Date Finished: March 4th 2024
There aren’t all that many writers who can guarantee that I’ll pick up their latest book as soon as I can, but George Monbiot is one of the few. And yet, this review is coming probably over a year after I first started the book. A mixture of reading slumps and a grim depression brought on by some of the content made this one a difficult read, but I want to say upfront that I think it’s a very important, even vital, read.
In Regenesis: Feeding the World Without Devouring the Planet, Monbiot turns his attention to our food networks, their resilience, and how we can keep feeding the human population adequately while conserving nature and reducing the damage that modern farming techniques wreak on the environment. Monbiot opens on his allotment where he and other residents communally look after the fruit trees. Here, on this tiny patch of English land, he decides to investigate a patch of soil and finds hidden multitudes. It’s probable that soil is even less understood than the relatively unexplored oceans; a vast microecosystem lurks beneath our feet, potentially more species-rich than the Amazon. We think of soil as an undifferentiated mass, but it’s actually a sophisticated network of ecological niches and zones occupied by a mind-boggling array of creatures, some of which we understand so little that we struggle to classify them within the existing phyla. The density of the undersoil world is hard to fathom: fungal mycelium cultivate plant roots via a complex, intelligent network, like a computer, and redistribute sugars to withering plants, effectively farming them; plants release between 11 and 40% of their sugars into the soil to signal to symbiotic microbes that they use as a sort of external gut microbiome (this process is similar to human breast milk which contains sugars indigestible to infants but that feeds the nascent gut bacteria forming in the child). Indeed, the relationship between plants and microbes in the soil is so inextricable that some research suggests that healthier soils will diminish the likelihood of human disease transmission from plants in the area, and that it may be possible to transplant healthy soil biomes to unhealthy ones. We know so little about the soil but the bacteria within it may hold the key to a vast wealth of future medical breakthroughs, and so when we interfere with soil, as we do globally every day, we can actually damage these fragile networks and put our food webs, ecology and medicines at risk.
“In humans, the infant immune system is less active than that of adults, enabling a wide range of bacteria to establish in our guts. Similarly, young plants release fewer defensive compounds into the soil than older ones, allowing a broad variety of microbes to colonise their rhizospheres. Human breast milk contains sugars called oligosaccharides. At first, scientists struggled to understand why mothers express these compounds, as babies can’t digest them. It now seems that their sole purpose is to feed the bacteria with which the child will grow. They selectively cultivate a particular bacterial species with a crucial role in helping the gut to develop and calibrating the immune system. Similarly, young plants release large quantities of sucrose into the soil, to feed and develop their new microbiomes.”
Complex systems are beyond comprehension. Some are natural and some are manmade but after a certain point they become self-perpetuating, and they can collapse. Monbiot cites the classic example of lake pollution: fertiliser run-off changes the composition of microbes in the lake causing algal blooms that choke the life out of the water; beyond a certain point, removing fertiliser from the lake won’t help it recover—it has reached a tipping point and the complex system itself has collapsed into a system that behaves differently. Only removing close to all the fertiliser reverses the situation. The same is true for the banking system during the 2008 recession. We can evaluate the stability of complex systems based on how they interlink. Society has moved towards a globalised, linked network. Weaker nodes within this network, I.e. a failing bank, slightly weaken the entire network. If the most important nodes—the ones that the network has come to depend on—collapse they can bring the entire system down, as with Lehman Brothers. Herein lies the problem: resilience—versatile networks are resilient but those that operate on similar principles and have little diversity are more prone to collapse, and global food networks are not resilient. Our food intake has become homogenised, locally diversified but globally more similar. We all eat roughly the same thing, and certain nations have become super-exporters of the most vital crops—wheat, maize, rice and soybeans—to super-importer countries whose own local food production cannot be relied upon. The entire food network is weakened—diseases can spread across vast trade routes more quickly and develop resistance to the same herbicides used everywhere. If a cataclysm hits part of the network it can quickly spread, wreaking untold damage.
At the same time, the industries that dominate the global food network and farming have metastasised. A small number of companies dominate in each sector, often integrating vertically and horizontally—controlling seed production, machinery, buying up land and competitors and small businesses. Slowly but surely a large amount of farmland is led into the same practices, the same seeds, the same fertilisers, the same pesticides. As a result, the diversity of the plants traded and eaten is very low, making them more susceptible to disease or global problems. Our need for crops, for biofuel and animal feed as well as for food, is only growing, and the footprint needed to sustain this growth is untenable. While we have the room and means to probably successfully feed the increasing population up to 2050 this relies on food networks remaining stable, and there’s no guarantee of this. Our food networks have begun to flicker: small localised problems are magnified by the interconnectedness of the network, leading to mini-crises, often fuelled by market jitters rather than real food production problems. But the major problem comes from climate change. Rising global temperatures are averaged, but a rise of 2°C could manifest as much more in some major bread baskets which would radically alter crop yields. Already the cultivation of some crop varieties is moving north, and at its extreme some global warming predictions see much of the globe reaping an annual average temperature of 29°C; 13°C is considered the best annual average temperature for farming. Assuming equipment is available and heat can be combatted, plants may well grow in such hot regions but their nutrients would be depleted—plants grow faster in hotter climes, giving them less time to produce nutrients, and this would naturally lead to further malnutrition. Naturally, poorer nations where the bulk of food is grown will be hardest hit, and many of the more productive areas of the world will no longer be able to grow food, and may not even be habitable if they continue to reach wet bulb temperatures (35°C and 100% humidity, making people unable to shed heat). In addition, we’re relentlessly damaging the soil. There are few safeguards or laws dictating how farmers treat soil and the few that exist are so paltry as to be pointless. Maize production for biogas, as well as other crops, can cause a breakdown of soil integrity, increasing soil erosions, and rising temperatures mean that the soil quality in many warmer climates has only decreased in recent decades.
“The Global Standard Diet creates the Global Standard Farm, and the Global Standard Farm promotes the Global Standard Diet. Farmers worldwide are converging on identical techniques, using the same machinery, the same chemicals and the same varieties of the major crop plants. Since 1900, the world’s crops, according to the UN, have lost 75 per cent of their genetic diversity. This genetic narrowing can make crops more susceptible to diseases, such as the Ug99 stem fungus, a virulent pathogen afflicting wheat, which, originating in Uganda, has now swept across Africa and parts of Asia, assisted by global trading networks that sometimes distribute diseases almost as quickly as they distribute food. As the same herbicides are used to treat the same crops, the same herbicide-resistant superweeds spring up around the world, and now threaten in some places to overwhelm farmers’ efforts to control them.”
Agriculture comes with problems. In the UK, fertiliser runoff and excess animal manure cause algal blooms which choke the life out of rivers, and this is rarely policed; some whistleblowers show that, though laws exist to prevent this, they are rarely enforced in order to appease farming lobbies. The obscene levels of antibiotics used in livestock (often as a growth hormone) end up in excrement (up to an estimated 58% of the antibiotics) where bacteria continue to build cataclysmic resistance to our most valuable defences. This same excrement is spread on fields as fertiliser where these same bacteria share genes and can be absorbed by plants. Meanwhile, human sewage is also used on fields, where it may contain—and isn’t screened for—complex hydrocarbons, microplastics, poisons and many other wonderful things. In some cases, microplastics are intentionally put in fertiliser to prevent caking, only to be absorbed up the food chain—the long term effects of this plastic buildup in our own bodies are unknown, but they are a poison to life in the soil, and the runoff into rivers kills marine life. Neonicotinoid based pesticides and herbicides are banned in Europe but remain in use elsewhere, and have been linked to colony collapse in bees, and the destruction of fish populations. Farmers don’t even get their money’s worth of these chemicals, fertilisers which should be used incrementally are often dumped in bulk, the excess washing away. The vast soy fields in South America have such a scale of runoff into the rivers and ocean that they have contributed to a 9,000 mile belt of sargassum running from the Gulf of Mexico to the coast of West Africa, an algal bloom so enormous that it may be accelerating the death of the oceans. Organic farming seems like the answer but this is just as fraught, perhaps more so. Free range chickens produce more excrement out in the open in a rawer form than fertiliser which proves more damaging to waterways, and the extended lifespan of free range animals means that they consume more food which itself has to be farmed. Additionally, they take up more room: roughly 51% of land in the UK is given over to livestock, compared with 7% for urban areas.
“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 per cent 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 per cent since 1970. Of 28,000 species known to be at imminent risk of extinction, 24,000 are threatened by farming. Only 29 per cent 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 per cent of the world’s animals, by weight, are wild, humans account for 36 per cent, and livestock for the remaining 60 per cent.”
Across the rest of the book, Monbiot explores some possible solutions to the dilemmas of farming. First up, he visits farmer Iain ‘Tolly’ Tolhurst, and organic farmer on the Thames in Oxfordshire. Tolhurst describes his farm as ‘stockfree’: no livestock or livestock products used and no artificial inputs. He grows around 100 varieties of fruit and vegetables which are sold in a farm shop and delivered in variety boxes to local customers, his fields are broken up by strips of native wildflowers that teem with a profusion of insects, and yet his crops display little sign of insect damage. That’s not to say there aren’t pests, in fact, they’re actively cultivated. More pests means more predators, the wildflowers between crops and nettles around the polytunnels provide a haven for dozens of species which all live in balance: aphids attract ladybirds, slugs attract ground beetles. The farm has, in essence, a robust security system that moves into the crops when they’re planted, and retreats to the other plants after harvest. Tolhurst says that the only problem animals are pigeons and badgers. New pests are a source of anxiety to the average farmer, whipped up by the pesticide industry, but Tolhurst has faith that his mini ecosystem will find balance, as it did with leek moths which were a problem for a couple of years but disappeared within four—one of his predators likely developed a taste for them and eliminated the invasion. Instead of fertiliser, Tolhurst practices crop rotation on a seven year cycle. His philosophy is to never leave bare soil: water washes away far more nutrients than plants absorb, and the varied relationships of plants to the soil—some that fix nitrogen, some with long roots that draw minerals up from the subsoil, etc—means that a balance can be achieved that ensures the minerals aren’t depleted. He also practices green manure—essentially actively sowing weeds which keep the soil covered both between crop plants and over harvested fields. Weeds sown a few weeks behind a healthy crop will form a blanket between but will be kept small by the dominating crop. The only other substance he puts on the fields is woodchip, which he gets from a local tree surgeon who would otherwise have to pay to dispose of it. This he puts on the fields twice in a seven year rotation and though scientists have failed to come up with an explanation thus far, it caused an immense rise in the fertility of the soil, and while, average crop land has 150-300 earthworms per square metre, Tolhurst’s soil has 800 earthworms per square metre. Organic farming isn’t even as organic as it seems: in the UK there are a number of loopholes that allow organic farms to plug the nutrient gap with artificial fertilisers. These release their nitrogen quickly leading to runoff, while manure releases nitrogen slowly which also leads to runoff—neither product is attuned to the growth rhythms of artificially bred crop plants. While we think of manure fertilising plants as natural, nature wouldn’t spread tons of it over an acre. Tolhurst’s soil, meanwhile, is a closed loop—everything a plant need is in the soil already and can be extracted according to need. Working as a consultant, he has driven forward the idea of ‘ghost acres’—how much land a farm uses elsewhere, from the fields in South America producing soy for livestock feed to the ground needing to grow the plants from which the seeds farmers buy are harvested. Minimising that footprint is an organic priority, and yet Tolhurst can’t reduce it to zero: he looked into using horses instead of vehicles and found that they would take up far too much space and do the job much slower, plus extra labour on keeping them and feeding them. The model is perfect, no model could be, but among small farmers these horticultural, closed loop methods are catching on, despite a total lack of government funding, all of which goes to the mainstream methods.
The economics on the other end are just as tricky. Despite a refrain that food is simply too cheap these days, millions in the UK live in food poverty and are reliant on food banks. Monbiot visits FareShare a charity which takes in surplus food and distributes it to local food banks. While a lot is said about wasted food, little of it is recoverable. Supermarkets have been induced to donate fresh produce going out of date to charities, and food that isn’t aesthetically fit for sale is an easy win, but some companies simply see no reason to donate the excess food, there being no financial sense in doing so. At the same time, food waste often happens on the other end of processes: before processing or after eating, and so is simply not viable. Those that frequent the food bank tell variations on the same stories: job losses, broken relationships, sudden physical or mental health issues of them or a family member, rising prices, addiction, and more. The food bank is a buffer between these people and starvation. While critics say that people don’t know how to balance a budget or are eating the wrong things, the UN has found that a good diet costs roughly five times as much as a bad diet, which is why poverty is more closely correlated with obesity than overeating is. ‘Solutions’ abound. Arguments that food costs should reflect their true cost are all well and good but they’d price most people out of staying alive when one factors in proper wages for farmers, transport, climate damage, etc. plus the costs would be immensely difficult to calculate. Arguments for localism run into the problem that the population is so massive that, on average, one needs a food network of 5,200km to sustain them—what nations could grow locally wouldn’t feed the populations, especially in an era of climate upheaval. Similarly, arguments for urban farming in hydroponic towers have proved to be investment disasters as the costs of light and water prove astronomical compared to regular farm costs.
In seeking to find better ways of producing grain crops, Monbiot visits the farm of Tim Ashton in Shropshire who has instituted a no-ploughing policy. Arriving after a season of bad flooding, Monbiot finds the fields firm and bouncy compared to a ploughed comparison patch which is sodden and muddy. Since stopping ploughing, the soil had become firmer, and a haven for even more earthworms per square metre than Iain Holhurst’s land. Ploughing releases carbon and nitrogen form the soil but more importantly it destroys the underground environment which has carefully been cultivated by earthworms and other subterranean creatures into a place with strong aeration and water filtration with existing burrows and pockets through which roots can grow easily. A ploughed soil, meanwhile, has a thick layer with no room for creatures or air or water to move through and it takes time for the earth to recover. While newly planted seeds have an easier time growing roots through ploughed soil at first, problems arise later. Since switching to no-till, Ashton has given up using pesticides completely and has reduced his fertiliser use by 15%. He’s also reduced the amount of work he does to the land, vastly saving on fuel. There are drawbacks: no ploughing means weeds have to be tackled using herbicide. Round Up, the most ubiquitous herbicide, is less potent than many others but there is nevertheless research suggesting in interferes with honeybee navigation and damages marine life. It’s also so widely used that one German study found it present, in low levels, in the urine of a third of participants; it also may increase antibiotic resistance through repeated exposure to bacteria, which means it may soon become obsolete. Other techniques of killing weeds have been explored, including robots that target specific weeds and zap them with electricity, but many of these are unaffordable to small farmers, and despite working as a commercial farm, Ashton has to have other forms of revenue: renting out the manor buildings for weddings and holidays and, more bizarrely, selling spaces for people’s ashes to be kept in a Neolithic monument he built from scratch with entrances aligned to the solstices.
Monbiot goes on to visit another farm, this one an experimental comparative agroecology company owned by Ian Wilkinson. Having bought the poor grain land with money from his private seed company, his first crop was as the farm had been previously farmed: grain for Heineken, which he made a small loss on. He runs a control field that’s farmed via the mainstream methods, a pasture for cows, a field for heritage fruit trees, and a large field for his experiments. His control field was doing okay, but required five passes with the tractor for fertiliser, herbicide and fungicide, and he has suffered two crop failures in seven years—one because of drought, the other because of storms. Meanwhile, his experimental field was growing heritage grain varieties that grow twice as tall as the usual varieties, and that had survived in the years when the control crop failed (taller heritage grains shade out weed competition and have sturdier roots). Practicing a seven year crop rotation to fix the soil, Wilkinson reckons his first seven years had roughly doubled the carbon content of his experimental soil. He also utilises sheep to crop his herbal ley rotation, which thickens the plant life. In addition, Wilkinson runs a Community Supported Agriculture scheme, whereby subscribers pay £35 a month for veg and some fruit. He has a large oven for baking heritage wheat into bread used by a baker once a week, and hives for collecting honey, which allows a number of small businesses to use his site, making it a commercial hub. This localised trade is a somewhat idealistic vision, particularly as Wilkinson’s land produces wheat at a dismal fifth of the rate of normal fields, but the vision is admirable. A game changer, however, could be perennial grains. Most arable crops are annuals, selected from species which tend to grow in disaster zones, such as after fires, which invest all their energy into fast growth—a logical crop for regular harvest. But cultivating them means maintaining ecological disaster annually. One grain variety, an intermediate wheatgrass branded Kernza, is tentatively being marketed whilst still in development—it produces as many grains as commercial wheat but at a quarter of the weight. After a couple of years to establish themselves during which weeding would need to be conducted, the perennials would look after themselves and the soil, holding it together with larger roots and preventing erosion, and allowing earthworms, carbon, bacterial rhizospheres and more to proliferate in the soil. The Land Institute has also developed a perennial rice variety currently grown on 7,000 hectares in China, and they’re working on many other species. While perennials won’t last forever and will need reseeding after a few years, they’ll be far more beneficial for the soil.
However, protein is the problem. Land use goes predominantly towards grazing animals, sheep and cows in particular, as well as to growing soy which makes up the bulk of animal feed. Pioneering research in Finland is experimenting with microbial fermentation: harvesting protein from bacteria. The inputs into this process are hydrogen, carbon and nitrogen, all obtainable from the air, while the energy needed to power the fermentation process is drawn exclusively from solar panels. While the technology is still new and expensive, it’s potential is enormous. If microbial protein took off, it could theoretically mean turning back a vast amount of farmland to ecology, allowing environments to recover and abating imminent extinctions. And the potential for independent producers to work all over the globe would increase the modularity of food networks, a resistant source of food not beholden to climate or transport concerns. Genetic engineering could allow for further development of proteins with different nutrient contents to target deficiencies… possibilities abound. Estimates suggest that once a new idea reaches a 25% saturation in the culture it can lead to a sudden system change—think of the #MeToo movement, for example. Plant-based milk and meat substitutes have recently become not just options but popular—any restaurant refusing to serve vegetarian and vegan options is making a somewhat financially silly decision at this point. The same could be true of microbial protein, and with that sudden hysteresis, we may finally find the will to change our entire food production system. A proper alternative would empower us to enact real change in spite of the hard lobbying of the meat industry and other lobbies, and could allow us to ultimately completely alter our relationship with both food and nature.
Monbiot ends by considering the ways in which we’re propagandised into certain bucolic visions of the pastoral. Metaphors of shepherds and flocks date back to before Christianity and have persisted through medieval and renaissance times, sometimes with sarcastic interspersions, until the present day when we can watch CountryFile for similarly idyllic visions of sheep farming. Books for young children depict idealised farms where all the animals live in perfect harmony and nothing ever dies, and we can see that vision made real by petting farms. An adjacent fantasy persists in the USA in the form of the Wild West, fuelling idylls about a libertarian cowboy communion with a rugged nature, lived in defiance of government tyranny. The reality is that the average English farm runs at a loss of £16,300 per year, and that globally governments spend $500-600 billion per year on farm subsidies (compared with a $100 billion pledge to tackle climate change which hasn’t yet manifested). While this nets is cheaper food prices, the system for keeping prices low is so convoluted and contradictory as to make little sense—food could and should be subsidised at the point of sale. The EU doesn’t even keep data on farm incomes often subsidies wealthy landowners, and some of the incentives of the subsidies are so perverse that they discourage agriculture or encourage habitat destruction. In reality, farming is an environmental disaster disguised by ferocious lobbying and propaganda.
Reading Regenesis what struck me hardest was the network of perverse incentives and warped priorities. Where a book like The Shock Doctrine highlights what amounts to unconscionable evil, Monbiot is highlighting something a lot more like chosen ignorance and bending the rules. In isolation, these blind eyes turned and rules flouted would barely be noticed, but as Monbiot rolls out the tapestry what we’re left with is a terrible cost; an aggregation of bad decisions transforming into one grand horror that we seem determined to sleepwalk into. Regenesis is a valuable exploration of something we all to readily take for granted and is in major need of reexamination.
8.5/10
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