Regenesis

Regenesis is a book of two halves. The first half, which explores the state of global food production and gives particular attention to the health of the soil, is absolutely terrifying. The second half discovers possible solutions to the man-made farming crisis and does offer some hope, albeit probably too little, too late unless serious systemic change happens within the next couple of years. George Monbiot is a passionate writer so his book is as gripping as a good novel, but with the unsettling realisation that he is talking about our planet and the imminent end of its stable food supply. It's a huge concept to get one's head around and even for someone like myself who already considers themselves pretty clued up on the topic, there was a lot in these pages for me learn - and wring my hands over.

Monbiot begins by discussing soil - what it actually is and the millions of tiny creatures who live there. This part is fascinating as, in common with many people I imagine, I rarely give much thought to the soil under my feet unless it's too muddy to hike across. It turns out the soil pretty much everywhere is in a worryingly poor state of health, mostly due to farming excesses - too many chemicals, too much intensive monocropping, too many animals. I was reminded of Lenore Newman's book, Lost Feast, in the way that human arrogance is again destroying the natural world to our own cost because we think we know best. Monbiot provides a dense flurry of facts and figures all demonstrating the imminent crisis and, by the time I had absorbed even a third of them, I was close to tears. Regenesis is a hard-hitting book and goodness knows it needs to be, but I did wonder if readers would be driven to abandon it despondently before they got to the good news.

Regenesis isn't just about what is being destroyed, but also offers several different visions of how things could be put right. Monbiot visits farms where regenerating soil health has resulted in good crop yields without the need for environmentally destructive chemicals. He also talks about new crops that don't require annual ploughing, and a Finnish laboratory growing an entirely new kind of protein. It's all exciting stuff which soon lifted the grey cloud over my head. I could feel myself becoming enthused by Monbiot's excitement at these new - and not-so new - solutions, the only niggle being that each one is an isolated small-scale project without the huge monetary backing of the agriculture industry. It's a catch-22 scenario. While Monbiot rightly identifies a need to move away from global food corporations and return to the greater stability of more localised, independent production, we need to do so without the big money forcing these new solutions to follow the same path as we're currently on.

I feel that Regenesis is such an important book which will hopefully drive some real change in the ways we think about our food and how it is produced. For such an emotive topic, Regenesis stays level-headed using facts and figures to make its arguments. I think this approach will appeal to practical and science-led readers in a similar way to Karthik Sekar's book, After Meat. I hope it does appeal to and influence a wide readership because we're rapidly running out of time. As Monbiot explains, the needed individual changes are far less disruptive than those we managed under Covid restrictions, but they need to be made and made soon.

I received a copy of this book for review via NetGalley.

Well-written, as one has come to expect of Monbiot, the book starts off strongly with a deep dive into soil ecology, which helps to frame later discussion of how soil should be seen as a living matrix and not just an inert substrate for plants and chemicals. The book really takes off over the next few chapters, detailing all the many problems with the current system of food production. Of particular note is the way that so much land and food production is so inefficiently mediated through meat, particularly beef. The second half of the book felt considerably weaker. Monbiot visits several unconventional farms, examining each in quite some detail and, while each seems a healthier alternative to more usual agriculture, none seemed particularly viable if scaled up to feed everyone. There's definitely lots of good stuff in here, and some of his prognoses are, frankly, a bit terrifying, but the stronger material felt rather let down by the weaker chapters.