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Regenesis

Feeding the World Without Devouring the Planet

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Regenesis

Written by: George Monbiot
Narrated by: George Monbiot
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About this listen

 Winner of the 2022 Orwell Prize for Journalism | A Sunday Times (London) Bestseller | Shortlisted for the Wainwright Prize for Writing on Conservation

“George Monbiot is one of the most fearless and important voices in the global climate movement today.” —Greta Thunberg

For the first time in millennia, we have the opportunity to transform not only our food system but our entire relationship to the living world.

Farming is the world's greatest cause of environmental destruction—and the one we are least prepared to talk about. We criticize urban sprawl, but farming sprawls across thirty times as much land. We have plowed, fenced, and grazed great tracts of the planet, felling forests, killing wildlife, and poisoning rivers and oceans to feed ourselves. Yet millions still go hungry and the price of food is rising faster than ever.

Now the food system itself is beginning to falter. But, as George Monbiot shows us in this brilliant, bracingly original new book, we can resolve the biggest of our dilemmas and feed the world without devouring the planet.

Regenesis is a breathtaking vision of a new future for food and for humanity. Drawing on astonishing advances in soil ecology, Monbiot reveals how our changing understanding of the world beneath our feet could allow us to grow more food with less farming. He meets the people who are unlocking these methods, from the fruit and vegetable grower revolutionizing our understanding of fertility; through breeders of perennial grains, liberating the land from plows and poisons; to the scientists pioneering new ways to grow protein and fat. Together, they show how the tiniest life forms could help us make peace with the planet, restore its living systems, and replace the age of extinction with an age of regenesis. Environment Science Solar System Sustainability
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I believe it should really be mandatory reading for all governement officials and consumer advocates everywhere.

Excellent book

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Great book, great content, great narrator and great ideas. He provides hope in the food industry and sheds a light on some of wrong doing. Now how do we get the masses to read this book and books like it to evoke change.....

A Fantastic Read !!

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The first chapters feel doom and gloom, but stay on to hear the rest of the book. I also bought a hard copy to make notes and for the references. Thanks to the author for writing such an important book and for narrating it himself.

wait for the hopeful messages and strategies

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This book provides some excellent context into problems with food production and solutions. Provides some hope for the future. It is a very enjoyable book.

Hopeful read

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Twenty years ago while I was going through IPCC reports with first year education students we considered worst case scenarios. I said as long as the planet was habitable we would survive because if we had to we would grow algae and bacteria in vats and eat that. A student, backed by class approval said "I don't want to live like that." No one said "I don't want to live." Now Monbiot is advocating bacterial protein and fat as part of the food of the future, and first steps in that direction, exploring the possibility, have been taken. Monbiot has eaten pancakes made with this product. Although our class also explored the meaning of exponential, things are moving faster than anyone including the IPCC expected. When I was in college human consumption of bacterial food products was in the realm of science fiction.

The many suggestions in this book, including reducing agricultural land use by using bacterial products as human food, just might preserve a habitable planet. The main obstacle is the slow acceptance of necessity by the population at large and the oligarchs that run not just communist countries but also the so called democracies of the west.

After a litany of brutal statistics Monbiot offers hope in the form of what is technically possible, but getting there seems impossible as no nation plans that far ahead and redistribution of wealth and power is of course resisted by the oligarchs. I'm hoping that an outraged population can pull off a peaceful revolution moving us to really study and promote long term human thriving. I'm hoping that we can correct the legacy of years of mindless consumption, but that remains in the realm of science fiction. We are in for hundreds of years of struggle no matter what, it is good to explore what is possible technically.

Follow this book with The good ancestor by Krzarnic for an exploration of the attitudinal change required to implement our technological potential and both survive and thrive. If we can get better political structures out of the realm of "Star Trek utopia" those centuries of struggle that lie ahead may be used well.

Science fiction becomes reality?

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