How Monbiot Thinks Microbes Will Save the Planet
Reader’s Digest from Regenesis, Feeding the World Without Devouring the Planet
Jan 9, 2024
I started reading George Monbiot’s Regenesis, Feeding the World Without Devouring the Planet thinking it would be about Regenerative Agriculture and how to minimize the environmental impact of our food by changing how we treat the soil and its symbioses. It is about the environment, the diet, and the role of microbes, but differently.
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Damages Caused by Our Food System
As often occurs in such essays, the beginning is a gloomy observation of the damage our food production system inflicts on the environment. A university lecturer friend of the author said “I study insects because I love them. But the only funding I can get is to kill them.”
This heart-breaking statement shows how little the beauty and services of insects are understood. Between 75 and 98% of insect biomass has disappeared since the 1980s (Goulson, 2019), and insects are so important for many ecological roles, from pollination to soil structure to feeding birds, which themselves support soil fertility and seed dissemination… Yet, “the global use of pesticides is expected to triple during the first 50 years of this century.” As life in the soil gets depleted, desertification and erosion accelerate.
“The global use of pesticides is expected to triple during the first 50 years of this century.” — Monbiot.
Monbiot’s analysis of the food system’s impacts turns a lot around the disproportionate impact of animal products. “The biggest population crisis is not the growth in human numbers, he says, but the growth in livestock numbers” that have risen to 2.4 % a year while the human population grows at about 1.05% a year.
“The biggest population crisis is not the growth in human numbers, but the growth in livestock numbers.”
“Already, roughly half the calories farmers grow are used for raising livestock.” — Monbiot.
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Seeking Land Efficiency
For Monbiot, land efficiency is the best environmental indicator, because the best way to restore biodiversity and sequester carbon is to release land from human activities.
“I have come to see land use as the most important of all environmental questions. I now believe it is the issue that makes the greatest difference to whether terrestrial ecosystems and Earth systems survive or perish.”
“The most secure and effective means of removing carbon from the atmosphere is to reduce the amount of land we need for farming, and rewild the land we spare, restoring wetlands and forests.” — Monbiot.
From this land use perspective, this book taught me two new concepts: ghost acres and soil obesity. The measurement of ghost acres, meaning land used in another place, on which a farm depends. For example, when organic growers use animal dung, this implies their produce is ghosted by an area about 2–3 times as big as the one they farm, according to Iain Tolhurst, one of the growers Monbiot interviews. It is a very important estimate of land efficiency. In a chicken farm, imported feed and pellets for warming should be accounted as ghost acres.
The second concept is soil obesity: a buildup of phosphate and potassium in the soil, that reduces the activity of fungi and bacteria. As an agronomist who studied Biology and the microbiome, and now the roles of the soil microbiome in soil structure, water retention capacity, and plant growth and resilience, I find this concept very interesting.
“Agricultural science has devoted a great deal of attention to soil chemistry. But the more we understand, the more important the biology appears to be.” — Monbiot.
In the second part of the book, Monbiot meets exceptional growers like Iain Tolhurst, Ian Wilkinson, Tim Ashton, and Paul Cawood, who dedicate incredible amounts of time, energy, and passion to their farms, developing complex culture rotations, building soil fertility and growing biodiversity.
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This is the most elegant circular economy example, and it can offer humanity and wildlife its boons immediately.
Scaling microbial-based protein has the potential to reduce humankind’s reliance on other proteins requiring land use and impacting life on Earth. Liberating 15% of the land from destructive activity in some parts of the world could prevent 60% of the extinctions that would otherwise happen and could sequester 30% of all the carbon dioxide released since the Industrial Revolution, according to Monbiot and a study in Nature.
“For the first time since the Neolithic, thanks to the possibilities created by microbial protein and fat, we have the opportunity to transform not only our food system but our entire relationship to the living world.” — Monbiot.
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Full article:
https://medium.com/microbial-instincts/how-monbiot-thinks-microbes-will-save-the-planet-97264a26a758
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