ecospirit

George Monbiot’s latest book, Regenesis, shares a revolutionary outlook. We can “feed the world without devouring the planet.” In an era of accelerating climate change and continuing habitat disruption, Monbiot, a vegan, surveys the landscape for a better way to produce food for 8-10 billion humans, while preserving land in which many threatened species might thrive. 

The book begins with a brilliant chapter on Soil, the least studied dimension of our remarkable planet.  Monbiot patiently researches and interviews experts on the remarkable holistically nested relationships of soil denizens.  There are whole phyla down there, not just classes of critters, including springtails, bristle tails, symphylids, crustaceans mites, spiders, centipedes and millipedes, earthworms, nematodes and mollusks.  And of course the much-celebrated and crucial symbiosis of fungi and plants. 

 After this stunning tour of what lies beneath our feet – and supports us nutritionally – he goes on to demonstrate, through sordid examples and research data, how modern industrial agriculture is systematically destroying the miracle of soil chemistry.   Not only are we losing topsoil, sending it along with chemical fertilizers into our waterways and ultimately, the ocean, but we are also destroying soil structure by ploughing and misusing soil amendments, chemical and otherwise. 

 Monbiot proceeds to grimly demonstrate the horrors of Big Ag, especially the dairy and livestock industries, with far more examples than I could stomach. Crucially, he points out that the vast majority of land given over to agriculture world-wide is used to produce feed for animals. But then he gives us a couple of refreshing chapters narrating in careful detail the work of farm geniuses who model the best practices of vegetable, fruit, and grain production in his native England. 

Tolly, tough and weathered, hands that have worked the soil for decades, late sixties, long blonde hair and a gold earring works an ancient estate, productive since lower paleolithic times, recognized in these latter days by its mansion, Toad Hall. The soil is about forty percent rock, chock full of ancient implements and shards, not what agronomists would call arable. But by patient observation and a labor intensive crop rotation, the plot produces at the threshold of high yields. As a gardener, I was in delight and amazement at Tolly’s genius in integrating multiple systems (including weeds!) to create good yields of high-quality vegetables without importing animal products from what he calls “ghost acres” (off-site sources of soil amendments).

 Another chapter follows Tim, a consummate English wheat farmer, producing organic wheat for the artisanal baking market with reasonable yields. Because he doesn’t plow, he avoided terrible erosion from unseasonal floods a couple of seasons back that you could see in the farms all around him, as well in as in his own research strip with grain grown by conventional methods.  

 With the kind of careful design and loving attention that Tolly brings to his plot, along with labor paid for by the green philanthropist who now owns Toad Hall, fruits and vegetables can be grown with enough yield to make it worthwhile (leaving aside the issue of sustainable lifestyle in a cash ecomomy).  But Tim with his heirlooom wheat and organic growers in general have a hard time producing fruit and vegetables efficiently enough to feed great numbers of hungry folk.  Monbiot takes issue with those who say food should  be more expensive, holding the admirable – and ultimately necessary – goal of feeding the masses nutritious food at a cost they can afford. His critique of organic fruit and vegetables and pasture-raised meat is perhaps the most controversial portion of Monbiot’s book. But his powerful summary of the barbarism of our traditional foodways, seen through the eyes of an interstellar visitor (pp203-04), is hard to contramend.

 I once met Wes Jackson, witnessing him in familiar conversation onstage st Duke Divinity School  with Wendell Berry.  Monbiot marvels at how little has been done to support Jackson’s research at the tiny Land Institute in Salinas Kansas, crossing and backcrossing native prairie grasses to create perennial wheat.  Now there are similar projects in China to breed perennial rice.  Not only do perennial grains save carbon by obviating the need for annual ploughing, they also preserve soil structure and fertility with their hardy two and a half foot roots. 

 But perennial grains will not be possible to grow in all places and conditions.  After a thoroughly dismantling critique of the ecology and economics of  the meat and dairy industries and surveying the best possible production of vegetable fat and protein, he comes to the conclusion that we are still using far too much arable land to feed humanity, to the detriment of our fellow creatures and the web that sustains the whole.

 Monbiot’s answer is already brewing in laboratory vats across Europe.  He returns to the soil bacterium from his initial chapter to investigate the production of protein and fat from cultured bacteria.  These products go far beyond elaborately produced Beyond Meat products, and can be brewed for different tastes and textures.  Skeptically, he samples a pancake made from bacteria flour, and finds it equal to the traditional pancake, which requires a huge panoply of grain, dairy, and poultry resources to fashion.  

So yes, Regenesis is possible, as Monbiot skillfully illustrates.  But is it likely?  That depends on the collective (political) will, which has not yet reached critical mass.  According to the climate clock, we have less than 6 years until we are over the climate cliff.  The intellectual and scientific case was made quite awhile back.  Now Monbiot points to a breakthrough in foodways patterns laid down in the neolithic, a true agricultural revolution.  It is no longer a matter of intellect, but of Schopenhauer’s sleeping giant, the Will, to get up and carry the Intellect over the slough of our lazy, dumb denial