a copy of Regenesis from the publisher via Netgalley.
August 30, 2022
Monbiot's past work has always struck a chord with me. To say I was disappointed with this piece is an understatement—this book aims to report on solutions for a sustainable global food supply, but reads ignorant of the cultural and socioeconomic realities that exist beyond the Western Eurocentric Developed World™️. The result is a highly imaginative, highly fantastical projection of a "sustainable utopia" which erases 95% of the planet's humanity.
March 2, 2022
The first chapter of this book goes into really quite a lot of detail about soil ecology and the various tiny unheralded creatures of the subterranean world we so often ignore. So much that as someone with embarrassingly little knowledge and interest in gardening, I did start to wonder if my enthusiasm for this book, based on having read a few very good books by the same author, was misplaced.
I was also feeling that I have read too many doom and gloom books recently and that I should perhaps lay off for a while, and the next few chapters laying out damage done by the global food system and some current farming practices do make for pretty scary reading.
I should not have worried though, there are some fascinating insights throughout the book. The author is also not scared of pointing out where some traditional green views are misplaced.
For example, the increase in land use required for 'pasture fed' meat. There are also intriguing glimpses of possible innovations that could help with rewilding and move us away from the ever increasing loss of natural habitats to farmland. The bacteria-based pancake springs to mind. Seems like a hard sell, but the book challenges a lot of conventional views in a well researched, interesting read and overall I really enjoyed it.
Advanced copy received from NetGalley.
I was also feeling that I have read too many doom and gloom books recently and that I should perhaps lay off for a while, and the next few chapters laying out damage done by the global food system and some current farming practices do make for pretty scary reading.
I should not have worried though, there are some fascinating insights throughout the book. The author is also not scared of pointing out where some traditional green views are misplaced.
For example, the increase in land use required for 'pasture fed' meat. There are also intriguing glimpses of possible innovations that could help with rewilding and move us away from the ever increasing loss of natural habitats to farmland. The bacteria-based pancake springs to mind. Seems like a hard sell, but the book challenges a lot of conventional views in a well researched, interesting read and overall I really enjoyed it.
Advanced copy received from NetGalley.
June 7, 2022
This is an excellent appreciation and deconstruction of the importance of soil, the environmental importance of agriculture, food, pollution, waste. It manages to deal with a number of connected issues in a thorough and detailed manner. Highly researched as you might expect and I found it to be a careful approach, always supporting the points that he makes with a detailed reference. Really question now why the approach outlined in the book can't be the future.
June 30, 2022
Utterly faultless..
However I am a soil science simpleton and will probably soon be schooled by some smart-arse anonymous keyboard warrior with a serious chip on their shoulder.
What's that you say.....
However I am a soil science simpleton and will probably soon be schooled by some smart-arse anonymous keyboard warrior with a serious chip on their shoulder.
What's that you say.....
July 21, 2022
De siste årene har jeg lest mange sakprosa-bøker om klimaendringer, naturtap og relaterte temaer. Noen har vært virkelig gode, noen middelmådige, og noen skuffende dårlig researchet og skrevet. Regensis troner nå øverst som den beste, mest lærerike, innsiktsfulle og øyeåpnende boka av alle jeg har lest i denne sjangeren. George Monbiot har lest over 5.000 forskningsartikler og titalls bøker i arbeidet med denne boka, og besøkt en rekke gårder i UK underveis. Det er et imponerende stykke arbeid som ligger bak, og boken er godt og engasjerende skrevet. Jeg visste at det sto dårlig til med verdens matsystemer, at de er under press blant annet fra klimaendringer, og at landbruk med dyr kommer med enorme klima-, natur- og miljøkostnader. Men jeg visste ikke hvor fullstendig ødelagt og ødeleggende dagens form for globalt landbruk faktisk er. Vi ødelegger den jorda vi er avhengige av for å leve med åpne øyne og enorme pengesubsidier. Vi lar elvene våre og fjordene våre fylles av møkk uten å reagere. Vi lar vill natur og dyreliv dø ut fordi vi er kultivert til å ønske et spesifikt type kosthold. Forbered deg på å bli sjokkert og sint av denne boka. Monbiot presenterer heldigvis også det som fremstår som gode og realistisk løsninger - hvis vi klarer å endre politikk og kultur. Det er få bøker jeg vil anbefale så varmt som denne. Den er så utrolig viktig. Les den.
June 7, 2022
There can’t be many books out there more important to read than this one. Monbiot forces us to confront some grim and hard truths about the global food system that we can’t keep ignoring. But while these are hard to stomach, most of the chapters are about solutions rather than problems, and he lays out a vision for the future that I found compelling and exciting.
It will not be easy to get there, but it starts with us all understanding the perverse realities of the way this system works, questioning its dogma, and understanding the scale of the threat we face if we continue as we are.
The book is meticulously researched and well-argued. I will certainly be reading it again and studying it carefully, and will invite others to do the same.
It will not be easy to get there, but it starts with us all understanding the perverse realities of the way this system works, questioning its dogma, and understanding the scale of the threat we face if we continue as we are.
The book is meticulously researched and well-argued. I will certainly be reading it again and studying it carefully, and will invite others to do the same.
December 12, 2022
Perhaps it wasn’t wrong to say that Regenesis is a kind of manifesto on saving the planet, focussing on the issue of food security. The manifesto departs from the premise that we could converge the ideas of mitigating climate change and ensuring our food security. One of the ideas that George Monbiot advocates through this book is the necessity to secure our foods without farming. He isn’t shy to put bluntly that what he advocates is a Counter-Agricultural-Revolution, exposing the problems that exist with our agricultural system. An optimist, Monbiot believes that our climate problems could be averted easily if all people change to a plant-based diet, which he admits is an unrealistic solution given the convergence between food and culture, as well as the existence of meat lobbyists advocating against the move.
Securing our foods without farming is not a joke that Monbiot throws up randomly here. He shows that it is technologically possible to cultivate enough foods to feed the population through alternative moves such as fixing the quality of soils, increasing the diversity of the creatures in farmland by rewilding, as well as relying more on bacteria to synthesise alternative foods that meet our nutritional needs. As an advocate, he shows that the real challenge that has been stymieing the transition is not technology but rather the government that keeps subsidising farming, as well as the food industry and meat lobbyists that are benefited by the preservation of the status quo. I like how detailed Monbiot describes his vision, including the need to ensure people in the traditional farming industry remain employed in his Regenesis plan.
I think this is the kind of book that policymakers would need to read. The ideas are controversial, as Monbiot himself criticised the movements advocated by some other climate and food activists such as Michael Pollan who says we should eat real food, which by his definition goes as “things that your great-grandmother (or someone’s great-grandmother) would recognize.” But the definition of real food is different throughout the ages and it is quite unrealistic to fulfil our food security using a simple traditional approach to define what qualifies as real food. Monbiot attempts to show that there is the need to converge both traditional and innovative approaches, by embracing the “return to nature” approach as well as genetic modification using bacteria to fulfil our food demands.
Securing our foods without farming is not a joke that Monbiot throws up randomly here. He shows that it is technologically possible to cultivate enough foods to feed the population through alternative moves such as fixing the quality of soils, increasing the diversity of the creatures in farmland by rewilding, as well as relying more on bacteria to synthesise alternative foods that meet our nutritional needs. As an advocate, he shows that the real challenge that has been stymieing the transition is not technology but rather the government that keeps subsidising farming, as well as the food industry and meat lobbyists that are benefited by the preservation of the status quo. I like how detailed Monbiot describes his vision, including the need to ensure people in the traditional farming industry remain employed in his Regenesis plan.
I think this is the kind of book that policymakers would need to read. The ideas are controversial, as Monbiot himself criticised the movements advocated by some other climate and food activists such as Michael Pollan who says we should eat real food, which by his definition goes as “things that your great-grandmother (or someone’s great-grandmother) would recognize.” But the definition of real food is different throughout the ages and it is quite unrealistic to fulfil our food security using a simple traditional approach to define what qualifies as real food. Monbiot attempts to show that there is the need to converge both traditional and innovative approaches, by embracing the “return to nature” approach as well as genetic modification using bacteria to fulfil our food demands.
May 26, 2022
Much as I’ve appreciated Monbiot in the past, this book is full of untruths, which damages the good cause of regenerative agriculture. Would have been better written by someone with actual farming experience.
October 16, 2023
4.5/5
Literally the best (to be fair the only) book I’ve ever read about food sustainability!!!
The book starts with George detailing the diversity that is literally in a scoop of soil, in such an interesting and eye opening way. Evolution is so wild and beautiful, and it’s crazy how little we know about this insane ecosystem that houses SO much of the food we eat?
I’ll be honest, the middle few chapters were hard for me to read as they detailed how convoluted and self-sabotaging the current agricultural system is… lobbyists and government including. Additionally, they opened my eyes to how HARD it is to be a farmer, challenging my existing understanding of the job. Toward the end I started to get fatigued reading all of the statistics about how we are headed toward a climate catastrophe … however that could be due to a personal avoidance problem on my end.
He continues the book by highlighting sustainable practices, some even fully contradicting everything that is known to be true about modern day mass scale farming - turns out there’s a reality where fertilizer doesn’t need to be used?? He also delves into agroecology, food technologies which will lead to the eradication of farms altogether, shifts in government incentives needed to actualize real change, animal cruelty, food affordability, and product naming issues. Also our king George Monbiot roasted so many entities involved that needed to be roasted, so some laughs happened. I zoomed through the last 50–80 pages filled with so much excitement and hope about this space, as well as feeling an even stronger personal calling :)
Literally the best (to be fair the only) book I’ve ever read about food sustainability!!!
The book starts with George detailing the diversity that is literally in a scoop of soil, in such an interesting and eye opening way. Evolution is so wild and beautiful, and it’s crazy how little we know about this insane ecosystem that houses SO much of the food we eat?
I’ll be honest, the middle few chapters were hard for me to read as they detailed how convoluted and self-sabotaging the current agricultural system is… lobbyists and government including. Additionally, they opened my eyes to how HARD it is to be a farmer, challenging my existing understanding of the job. Toward the end I started to get fatigued reading all of the statistics about how we are headed toward a climate catastrophe … however that could be due to a personal avoidance problem on my end.
He continues the book by highlighting sustainable practices, some even fully contradicting everything that is known to be true about modern day mass scale farming - turns out there’s a reality where fertilizer doesn’t need to be used?? He also delves into agroecology, food technologies which will lead to the eradication of farms altogether, shifts in government incentives needed to actualize real change, animal cruelty, food affordability, and product naming issues. Also our king George Monbiot roasted so many entities involved that needed to be roasted, so some laughs happened. I zoomed through the last 50–80 pages filled with so much excitement and hope about this space, as well as feeling an even stronger personal calling :)
January 29, 2023
Ilmselt üks viimase aasta olulisemaid populaarteaduslikke raamatuid. The Guardiani ajakirjanik võtab ette hoomamatute mõõtudega väljakutse: inimkonna toidutootmise ühes selle erinevate ökoloogiliste, eetiliste, tervislike, sotsiaalmajanduslike, poliitiliste ja tehnoloogiliste dimensioonidega. Üllataval moel suudab ta vaatamata röögatule infohulgale püsida klaarina ilma karjuvalt vägivaldsete lihtsustusteta, ligipääsetava ja loogilisena ka vajalikke teaduskraade mitteomavale lugejale. Põimuvad isiklik poeetiline mõtisklus üheainsa inimese suhtest toiduga ja globaalsed süsteemiteoreetilised kirjeldused. Kaalutud on kõiksugu võimalikke argumente ja vastuargumente, valikuid ja katsetusi, praktikaid ja stsenaariumeid, kuid üks koorub siit igal juhul üheselt: liha söömisel puudub tulevik. 5/5
May 29, 2023
Excellent. Horrifying and hopeful at the same time.
April 30, 2024
A highly evidence based approach to a critique of the current agricultural system to which Monbiot provides some urgent insights into possible revisions for the future.
July 31, 2022
Een hoop geleerd over hoe ons eten wordt gemaakt en hoe er aan de toekomst van landbouw wordt gewerkt. Zoals altijd bij GM is het activistisch geschreven, en sommige hoofdstukken misschien iets te, maar uiteindelijk is het vooral inspirerend en niet beklemmend.
June 11, 2022
a rollercoaster of common sense.
For a while you doom scroll, then there is hope and clarity amidst the thick fog of environmental abuse. Recommended essential reading. Well written and researched. Thx George. Let’s hope it happens.
For a while you doom scroll, then there is hope and clarity amidst the thick fog of environmental abuse. Recommended essential reading. Well written and researched. Thx George. Let’s hope it happens.
June 12, 2022
A must-read for everyone.
January 3, 2023
That the food system is broken is something we would all agree on. But few understand exactly how broken it is. From the furthest upstream reaches of the business, where proprietary seeds are developed together with their proprietary pesticides by giant corporations operating de facto oligopolies, all the way to the waste end, where dead zones are expanding by their hundreds across the world's oceans, Regenesis' very first chapter reminds us that the food crisis, even more than climate crisis, is what is rapidly and perhaps irrevocably destroying the very basis of human lives on this planet.
Behold: the Global Standard Farm.
George Monbiot does an excellent job of explaining why that is: a relentless drive for agricultural simplification, standardisation and efficiency has led to the rise of what he usefully terms the "Global Standard Farm". We are all familiar with it: present on almost every continent, it is growing standard crops and livestock from standard genetics with standard fertilisers and pesticides, using agronomic processes that are degrading soils in much the same way everywhere, and are subject to much the same stresses, from drought to disease. Because it is so standardised, the GSF is much more at risk of disruption than the far more complex traditional farming systems it is relentlessly replacing. As a result, the global food system is alarmingly brittle. Yet the Global Standard Farm is an extraordinarily powerful beast: the perversity of the rich world agricultural subsidies is a direct result of GSF lobbying (yes, I'm looking at you, Europe).
His focus on the importance of numbers is particularly valuable. For example, it matters little if the rich world becomes "overrun by tofu-munching vegans", as long as the vast majority of people on this planet continue sourcing the protein they do get from unsustainable livestock systems. Urban farming aficionados and locavores are making simple mathematical mistakes: when over 3.5 billion people live in cities, food by definition must come from hundreds and thousands of kilometres away. The huge areas devoted to the monocropping of plants to produce biofuels and animal feed are indeed an obscenity.
Much of the global harvest ends up in the tanks of cars and the bellies of livestock
Because agriculture is so stressful for soils and biodiversity, limiting its reach is important. But we treat it like a limitless resource: a large proportion of the global harvest ends up in the tanks of cars and the bellies of livestock. Add to that the remarkably poor conversion efficiency of most livestock systems and the miracle is that we have not seen the collapse of the global food system and the ecosystems that undergird it yet. The GSF is also the single biggest source of greenhouse gas emissions - so the food system risks killing us as much as nourishing us. The search for alternative ways of generating the carbohydrates and proteins we need is thus urgent, and Regenesis does a good job of highlighting the potential of microbial fermentation in this regard. Companies like Solar Foods, and their recipes to grow protein using feed stocks that need several orders of magnitude less land than cropping, will undoubtedly be a precious part of our future.
Missing the forest... and the trees!
And yet the book is marred by two disappointing failings. First, Monbiot has managed to write an entire book about the troubles and regeneration of the food system without once mentioning the word agroforestry. This is surprising: few agricultural interventions can more durably and resiliently raise the total production of a given piece of land than the expert mixing up of perennials like trees with pastures or crops. Agroforestry boosts yields by anywhere between 30% (in the temperate zone) to several hundred percent (in the humid tropics), while boosting biodiversity compared to monocultures, sometimes by remarkably large amounts. Because raising yields is absolutely crucial to feed a huge and growing human population without further damaging the world, this omission is surprising.
Perhaps this blind spot is linked to the boundary conditions that Monbiot sets himself. His book is about the food system, not about landscapes and their uses. Agroforestry boosts the total productivity of trees and crops, not necessarily that of crops alone. Yet these non-food crops, too, can seriously damage the soil and impact biodiversity. The vast cotton fields of Uzbekistan carry much of the blame for the disappearance of the Aral Sea, and our hunger for toilet paper directly feeds the transformation of Scandinavian boreal forests into monoclonal plantations.
Second, Monbiot does not seem to recognise that the importance of wise management for soil and ecosystem health extends beyond croplands. He devotes an entire chapter to the extraordinary farm of Ian Tollhurst, a horticulturalist who grows a cornucopia of vegetables without any inputs on lousy soils near Oxford. I have spent a day with Tolly (as everyone calls him) on his farm. He is an inspiring, charismatic, and outstanding farmer achieving results that most agronomists would dismiss as impossible. Not surprisingly, scientific papers looking at horticulture will fail to pick up his superb but extreme farming system. Monbiot recognises the exceptional nature of Tolly's farm and so, rightly, decides not to let the broader science of horticulturalism stand in his way. Disappointingly, he fails to extend the same approach to any other form of land use, and in particular to pastoral production systems. He seems not to have visited a single livestock operation (well-managed or otherwise), limiting himself to a diet of scientific papers purporting to analyse grazing management. Without having talked to any ranchers, he accuses them of making "wild assertions", dismisses papers showing the significant carbon drawdown and biodiversity benefits of holistic grazing as "minor", and wraps up that extraordinarily important topic in three profoundly flawed pages.
To graze or not?
There is no question that the total amount of calories, proteins or vitamins per acre that can be produced through grazing systems is much lower than that delivered by cropping systems (and, a fortiori, bacterial fermentation). Nevertheless, management matters for soil health. And on that front, well-managed grazing systems tend to win. Cropping can, in exceptional cases like Tolly's, restore biodiversity on the smaller scale - arthropods, soil biota, birds - but the vast majority of cropping operations are, as Monbiot makes clear in his introductory chapters, absolute disasters for the climate and biodiversity alike. The fact that, like cropping systems, almost all of the livestock operations on this planet are destructive should have encouraged him to visit those ranchers who are achieving extraordinarily different results. Examples from across Africa, the US, Australia, Asia and even Europe show that well-managed grazing systems can generate human food while maintaining or regenerating a fine range of megafauna on the land. The added biodiversity flowing from that management increases the resilience of those grazing systems as well as their productivity, which explains their growing popularity with ranchers. Yes, these grazing systems are exceptional, and thus by definition rare. But not nearly as rare as Tolly's horticulture. Seeking them out and analysing how they could and could not contribute to solving the food system crisis would have added value to the book.
For a work that purports to analyse the entire food system, Monbiot is also strangely silent about the extraordinary social and cultural aspects involved. He makes the fascinating point that the poetry with which we embroider pastoral life - the wizened shepherd gazing meaningfully into the distance in the Welsh hills, the cowboy riding into the sunset in the American west, the cute little farms decorating the world's butter packets and milk bottles - is a huge barrier against the rational analysis of the damage wrought by most pastoral systems. But his discussion of the importance of pastoralism for traditional people and the biodiversity they support is limited to a short paragraph bemoaning what happened to a Maasai group he once worked with.
Worse, he is mum about the social and financial implications of taking vast areas of agricultural and pastoral land out of production. There are millions of square kilometres of land on this planet belonging to hundreds of millions of people whose value derives entirely from its ability to grow products for markets. What happens to that value if farming shrinks as drastically as he suggests it should? We can all agree that land growing animal feeds and biofuels should be switched to something else, but that will have to be paid for. Is the world prepared to pay farmers just for owning land in exchange for removing barbed wire and letting it rewild? One may decide that good grazing management under trees, a practice known as silvopastorlism that the Drawdown Project ranks as one of the top 11 carbon mitigating measures we have at our disposal, is the lesser of two evils: the landowners can sell meat and still do something good for carbon and biodiversity, and it may be an easier sell, politically, than a new version of feudalism where the urban working classes pay rich landowners simply for letting their land rewild.
This silence is symptomatic of the book's biggest issue: its failure to engage with the role of human management, something which is as relevant to wild areas as to pastoral and cropping lands on our crowded planet. Knepp Castle, Oostvardersplassen and Africa's iconic national parks may seem to be glorious nature doing its thing, but each would collapse without careful management. Oostvardersplassen is intensively managed, including by the deployment of massive water works. Most African national parks are glorified game ranches, managed by a range of parties, including commercial operators, and sometimes not very well (have pictures of wildlife on bare land under some trees not become the iconic image we have of African safaris?). In southern Africa, the wildlife is often found on commercial game or cattle ranches, since that is where the grazing is, and so where the prey animals are: like Knepp, they are wild-seeming areas that are in fact carefully managed.
I join Monbiot in bemoaning that human settlements, dense road networks and the curse of barbed wire have divided up the land so much that the grand migrations of millions of beasts that were common until a few hundred years ago cannot return. But that does not mean that grasslands must die, or wildlife become extinct. We may do without the management of cattle, as Monbiot suggests, but unless we want to see wildlife disappear, we cannot do without the management of wildlife. The future lies in the clever management of landscapes for all our needs - food, timber, fibre, water, carbon, biodiversity and more. And as long as we are so numerous on this planet, that means managing pretty much all of it.
The future lies in the clever management of landscapes for all our needs - food, timber, fibre, water, carbon, biodiversity and more.
Despite its flaws, this is an important book and one I do not hesitate to call a must-read. Monbiot gets the big questions right, from the scale and impact of the food system, through the dangers and the brittleness of the Global Standard Farm, to the extraordinarily deleterious impact of the corporate concentration along the food value chain, and the reliable catastrophes that rich world agricultural subsidies deliver. Just don’t expect him to offer a full set of solutions.
Behold: the Global Standard Farm.
George Monbiot does an excellent job of explaining why that is: a relentless drive for agricultural simplification, standardisation and efficiency has led to the rise of what he usefully terms the "Global Standard Farm". We are all familiar with it: present on almost every continent, it is growing standard crops and livestock from standard genetics with standard fertilisers and pesticides, using agronomic processes that are degrading soils in much the same way everywhere, and are subject to much the same stresses, from drought to disease. Because it is so standardised, the GSF is much more at risk of disruption than the far more complex traditional farming systems it is relentlessly replacing. As a result, the global food system is alarmingly brittle. Yet the Global Standard Farm is an extraordinarily powerful beast: the perversity of the rich world agricultural subsidies is a direct result of GSF lobbying (yes, I'm looking at you, Europe).
His focus on the importance of numbers is particularly valuable. For example, it matters little if the rich world becomes "overrun by tofu-munching vegans", as long as the vast majority of people on this planet continue sourcing the protein they do get from unsustainable livestock systems. Urban farming aficionados and locavores are making simple mathematical mistakes: when over 3.5 billion people live in cities, food by definition must come from hundreds and thousands of kilometres away. The huge areas devoted to the monocropping of plants to produce biofuels and animal feed are indeed an obscenity.
Much of the global harvest ends up in the tanks of cars and the bellies of livestock
Because agriculture is so stressful for soils and biodiversity, limiting its reach is important. But we treat it like a limitless resource: a large proportion of the global harvest ends up in the tanks of cars and the bellies of livestock. Add to that the remarkably poor conversion efficiency of most livestock systems and the miracle is that we have not seen the collapse of the global food system and the ecosystems that undergird it yet. The GSF is also the single biggest source of greenhouse gas emissions - so the food system risks killing us as much as nourishing us. The search for alternative ways of generating the carbohydrates and proteins we need is thus urgent, and Regenesis does a good job of highlighting the potential of microbial fermentation in this regard. Companies like Solar Foods, and their recipes to grow protein using feed stocks that need several orders of magnitude less land than cropping, will undoubtedly be a precious part of our future.
Missing the forest... and the trees!
And yet the book is marred by two disappointing failings. First, Monbiot has managed to write an entire book about the troubles and regeneration of the food system without once mentioning the word agroforestry. This is surprising: few agricultural interventions can more durably and resiliently raise the total production of a given piece of land than the expert mixing up of perennials like trees with pastures or crops. Agroforestry boosts yields by anywhere between 30% (in the temperate zone) to several hundred percent (in the humid tropics), while boosting biodiversity compared to monocultures, sometimes by remarkably large amounts. Because raising yields is absolutely crucial to feed a huge and growing human population without further damaging the world, this omission is surprising.
Perhaps this blind spot is linked to the boundary conditions that Monbiot sets himself. His book is about the food system, not about landscapes and their uses. Agroforestry boosts the total productivity of trees and crops, not necessarily that of crops alone. Yet these non-food crops, too, can seriously damage the soil and impact biodiversity. The vast cotton fields of Uzbekistan carry much of the blame for the disappearance of the Aral Sea, and our hunger for toilet paper directly feeds the transformation of Scandinavian boreal forests into monoclonal plantations.
Second, Monbiot does not seem to recognise that the importance of wise management for soil and ecosystem health extends beyond croplands. He devotes an entire chapter to the extraordinary farm of Ian Tollhurst, a horticulturalist who grows a cornucopia of vegetables without any inputs on lousy soils near Oxford. I have spent a day with Tolly (as everyone calls him) on his farm. He is an inspiring, charismatic, and outstanding farmer achieving results that most agronomists would dismiss as impossible. Not surprisingly, scientific papers looking at horticulture will fail to pick up his superb but extreme farming system. Monbiot recognises the exceptional nature of Tolly's farm and so, rightly, decides not to let the broader science of horticulturalism stand in his way. Disappointingly, he fails to extend the same approach to any other form of land use, and in particular to pastoral production systems. He seems not to have visited a single livestock operation (well-managed or otherwise), limiting himself to a diet of scientific papers purporting to analyse grazing management. Without having talked to any ranchers, he accuses them of making "wild assertions", dismisses papers showing the significant carbon drawdown and biodiversity benefits of holistic grazing as "minor", and wraps up that extraordinarily important topic in three profoundly flawed pages.
To graze or not?
There is no question that the total amount of calories, proteins or vitamins per acre that can be produced through grazing systems is much lower than that delivered by cropping systems (and, a fortiori, bacterial fermentation). Nevertheless, management matters for soil health. And on that front, well-managed grazing systems tend to win. Cropping can, in exceptional cases like Tolly's, restore biodiversity on the smaller scale - arthropods, soil biota, birds - but the vast majority of cropping operations are, as Monbiot makes clear in his introductory chapters, absolute disasters for the climate and biodiversity alike. The fact that, like cropping systems, almost all of the livestock operations on this planet are destructive should have encouraged him to visit those ranchers who are achieving extraordinarily different results. Examples from across Africa, the US, Australia, Asia and even Europe show that well-managed grazing systems can generate human food while maintaining or regenerating a fine range of megafauna on the land. The added biodiversity flowing from that management increases the resilience of those grazing systems as well as their productivity, which explains their growing popularity with ranchers. Yes, these grazing systems are exceptional, and thus by definition rare. But not nearly as rare as Tolly's horticulture. Seeking them out and analysing how they could and could not contribute to solving the food system crisis would have added value to the book.
For a work that purports to analyse the entire food system, Monbiot is also strangely silent about the extraordinary social and cultural aspects involved. He makes the fascinating point that the poetry with which we embroider pastoral life - the wizened shepherd gazing meaningfully into the distance in the Welsh hills, the cowboy riding into the sunset in the American west, the cute little farms decorating the world's butter packets and milk bottles - is a huge barrier against the rational analysis of the damage wrought by most pastoral systems. But his discussion of the importance of pastoralism for traditional people and the biodiversity they support is limited to a short paragraph bemoaning what happened to a Maasai group he once worked with.
Worse, he is mum about the social and financial implications of taking vast areas of agricultural and pastoral land out of production. There are millions of square kilometres of land on this planet belonging to hundreds of millions of people whose value derives entirely from its ability to grow products for markets. What happens to that value if farming shrinks as drastically as he suggests it should? We can all agree that land growing animal feeds and biofuels should be switched to something else, but that will have to be paid for. Is the world prepared to pay farmers just for owning land in exchange for removing barbed wire and letting it rewild? One may decide that good grazing management under trees, a practice known as silvopastorlism that the Drawdown Project ranks as one of the top 11 carbon mitigating measures we have at our disposal, is the lesser of two evils: the landowners can sell meat and still do something good for carbon and biodiversity, and it may be an easier sell, politically, than a new version of feudalism where the urban working classes pay rich landowners simply for letting their land rewild.
This silence is symptomatic of the book's biggest issue: its failure to engage with the role of human management, something which is as relevant to wild areas as to pastoral and cropping lands on our crowded planet. Knepp Castle, Oostvardersplassen and Africa's iconic national parks may seem to be glorious nature doing its thing, but each would collapse without careful management. Oostvardersplassen is intensively managed, including by the deployment of massive water works. Most African national parks are glorified game ranches, managed by a range of parties, including commercial operators, and sometimes not very well (have pictures of wildlife on bare land under some trees not become the iconic image we have of African safaris?). In southern Africa, the wildlife is often found on commercial game or cattle ranches, since that is where the grazing is, and so where the prey animals are: like Knepp, they are wild-seeming areas that are in fact carefully managed.
I join Monbiot in bemoaning that human settlements, dense road networks and the curse of barbed wire have divided up the land so much that the grand migrations of millions of beasts that were common until a few hundred years ago cannot return. But that does not mean that grasslands must die, or wildlife become extinct. We may do without the management of cattle, as Monbiot suggests, but unless we want to see wildlife disappear, we cannot do without the management of wildlife. The future lies in the clever management of landscapes for all our needs - food, timber, fibre, water, carbon, biodiversity and more. And as long as we are so numerous on this planet, that means managing pretty much all of it.
The future lies in the clever management of landscapes for all our needs - food, timber, fibre, water, carbon, biodiversity and more.
Despite its flaws, this is an important book and one I do not hesitate to call a must-read. Monbiot gets the big questions right, from the scale and impact of the food system, through the dangers and the brittleness of the Global Standard Farm, to the extraordinarily deleterious impact of the corporate concentration along the food value chain, and the reliable catastrophes that rich world agricultural subsidies deliver. Just don’t expect him to offer a full set of solutions.
February 24, 2023
"Let’s imagine it was the other way round.
"Imagine that the world was currently producing most of its protein and much of its fat from microbes in breweries, occupying, in total, the land area of a small European province, and fed and powered by clean electricity. Imagine that my evil, anagrammatic twin, Tom Go-Bioregen, wrote a book with the following argument.
“I’ve got this great idea. Let’s shut down the food factories. Let’s replace the food they make by catching some wild animals — aurochs, wild boar, jungle fowl, and a woolly ruminant from Mesopotamia would do — modifying them drastically and breeding them in stupendous numbers. Let’s separate the young from their mothers, castrate them, dock their tails, clip their beaks, teeth, and horns without anesthesia, herd them into barns and cages, subject them to extreme boredom and sensory deprivation for their short, distressing lives, then corral them into giant factories where we stun them, cut their throats, skin, pluck, and hack their bloody flesh into chunks that you, the lucky customer, will want to eat (oh yes you will!).
"I’ve done the sums—we’d need to slaughter only 75 billion animals a year. Let’s kill the baby aurochs, extract a chemical from the lining of their fourth stomachs and mix it with milk from lactating mothers of the same species, to create a wobbly mass of fat and protein. We’ll stir in some live bacteria to digest this mass, then let their excrements sit till they go hard and yellow and start to stink. You’re really going to want this!
“Let’s fell the forests, drain the wetlands, seize the wild grasslands, expel the indigenous people, kill the large predators, exclude the wild herbivores, trigger the global collapse of wildlife, climate breakdown, and the destruction of the habitable planet. Let’s fence most of this land for our captive animals to graze, and plant the rest with crops to make them fat. Let’s spray the crops with biocidal toxins and minerals that’ll leach into the soil and water. Let’s divert the rivers and drain the aquifers. Let’s pour billions of tons of shit into the sea. Let’s trigger repeated plagues, transmitted to humans by the animals we’ve captured, and destroy the efficacy of our most important medicines.
“Sure, it will trash everything after a while, but think of the fun we’ll have. Come on, you know you want this.”
I hope you would run this scoundrel out of town."
"Imagine that the world was currently producing most of its protein and much of its fat from microbes in breweries, occupying, in total, the land area of a small European province, and fed and powered by clean electricity. Imagine that my evil, anagrammatic twin, Tom Go-Bioregen, wrote a book with the following argument.
“I’ve got this great idea. Let’s shut down the food factories. Let’s replace the food they make by catching some wild animals — aurochs, wild boar, jungle fowl, and a woolly ruminant from Mesopotamia would do — modifying them drastically and breeding them in stupendous numbers. Let’s separate the young from their mothers, castrate them, dock their tails, clip their beaks, teeth, and horns without anesthesia, herd them into barns and cages, subject them to extreme boredom and sensory deprivation for their short, distressing lives, then corral them into giant factories where we stun them, cut their throats, skin, pluck, and hack their bloody flesh into chunks that you, the lucky customer, will want to eat (oh yes you will!).
"I’ve done the sums—we’d need to slaughter only 75 billion animals a year. Let’s kill the baby aurochs, extract a chemical from the lining of their fourth stomachs and mix it with milk from lactating mothers of the same species, to create a wobbly mass of fat and protein. We’ll stir in some live bacteria to digest this mass, then let their excrements sit till they go hard and yellow and start to stink. You’re really going to want this!
“Let’s fell the forests, drain the wetlands, seize the wild grasslands, expel the indigenous people, kill the large predators, exclude the wild herbivores, trigger the global collapse of wildlife, climate breakdown, and the destruction of the habitable planet. Let’s fence most of this land for our captive animals to graze, and plant the rest with crops to make them fat. Let’s spray the crops with biocidal toxins and minerals that’ll leach into the soil and water. Let’s divert the rivers and drain the aquifers. Let’s pour billions of tons of shit into the sea. Let’s trigger repeated plagues, transmitted to humans by the animals we’ve captured, and destroy the efficacy of our most important medicines.
“Sure, it will trash everything after a while, but think of the fun we’ll have. Come on, you know you want this.”
I hope you would run this scoundrel out of town."
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