Many of us think the planet is in trouble. The climate extremes, including drought and deluge, combined with a lack of political will, is something many of us worry about but don't know how to approach. Are massive shifts in agriculture policy what we need? Guardian columnist George Monbiot thinks it's time to take a look at post-agricultural solutions. Monbiot's 2022 book, Regenesis: Feeding the World without Devouring the Planet, continues to be a lightning rod for discussion around how we'll sustain ourselves in the years to come.
Evan Kleiman: The beginning of Regenesis is this amazingly poetic, beautifully written love song to soil. You say, "Learning about the soil has taught me to a greater extent than ever before, that we establish our truths from information that's patchy and shallow, beneath which lies realities we scarcely imagine." Can you expand on that a bit for us?
George Monbiot: Soil is this thin cushion between rock and air on which the entirety of human society and civilization is built. 99% of our calories come from it. It's an extraordinarily complex ecosystem. Most people think of it as just stuff but actually, it's an ecosystem. It's more than that. It's a biological structure, like a coral reef. It's built by the organisms that inhabit it. If it weren't for those organisms, there would be no soil. But it's also got properties, unlike any other ecosystem or biological structure that we know.
In fact, there's quite a heated debate among some soil scientists as to what soil even is. We genuinely don't know what it is. It's got some characteristics which make it seem almost like a super organism, in that they get these extraordinary synchronized events taking place right across the soil. For instance, if soil carbon declines, the entire microbial DNA genome shrinks simultaneously. But at the same time, the number of RNA operons rises, suggesting a collective metabolic response. We just don't understand what this means. We don't understand what's going on there but we do know that we are looking at a really mind-blowing and unique system. It is an extraordinary thing that this system upon which we totally depend is almost unknown to us.
And because it is so unknown, we have been so inclined to heap tons of abuse on it.
George Monbiot: Yes, we trash the things we don't understand, and this is never truer than when it comes to soil. You would think that this rather important resource on which everything depends would be something that we would treasure and look after but we treat it like dirt. I mean, it's literally and metaphorically beneath us and even studying it is considered a very unglamorous subject, which is perhaps why there's no soil ecology institute anywhere on Earth. There's no global soil treaty. There's treaties on all sorts of things, from doping in sport to counterfeit goods, but there's no treaty on soil, which is literally at the base of everything. As a result of this, we abuse it mostly through the way that we farm it, with slapping on far too many fertilizers which can severely destroy soil structure; pesticides, which rip through soil ecosystems, and can then help to destabilize the soil itself because it's built by the organisms that those pesticides are killing; and deep plowing, which can often lead to the breakdown of soil structure.
It can take a lot of abuse until it suddenly hits a tipping point. When it hits that tipping point, that's what we call a dust bowl. A dust bowl is when the rate of soil erosion rises massively, almost overnight. Basically, when a major drought hits a highly degraded soil, the erosion rate can rise 6,000 fold. In other words, the entire soil structure collapses. It's a classic response of a complex system. Complex systems absorb stress and absorb stress and absorb stress then suddenly collapse. We're all aware of the great dust bowl in the United States but there have been many other dust bowls around the world and there are many threatened [dust bowls]. This threatens the entire basis of our survival. We can get everything else right but if we get the soil wrong, we're kippered.
This deep love and reverence and understanding of soil is what has caused you to do this deep-think on what we need to do to prevent that tipping point from happening. Could you tell us a bit about Iain Tolhurst?
George Monbiot: Yes. Iain Tolhurst or Tolly, as he's known to all his friends, is a remarkable man. He's what's called a stock-free, organic grower. He farms on some very poor soil. It's 40% stone. Most growers would not even look at it, which is how he managed to get hold of it because he had and has very little money. But he's managed to turn this very unpromising, small farm into a highly productive place. Without any fertilizer or any manure, he's managed to hit the lower bound of what conventional vegetable growers produce on good soil. And he's done so through 34 years of intense experimentation, trial and error, until he finally hit on what makes that soil work.
I think his key insight is that soils in the UK and Northern Europe that we call agricultural soils are, in fact, forest soils. They're places where trees used to grow and they function much better when they think there's still trees growing there. As well as a whole series of really interesting and innovative techniques, one of the key interventions is that at a certain point in the rotation, he introduces a tiny bit of wood chip. It's almost like the litter of twigs and leaves falling from the trees. That seems to mediate the relationship between plants and bacteria and fungi in the soil. This is what will happen in a forest ecosystem but that can very easily be disrupted when the trees are taken away, and the land is plowed up. He's doubled his yields of vegetables, he's greatly enhanced soil fertility without adding anything to it. It's this tiny sprinkling of wood chip.
Your book Regenesis is really fascinating because it goes back and forth between stories like this of Tollys, of an individual who has basically dedicated their lives to throwing away a rule book that had been written by someone else to do this intense experimentation and record-keeping so they can document when things have gone right. But you also paint a very bleak picture of the type of agriculture that goes on globally. You bemoan so many ills that farming has given us. Are you advocating that we should save our soil by leaving it alone?
George Monbiot: In some places, yeah. We need to minimize the area of the planet that we use for farming. The reason for that is that the Earth systems, our life support systems, depend on wild ecosystems. And the fewer of those that remain, the harder it will be for those earth systems to sustain themselves because, like the soil, which is one of those systems, Earth systems are complex systems. They absorb stress and then they reach a tipping point and they collapse. That's the point at which we are no longer able to live on most of the planet.
To prevent that from happening, we need, as much as possible, to defend the systems which repair and sustain those wider earth systems. Those are, for the most part, wild ecosystems. By far, the greatest threat to world ecosystems is the sheer amount of land that we use for farming. What we have to try to avoid now is what I call agricultural sprawl, farming occupying very large amounts of the planet while not producing very much. That is, I think, the greatest of all threats to Earth systems because of the opportunity cost, because it prevents the establishment of wild ecosystems across very large parts of the planet.
In "Regenesis," George Monbiot bemoans the ills of farming and paints a picture where brewing microbes in labs creates the food supply. Photo courtesy of Penguin Random House.
I think about so many solutions that have been called by so many different names — sustainable, regenerative all these different kinds of solutions that people posit. How do we convince societies to accept massive change? We can't seem to convince societies around the world about the most egregious harm done by the largest industrial livestock operations.
George Monbiot: It is tough. It's particularly tough with food because people almost form their identity around the food that they eat and they believe that any challenge to a particular diet is a direct challenge to their identity. But at the same time, the food we eat has radically changed. If you say, "What's your traditional diet?" They will reel off the traditional foods that are eating in their region. Then you say, "What do you actually eat?" It'll be completely different from that traditional diet. We've moved, for better or for worse, towards what some people call the global standard diet. This means that our food has become locally more diverse but globally less diverse.
For instance, here in the UK, if I walk into my local supermarket, I will see an incredible profusion of food, extraordinary diversity, which my grandma would have absolutely boggled at. She would be amazed by it. She wouldn't recognize most of what was on the shelves. You think, "This is extraordinary, what great wealth, what an abundance of diverse foods." But if I were to walk into a supermarket 5,000 miles away, in a different continent, I would likely see a very similar selection. It's the same range of food, often produced by the same corporations. So while each one of us is confronted by more diversity, globally there's less diversity. I guess the point I'm making here is that there's been radical dietary change and if we've changed once, we can change again, and potentially change in better directions.
Since the book came out last year, you talk about this one particular lab that is creating a kind of food out of fermented bacteria. Could you talk about the people involved in that project and tell us a little bit about it?
George Monbiot: I tried to sketch out in the book why I think precision fermentation, brewing microbes in factories, is actually going to be an important and perhaps even necessary part of our food supply. As part of my research on that subject, I visited a laboratory in Helsinki, Finland called Solar Foods, where they're working with a bacterium that's found in the soil, which has the interesting property of feeding on hydrogen. It needs no agricultural feedstocks at all. You can produce everything within the footprint of your factory on a very small area of land with far lower resources — much less water, much fewer nutrients — than you'd need to grow protein any other way.
It produces, which is basically the dead bodies or the bacteria, this golden colored flower, which is about 65 to 70% protein. That can be the basis of a whole range of new foods, some of which we can't yet conceive of but some of which could make much better substitutes for animal products than plant-based foods can.
I asked if I could be the first person ever to eat a pancake made of bacterial flour. It was slightly vain of me to ask, I admit, but unfortunately, they said, "Well, we've got to try it before we let you try it." So I can say I was the first person outside the laboratory to eat a pancake made of bacterial flour. The remarkable property of this pancake was it tasted just like a pancake yet it was made with no agricultural products at all.
In fact, for you to be able to consume this flour, they had to step down the protein content of it.
George Monbiot: Yes, that's right. Actually, the raw flour had no agricultural product. But we had to put some wheat flour in it because otherwise you would have made an omelet rather than a pancake. Normally, it's the other way around. You start with wheat flour then you have to add some protein and fat in the form of eggs and milk in order to make it a pancake. But in this case, it's got so much protein that you have to wind it back. So we did actually have to add some wheat flour. I think it would have made quite a nice omelet as well, because it smelt just like eggs.
The thing is, there's millions of microbes and there's loads of them which seem to have really good food values. I went to a laboratory in Amsterdam recently where they're working with a bacterium that's pink and tastes and smells exactly like sausages. You can basically grow sausage meat, and it requires far less processing than it does to make sausages out of pigs.
Are you a fan of cultured meat?
George Monbiot: Actually, I'm not. The reason for that is I don't think it's ever going to be viable. It's not going to come in at cost and it's really complicated. There's lots and lots of different steps, a lot of them extremely difficult. But above all, in order to grow a steak or another cut of meat in a flask, you need to maintain clinical hygiene standards.
Clinical hygiene standards are fine in medicine, where there's a lot more money per unit floating about, but if you're trying to produce food at a reasonable price, they make it prohibitively expensive. The reason you need those clinical hygiene standards is that mammalian cells double every 24 hours. Bacterial cells double every 20 minutes. So unless you've got those standards, you're gonna have a bacterial culture not a mammalian culture. So my answer is, well, why not just grow bacteria? It's so much easier.
Have any of these labs that you had the opportunity to visit actually been able to offer a product to the public yet?
George Monbiot: No, because the ones I've been visiting are in Europe, and Europe has a pretty restrictive novel foods regime. We need proper regulation, everything's got to be properly tested but the trouble is it's very, very slow. And it can be suspended at any time. Of course, the meat industry is all over this, trying to stop it from happening. So it gets suspended and it gets left in limbo. So they're ready to go. They're ready to scale. It's all there. They could hit the cost curves very quickly indeed but it's frustratingly held up in this rather Kafka-esque regulatory system.
As with cultured meat for a long time, perhaps it will eventually happen. I'm curious, in your perfect world in which we managed to hold off climate change and not hit a tipping point on our soils, are we completely giving up on land-based agriculture?
George Monbiot: Oh, no. By no means. We'd still have to grow grain, we'd still have to grow fruits and vegetables. I suggest some new and, I think, some very interesting ways in which we could do that with far less environmental damage and potentially more environmental resilience. As you know, farming is severely threatened now by environmental change, particularly by climate breakdown. Annual grain crops are especially susceptible. So what I'm really talking about with microbes is substituting for animal products. The reason we need to do that is that animal products are disproportionately harmful in environmental terms. They take up far more land, they produce far more greenhouse gasses, they need more of most commodities in order to produce them. To feed ourselves, we're killing nearly 80 billion animals per year, and that has a very high cost.