How do we feed the world without devouring the planet? Read George Monbiot interviewed on his new book, Regenesis
George Monbiot is the anthropocene’s George Orwell - fearless, intellectual, brilliantly fluent about our disrupted biosphere, and on the urgency of our need to change our ways.
At a time of an intensifiying cost-of-living crisis, and the last few years of disruptions to our supply chains (with more ahead), George couldn’t be more timely with his new book’s vision for a new food system. Nor with its title: Regenesis - with “Regen Economies” a huge part of the Alternative Global’s new direction.
We have found an excellent introductory interview with George conducted by the Irish website, Dublin City University Centre for Climate and Society, with Monbiot interviewed by the director, Dave Robbins. Excerpts below:
DR: Why did you write this book?
GM: It came about mostly because of my newfound obsession with soil. I started exploring it largely because I sort of exhausted all my other options for exploring ecosystems around where I live, and I was getting quite seriously ecologically bored.
And then it suddenly occurred to me, there is an ecosystem under our feet and I know almost nothing about it. And as soon as I started digging into it, literally, metaphorically, I became obsessed, absolutely obsessed.
It's just the most extraordinary living system, and one which we have neglected I think probably more than any other major ecosystem, and yet, of course, it's the most important of all.
And as I started reading into it and, like all the things I do, I put enormous effort into it and read a ridiculous amount of material, I began to see that soil science was changing at extraordinary speed.
Studying soil ecology puts you right on the frontier of knowledge and science. The transformation in knowledge was happening faster than I’ve seen in any other scientific field that I’ve looked into.
That transformation was really changing our view of even what soil is, let alone how it functions and how we could use that knowledge to create entirely new systems of producing food. I became very excited by that possibility and started exploring it.
it's not as if this was the first time I became interested in food and farming. Obviously it's been a very long-standing interest of mine and going back, well, I guess, for the whole 37 years of my career.
But suddenly I saw there was a new way in. I see the issue of how we're going to feed ourselves as perhaps the most difficult and serious of all issues.
For two reasons. One is not at all clear that we can, through the rest of this century. And two, it's not totally clear that we can do so without completely wrecking what remains of our ecosystems.
And so, as I began to see that there might be different ways of doing it, I thought I just have to write about it. That it was almost as if I had no choice.
DR: What is the audience for the book?
GM: I can never answer that question because I always write it for myself. I never have a target audience in mind. I find it very hard to conceive the mind of other people in that way. If it's something that I would put on top of my reading pile, then I feel I’ve got to where I want to be.
In researching this, i was just constantly surprised and amazed and astonished by the things I was discovering. I had a very strong sense of discovery which I hope I’ve managed to convey to readers.
DR: The book has some great case studies and characters. I especially liked Tolly. Did you have a favourite?
GM: Well it's definitely Tolly. He is an extraordinary person. You know, he had no qualifications, when he left school he had no money, but he's really found a way of delivering high yields with low inputs.
Very, very few people or projects fall into that category. There's plenty of farmers delivering high yields, there's plenty of farms with no inputs, but to do both based on an entirely new principle of agriculture which actually anticipates soil ecology, I mean he was like 20 years ahead of current developments in soil science. That's one of the most remarkable achievements by anyone I’ve ever come across.
He’s also a lot of fun and he's honest. Blunt and funny. Brutal about himself. And so he's a great subject.
DR: What was your most surprising discovery?
GM: Some of the aspects of complex systems. Incidentally they are just so fascinating and should, I think, be at the centre of the school curriculum. Our lives are entirely dependent on complex systems and we are never taught anything about them.
We talk about them, if at all, as if they were simple systems, but they’re completely different things, and they operate on totally different principles. Some of their weird emergent characteristics, particularly of soil—the development of the rhizosphere around the plant’s root, and the way it operates almost exactly as the human gut does… I found that fantastic.
Other discoveries were the story of the “Angel’s Glow”—the nematodes infecting the soldiers after the Battle of Shiloh, or the way in which such a high proportion of rainfall in East Africa comes from irrigation in South Asia.
In terms of exciting new developments, I’m very inspired by the Land Institute and its perennial crops. Some of these are already being commercialized; with others, we've got a long way to go. But I think in terms of the actual practical scientific progress towards where we need to be, in agriculture. And that's just thrilling.
We're talking again about a genuine paradigm shift there, just as we are also with the farm free-food being produced through precision fermentation.
DR: Is it fair to describe your writing journey as being one from documenting problems to focusing on solutions?
GM: Well, I’ve always tried to incorporate solutions, even when I was documenting these massive human rights abuses and destruction of ecosystems in Brazil and East Africa.
All the time I was trying to say things could be done completely differently. If you want economic development, there are totally different ways of doing economic development that is not self-destructive. Let's see who's driving these destructive and, in some cases genocidal policies, Let's see what we can do to stop them.
The older I got, the more I became focused largely on solutions, and so I wrote a book called Heat in 2006 which was looking at how we could decarbonize the UK. I looked at what a 90% carbon cut would look like while trying to maintain what we think of as our quality of life.
I’ve written one or two more [solutions-based books] since then. For instance, Age of Consent (2003), looking at how to rewrite the global rules and shift towards the globalization of democracy, bringing democracy into global governance. I guess my most recent proper book was Out of the Wreckage, looking at how you could a much more community-based politics and much more participatory democracy,
[Regensis] was exhausting, absolutely shattering. I was typically starting at four in the morning and working till six in the evening and just going straight through. There were times I went into this this weird, almost fugue state, reading 50 scientific papers on one day. It was crazy.
Every chapter I began, I thought: ‘I can't do this, this is not possible, it's not humanly possible to read and process this amount of information’. I was just so excited by the project that somehow it happened.
When I finished writing the book, it genuinely felt like recovering from a serious illness. It took me three or four months until I felt I was back on my feet.
DR: What pushes you to that kind of level of effort?
GM: intellectual excitement, more than anything, it's the thrill of the chase of seeing that there's a line of thinking, a line of discovery that hasn’t been pursued in quite the same way before. And for myself, finding out a vast range of things that I never knew. I find that so exciting that, even with the short amount of sleep I was getting, I was sort of waking up halfway through the night and my mind was straight back on it.
And there is also always this tremendous sense of urgency that we have so little time to turn things around now. And my own personal urgency is heightened by having cancer, four years ago. Yes, another brush with death, but it does concentrate the mind somewhat.
Also the sense of global emergency—that we are going so badly wrong so quickly now. We’ve so little time to pull out of this spiral, and avoid what could be the collapse of one or more of the complex systems on which our lives depend.
That, more than anything else drives me on and drives me to work these ridiculous hours.
DR: In the other books, you might have had the destination in mind, but this was more like the journey?
GM: At the beginning, I really didn't know where I was going. I just spent a very long time reading soil ecology and reading massive textbooks, which to begin with, I found very difficult to read, because, even though I have got a background in science, it's a long time since I did my degree. I have been reading scientific papers throughout, but this was largely a new discipline to me.
I mean, there were certain ecological principles which I retained, which were useful, but actually most of it I had to pretty well learn from scratch, because you have to understand the physical nature of soil, as well as the ecosystem, which builds it.. It was out of that reading that the different directions of the book began to sprout - appropriately enough.