Regenesis: Feeding the World Without Devouring the Planet
GEORGE MONBIOT
(Allen Lane, 352 PP, £20)
Tablet bookshop price £18 • tel 020 7799 4064
Our food system is broken. It poisons and destroys soils. It concentrates production and the means of that production in too few and too powerful hands. Its delivery network is overcomplicated, overstretched and frighteningly fragile. Its pricing is wrong: healthy, responsibly produced food is expensive; unhealthy, destructively produced food is cheap. It accounts for 30 per cent of global carbon emissions, yet a third of all food never gets eaten: wasted due to poor storage, transport failures or people simply throwing it away. Farming already provides enough calories to feed the world three times over, yet agricultural land sprawls ever further and faster, destroying our last few remaining wildernesses and wiping out the biodiversity that is critical to maintaining functioning ecosystems – in other words, a liveable planet. If we don’t fix things, and fast, we are in danger of eating ourselves into extinction.
These are just some of the problems identified and explored by the environmentalist and Guardian columnist George Monbiot in his new book, Regenesis. An ambitious, passionate polemic, it’s bound to be widely admired and, probably, just as widely argued about.
