Regenesis: Feeding the World Without Devouring the Planet

our loyalties are to the aesthetics, not the evidence. We are seduced by the way things look, and overlook the way they function. But beauty is seldom truth, and truth is seldom beauty.

Another paper calculates that if a magic switch were thrown, causing the entire world to shift to a plant-based diet, and the land now occupied by livestock were rewilded, the carbon drawn down from the atmosphere by recovering ecosystems would be equivalent to all the world’s fossil fuel emissions from the previous sixteen years.[218] This drawdown could make the difference between our likely failure to prevent more than 1.5°C of global heating, and success.

I doubt I'm the only one in this field exasperated by people who claim that their variety of farming is the best of all possible systems in the best of all possible worlds. I've seen farmers who set out with high ideals gradually becoming hucksters, overlooking the drawbacks of their practice, exaggerating the advantages, subordinating their intellects to their interests. The people I'm drawn to are those, like Tolly, with a capacity for self-correction, who recognize the flaws in what they do and seek to address them.

[Agribusiness Conglomerates'] growth relies on ripping down circuit breaking, back-up systems, and modularity, and streamlining a system whose major nodes are already too big and whose links are already too strong. It's an accelerating cycle that inexorably destabilizes the system.

Scientists at Germany's Max Planck Institute have found that as much as 40 percent of the rainfall in parts of East Africa appears to be caused by farmers watering their fields in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, between 4,000 and 6,000 kilometers away.

After the Civil War battle at Shiloh, Tennessee, in 1862, thousands of injured soldiers were left lying in the mud, in some cases for two days and two nights, as the number of casualties on both sides was so great that it overwhelmed their armies' capacity to retrieve and treat them. Many died from their injuries and the consequent infections. But at night, some of the injured men noticed a strange blue glow emanating from their wounds. Their ghostly penumbra could be seen from a distance. Field surgeons observed that the soldiers who luminesced healed more quickly and had a higher survival rate than those who didn't. They called it the Angel's Glow. An explanation for the Angel's Glow was proposed 139 years later, when a seventeen-year-old high-school student, William Martin, acting on a hunch, persuaded his friend Jonathan Curtis to help him investigate. Their paper, which won a national science prize, argued that the soldiers appear to have been attacked by insect-eating nematodes in the soil contaminating their wounds. The nematodes regurgitated their bacteria, and the antibiotics these microbes produce are likely to have destroyed the other pathogens infecting the wounds. Because the luminous bacteria have evolved to infect insects, whose body temperature is lower than that of humans, the students speculated that only hypothermic soldiers were inoculated. When they were brought in for treatment, and warmed up, the bacteria that had saved them died, preventing complications. (A related species, adapted to mammalian temperatures, causes severe infections.)

Human breast milk contains sugars called oligo-saccharides. At first, scientists struggled to understand why mothers express these compounds, as babies can't digest them. It now seems that their sole purpose is to feed the bacteria with which the child will grow. They selectively cultivate a particular bacterial species with a crucial role in helping the gut to develop and calibrating the immune system. Similarly, young plants release large quantities of sucrose into the soil, to feed and develop their new microbiomes. Like the human gut, the rhizosphere not only digests food, but also helps to protect plants from disease. Just as the bacteria that live in our guts out compete and attack invading pathogens, the microbes in the rhizosphere create a defensive ring around the root. Plants feed beneficial bacteria species, so that they crowd out pathogenic microbes and fungi.

In every gram (less than a teaspoon) of soil, where plants are well established, there is around a kilometer of fungal filaments.

The soil can support such abundance because of its gigantic surface area. In an extreme case -- the finest clays -- a single gram (half a teaspoon when dry), would, if all its surfaces were laid out flat, cover 800 square meters.

Charity is what happens when government fails.

Obesity is a communicable disease. Its vectors are corporations.

One aspect of the human tragedy is that our attempts to solve our problems accidentally create systems whose complexity escalates faster than our understanding of them. They behave in strange, counterintuitive ways, sometimes producing outcomes that are the opposite of what anyone intended.

I’ve got this great idea. Let’s shut down the food factories. Let’s replace the food they make by catching some wild animals—aurochs, wild boar, jungle fowl, and a woolly ruminant from Mesopotamia would do—modifying them drastically and breeding them in stupendous numbers. Let’s separate the young from their mothers, castrate them, dock their tails, clip their beaks, teeth, and horns without anesthesia, herd them into barns and cages, subject them to extreme boredom and sensory deprivation for their short, distressing lives,[88] then corral them into giant factories where we stun them, cut their throats, skin, pluck, and hack their bloody flesh into chunks that you, the lucky customer, will want to eat (oh yes you will!). I’ve done the sums—we’d need to slaughter only 75 billion animals a year.[89] “Let’s kill the baby aurochs, extract a chemical from the lining of their fourth stomachs and mix it with milk from lactating mothers of the same species, to create a wobbly mass of fat and protein. We’ll stir in some live bacteria to digest this mass, then let their excrements sit till they go hard and yellow and start to stink. You’re really going to want this! “Let’s fell the forests, drain the wetlands, seize the wild grasslands, expel the indigenous people, kill the large predators, exclude the wild herbivores, trigger the global collapse of wildlife, climate breakdown, and the destruction of the habitable planet. Let’s fence most of this land for our captive animals to graze, and plant the rest with crops to make them fat. Let’s spray the crops with biocidal toxins and minerals that’ll leach into the soil and water. Let’s divert the rivers and drain the aquifers. Let’s pour billions of tons of shit into the sea. Let’s trigger repeated plagues, transmitted to humans by the animals we’ve captured, and destroy the efficacy of our most important medicines. “Sure, it will trash everything after a while, but think of the fun we’ll have. Come on, you know you want this.” I hope you would run this scoundrel out of town.

Campaigners, chefs, and food writers rail against “intensive farming,” and the harm it does to us and our world. But the problem is not the adjective. It’s the noun.