“We have the potential for a world where everyone can lead a prosperous life without bursting through planetary boundaries, a world where we can feed the planet without devouring it.”
If any quote could sum up the final event of the Festival of Debate, a talk by author, journalist and political commentator George Monbiot, it is this, with the latter part of the quote – his final, closing words of the evening – resembling the title of his new book, Regenesis: Feeding the World Without Devouring the Planet. This book and the ideas within it – how damaging agriculture and the current food system is to our planet, and how we can move past it – was the subject of Monbiot’s talk.
The event was held in the Octagon Centre of the University of Sheffield on the evening of the 23rd June, and chaired by co-director of the University of Sheffield’s Institute for Sustainable Food, Professor Peter Jackson. Turnout was high despite the fact many students had gone home for the summer holidays; queues for the adjacent book selling and signing tables after the talk were long.
Monbiot is an established force in environmental and left-wing politics in Britain. He has long been involved in environmental protesting and was notably arrested at an Extinction Rebellion protest in October 2019. Monbiot’s writing has been dominated by the subject of the environment, both in his regular column for the Guardian (one recent piece discussed the impact of chicken farming on the River Wye), and in some of his books, like Heat, Feral, and now Regenesis.
As in this latter book, a sizable portion of Monbiot’s talk was about the damage that agriculture in its current form does to our planet. Monbiot’s views are made clear in the book; farming is the “most destructive human industry ever to have blighted the earth,” he argues. He certainly makes a good case for why one would think this way.
As well as the harms of pesticides and greenhouse gas emissions, Monbiot is particularly concerned with land use. He explains in the talk that a “far greater threat to life on earth” than urban sprawl, which he is no fan of, is agricultural sprawl. A shocking 28% of the earth’s surface is used to graze pasture fed livestock (compared to 1% for human habitations and 12% for crops), this figure made more significant by the fact that this pasture fed livestock account for only 1% of our protein, Monbiot tells us.
In this vein, Monbiot believes that organic, pasture fed beef is the most damaging type of farming – the greater space needed for grazing means more rainforests, wetlands and savannahs have to be cleared, radically simplifying ecosystems and shattering biodiversity, and eliminating biomes which serve to maintain the earth’s regulatory functions. Extensive farming compared to intensive, though “kinder” on the animals, is for Monbiot a catastrophe because it is using far more land for the same amount of produce. It is intuitively favoured because it fits the stereotype of a nice farm with happy animals – and there are certainly ethical arguments for this over intensive factory farms – but for Monbiot, these perceptions ignore hard environmental realities; “we’ve been trading in pictures, when we should be trading in numbers,” he emphasises.
However, like in Regenesis, Monbiot’s talk was not all doom and gloom. A good proportion was reserved for solutions – how we can change the way we feed ourselves to have less of an impact on the planet. And these solutions are more detailed and sophisticated than calls for people to merely switch to a plant-based diet, though this would undoubtedly reduce one’s individual environmental footprint, and would certainly be something that Monbiot, a vegan himself, would advocate for. He discussed replacing annual grains with perennial ones and harnessing soil ecology to reduce the need for fertilisers and chemicals for growing veg, but the best thing we can do for the environment is to take protein and fat production out of farming altogether, and instead rely on precision fermentation – “brewing microbes in a vat” – for getting these nutrients into our diets.
This process yields a flour, approximately 70% protein, which can be made into pancakes and all manner of other things, and Monbiot sees it as a gateway to a whole new cuisine. Just as the first people to domesticate cows weren’t thinking of camembert, he says, we have no idea the new types of food this could give us in the long run. Interestingly, Monbiot’s backing of precision fermentation is at the expense of another often touted solution, lab grown meat. In response to an audience question, he argued that this latter solution is extremely expensive due to the need to maintain clinical standards of sanitation and the large up-front cost, and seems unnecessary because of the possibilities we have with meat substitutes like precision fermentation.
The discussion of new technologies raised the essential issue, in the audience questions, of ownership, and this is not something that Monbiot ignores. Technologies are very important – just as the printing press and modern contraception enabled some of the social change that has brought us to where we are today, we are now on the cusp of another “techno-ethical shift”, a combination of increasing support for change and the technical means to change. These new technologies, like precision fermentation, can’t be allowed to be patented, says Monbiot; we must ensure that antitrust laws are strong, and intellectual property laws are weak, to prevent these processes from being dominated and monopolised by major corporations. In this anti-corporate vein, Monbiot dreams of a future where every town has its own brewery for precision fermentation, each acting autonomously, not reliant on corporations or a global food system.
Being reliant on a global food system is at present a very precarious situation to be in for many poorer nations who rely on food imports to feed their populations. For Monbiot, the issue is not just that the global food system is extremely damaging to the environment, but that it is extremely damaging to many of the most vulnerable in the world – near the start of the talk, he notes the fact that, though from 2015 (until 2021) global food prices were falling, chronic global hunger, which had been consistently declining until 2014, had started instead to rise. This is because, we are told, the food system has lost its resilience and adaptability due to rationalisation and profit maximisation, and so external shocks like the invasion of one exporter by another, or environmental shocks like a heatwave and crop failure, have amplified effects on the poorer, import reliant nations.
Looking at the food system in global political and economic terms is representative of Monbiot’s concern with globalisation and global capitalism, as well as his fiercely left-wing political outlook which was seen elsewhere in the talk; relating to the fact that millions are reliant on food banks in this country, Monbiot responded angrily that this “should be bringing people out on the streets in open rebellion” – perhaps a hyperbole, though we of course know how much Monbiot believes in the power of popular protest.
Reading Monbiot’s book, or just listening to him on YouTube (this video is a good summary of the ideas in Regenesis), is certainly worthwhile if you’re interested in the reality of where our food comes from and how this relates to the environment at large. Despite being a man with big ideas and a global outlook, Monbiot stuck around after the talk to engage in a round-table discussion with local activists, where such issues as local produce and food poverty were discussed. This capped off an evening of hugely important ideas from an inspiring and extremely relevant thinker.