Monbiot, G. (2022). Regenesis: Feeding the World Without Devouring the Planet. Allen Lane.

George Monbiot ambitiously challenges what is perhaps the greatest taboo subject as it relates to ecological impact – the source of our food.

Regenesis explores farming as it relates to water pollution, persistent pollutants in the soil, biodiversity loss and climate change – the impacts are cumulative and reaching planetary limits. Regarding greenhouse gas emissions, Monbiot presents that farming alone has enough of an impact for average global temperatures to exceed 2°C above pre-industrial levels: “Just over one-third of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions are produced by the food system. Of these, roughly 70 percent are released by farming, and the rest by processing, transport, selling and cooking. An analysis by Our World in Data shows that even if greenhouse gases from every other sector were eliminated today, by 2100, food production alone would bust the entire carbon budget two or three times over, if we want to avoid more than 1.5°C of global heating. Even if we sought to hit the less ambitious, and far more dangerous, target of 2°C, the food sector would account for almost all of it, unless its impacts are drastically reduced’ (p.82). And these figures include only the emissions from farming, ignoring the ‘carbon opportunity losses’, the amount of carbon the land could absorb if it were not being used for farming and pasture.

Furthermore, farming “is the world’s greatest cause of habitat destruction, the greatest cause of the global loss of wildlife, and the greatest cause of the global extinction crisis. It’s responsible for around 80 percent of the deforestation that’s happened this century. Food production (including commercial fishing) is the main reason why the global population of wild vertebrate animals has fallen by 68 percent since 1970. Of 28,000 species known to be at imminent risk of extinction, 24,000 are threatened by farming” (p.90). Efforts of ‘sharing and sparing’ by leaving small patches of habitat on agricultural land are limited as the “great majority of the world’s species cannot survive in farmed landscapes of any kind. Many can persist only within very large areas of unexploited land.”

Solutions such as organic farming and urban farming tend to overlook what Monbiot calls ‘ghost acres’ of land that are needed to provide inputs required to maintain yields. He shares examples of farmers who have experimented (and in many ways succeeded) in producing lower-impact products. But when the results are critically evaluated, these are not solutions to feeding large populations while taking farmland out of production so as to begin to reduce agricultural emissions and impacts of pollution.

Stopping climate change, he says, requires that we restructure our food system: “We need healthy food that’s cheap enough to let everyone eat well. We need high yields, to ensure that farming feeds the world without sprawling across the planet. We need healthy soils, whose fertility can be raised without either dousing the land with fertilizer or removing it from production for long periods. We need, as far as possible, to stop using herbicides and pesticides and to reduce the need for irrigation. We need farm landscapes that provide habitats and corridors for wildlife. The technologies we choose should be simple and cheap enough for small farmers to use, so that capital does not overwhelm labor. They should be varied enough to reverse the dangerous homogenization that creates the Global Standard Farm” (p.178). Monbiot is most hopeful about emerging technologies that produce proteins to replace farmed animals, which would allow the restoration of pastures but also significantly reduce the amount of land dedicated to feeding domestic animals.

Regenesis is a challenging book. The first barrier is to overcome what Monbiot calls our ‘bucolic nostalgia’ for the family farm. Agriculture is an industrial sector dominated by a few multi-national corporations with very limited consideration for environmental ‘externalities’. This romance with farming “shuts down our moral imagination, unstrings our critical faculties, stops us from asking urgent and difficult questions. But at a time of global ecological catastrophe, we cannot afford this indulgence” (p.224). The second barrier, he suggests, is our reliance on meat which is currently increasing globally with affluence.

Monbiot thinks: “Sometimes it seems to me that we are almost willfully destroying the basis of our survival” (p.52). And in Regenesis he illustrates why that is.