George Monbiot,
Regenesis: Feeding the World Without Devouring the Planet,
Londres : Penguin Books, août 2022.
The ecologist Monbiot now supports the “war against subsistence” that capitalist industry has waged since its beginnings, first in England and still waging today throughout the world, in order to make each and every one of us dependent on its commodities, its ersatz products…
The plan to completely enclose humanity in an urban and industrial prison is now being expressed without restraint in certain business circles. In the near future, we can expect leaders?
Monbiotic Man
Simon Fairlie assesses the farm-free future for humanity spelled out in George Monbiot’s latest book Regenesis.
Regenesis starts harmlessly enough. In his first chapter George Monbiot illustrates the complexities of soil structure by describing what he sees when he looks at a sod dug up from his orchard through a 40x magnifying eyepiece. It is an elegant snapshot of the world beneath our feet that we always vaguely knew about, but rather took for granted until Merlin Sheldrake and others unveiled some of its mysteries.
In chapter two he lays into industrial agriculture, cataloguing failings and dangers that many readers of The Land will already be familiar with. The theme is carried forward in the following chapter, where he targets agricultural pollution and the excesses of the intensive livestock industry. He then goes on to visit three farms in the UK that are trying to address some of these problems. The first is Ian Tolhurst’s stock-free market garden in Oxfordshire, which rightly meets with Monbiot’s enthusiastic approval. His comments on the other two holdings he visits are also sound: the no-till arable farm would be more convincing were it not reliant on glyphosate weedkiller. The mixed farm employing mob-grazing and heritage grains has high aspirations but low yields.
Much of this is music to the ears of any reader supportive of agro-ecology and food sovereignty. Even if not much of it is breaking news, it is enlivened by Monbiot’s acute observations and sharp turn of phrase.
However, it soon proves to be the overture to something more discordant. Soft cop George is buttering us up before hard cop Monbiot launches in with the tough questioning. The crime, he alleges, is not industrial agriculture, but agriculture itself: “Farming, whether intensive or extensive is the world’s major cause of ecological destruction”. Overheating the world’s atmosphere and oceans through fossil fuel use apparently comes second.
The culprit is every farmer, big or small, chemical or organic (with the exception of Ian Tolhurst). A farm-free world is what Monbiot hopes to see, where everyone enjoys farm-free food. “We can now contemplate the end of most farming, the most destructive force ever to have been unleashed by humans.” To this end he visits the Solar Foods laboratory in Finland where scientists are developing a high protein foodstuff made from bacteria fed on hydrogen. He eats a pancake made from the substance that he believes “represents the beginning of the end of most agriculture”. Since this substance has no name, I call it “studge”, after the breakfast cereal that readers of Saki may remember was marketed on the basis that “people will do things from a sense of duty that they would never attempt as a pleasure”.
The Agribashers
George Monbiot is by no means the first writer to launch an all-out attack on agriculture. Since the publication of Marshall Sahlins’ Stone Age Economics in 1972 (see p.53 of this issue) there has been a crescendo of variations on the theme that it all went wrong when people started keeping animals and growing crops. Examples include Paul Shephard’s call for humanity to Come Home to the Pleistocene, the late James Lovelock’s Revenge of Gaia, Yuval Noah Harari’s contention that agriculture was “History’s Biggest Fraud”, James C Scott’s Against the Grain, and the report Rethinking Food and Agriculture by the think tank Rethinkx. Three of these – Shepard, Lovelock and Rethinkx – propose the same solution as Monbiot: feeding people, in Lovelock’s words, on “tissue cultures of meats and vegetables and junk food made from any convenient organism”.
Two differences between Monbiot’s book and earlier exponents of the agribashing tendency are worth mentioning. Firstly there are now start-up labs working to produce the junk food that will replace agricultural products; and there are generations of urban dwellers who are now so divorced from the land, and so wrapped up in cyberspace that they will probably be quite happy to eat the stuff. Secondly Monbiot, through his long association with The Guardian, has rather more influence than most of his predecessors. Regenesis was heralded by an hour-long documentary on the subject on Channel 4. In 2013 when his book Feral came out, few people had even heard of rewilding: now it is UK government policy.
Neither Spare nor Share
Monbiots’s third chapter, which bears the engaging title “Agricultural Sprawl”, begins by continuing his onslaught upon industrial agriculture in the form of the factory chicken farms currently polluting the River Wye (see The Land 29). He continues in this vein for 17 pages until he abruptly changes his tone:
“You might, by now, have decided that you want nothing more to do with intensive farming: from now on you will eat only meat, eggs and milk from animals that can roam outdoors or have been certified as organic… If so I can offer you little comfort.”
The problem with grazing animals, he continues, is that they occupy a rather large proportion of the world’s land area: 28 percent according to figures cited by Monbiot (slightly less than the 31 percent covered by forest) [1].1 Another 12 percent is occupied by arable crops, and one percent by buildings. The rest is desert or icy waste.
Forty percent of the world’s land surface is devoted to agriculture, and as such is a threat to global biodiversity because “the great majority of the world’s species cannot survive in a farmed landscape”. The reference for this statement is a trio of UK papers on the benefits of “land-sparing” as opposed to “land-sharing”. But Monbiot is in favour of neither. Land-sparing – pursuing highly intensive agriculture over a relatively small area in order to give extensively farmed land back to Nature – would triple pesticide use and lead to even greater use of arable land for animal feeds and biofuels. Land sharing through organic farming and regenerative agriculture has lower yields and takes up too much land. The problem with intensive farming, writes Monbiot:
“is not the adjective, it is the noun… We appear to be trapped between two dangerous forces: efficiency and sprawl. Farming is both too intensive and too extensive. It uses too many pesticides, too much fertiliser, too much water and too much land.”
Rural Sprawl
It is indisputable that the task of nourishing seven billion people has reduced the areas of wilderness on the Earth to enclaves and condemned numerous species to decline and extinction. Such wilderness and many of the species associated with it in the UK disappeared centuries ago. This is a matter of genuine concern, which I will come back to it later.
But whether the conceit that this represents “agricultural sprawl” is a helpful one is another matter. Monbiot focuses mainly on the UK, and so will I. Look out of the window on a train journey from the less intensively farmed West Country up to London and you will catch glimpses of a great many landscape features: fields of wheat, maize, potatoes or rape, meadows cut for silage or left to grow for hay, pastures of every feasible ecological status and condition, downland grazed by sheep, water meadows where rivers weave oxbow curves, old commons turning to scrub, fields left to grow wild, stately parks with spreading oaks, edge of town allotments, oak, beech or sycamore woodlands, hazel coppice, conifer plantations, spinneys, hedgerows, ditches and bogs.
Within this mosaic, thousands if not millions of species find their niche. Most evolved over the long period of time that preceded the neolithic agricultural revolution, but many have benefited from the disturbance caused by agriculture, or adapted to its rhythms. According to Plantlife:
“Hundreds of different wild flowers and fungi have co-evolved over millennia with farmers managing the land as hay meadows and pasture. This unparalleled plant diversity provides the life support for our invertebrates, birds, mammals… More than 120 species of wildflowers grow in arable habitats and together make up one of the most threatened groups of plants in the UK. Many of our most beloved plants – such as cornflower, corn marigold and corncockle – have drastically declined and no longer colour our farmland.”
This diversity of landscape features and species is the result of about 6,000 years of co-operation between the people of this island and its environment in the name of agriculture, and to most people’s eyes it looks green and pleasant, even if it doesn’t have the romance or mystery of Pleistocene wilderness. Yes, it has become degraded and species are under threat largely because of industrial farming methods. A judicious measure of rewilding might help to redress the balance. But complete abandonment of agriculture would be detrimental to biodiversity, since we would lose many of the wild species that have successfully adapted to agricultural disturbance, as well as the innumerable varieties of domestic plants and animals that are utterly dependent on a farmed ecosystem.
On your train journey you will also find that for much of the time you can’t see anything of the landscape, because of all the trees growing up by the side of the track. This is nature, wilderness, trying to regain lost territory, which it would do if Network Rail didn’t arrange for it to be hacked back from time to time. If Monbiot’s farm-free landscape were let loose, that is pretty much all we would see for much of the journey. A return to the blanket of woodland which covered much of Britain before our forefathers let the light in and allowed sun- and disturbance-loving plants and insects to proliferate, might feel more like sprawl than the highly variegated farming landscape that much of Britain enjoys now.
Urban Sprawl
Anyway, real sprawl is in a different league. It multiplies on the outskirts of towns like Didcot and Basingstoke, increasing in intensity, until by the time you get to Woking or Slough it is relentless. Rows of terraced houses give way to new semi-detached estates while half-built roundabouts map out the frontiers of future building sites. Who are all these people? What do they do, apart from “taking in each other’s washing”? Why so many? By the time you get to Vauxhall or Paddington the sprawl becomes vertical, as office blocks and residential towers, starved for space, stretch skyward like plants competing for light.
Monbiot’s hatred of farming has become so visceral that the pastures and cornfields of the West Country are in his view more to be feared than the spread of concrete and tarmac. The cows and sheep that we glimpse from the train window, along with the pigs and chickens that we don’t see, he reckons threaten the carrying capacity of the planet, more than the people who rear them:
“While the human population growth rate has fallen to 1.05 percent a year, the growth rate of the livestock population has risen to 2.4 percent a year… The biggest population crisis is not the growth in human numbers but the growth in livestock numbers.”
The biggest numerical increase in recent years no doubt; but it is a bit rich to vilify cows, pigs, sheep and poultry when they do little other than eat, sleep, procreate and defecate, while human occupants of the sprawling metropolis demand cooked food, clothes, hot showers, central heating, computers, motor-cars, hospitals, shopping, foreign holidays and who knows what else. The built environment may only occupy 11 percent of the UK land area, but it sucks up far more energy and resources from ghost acres than the countryside does.
Yield-Blindness
Let us unpack this figure of 2.4 percent annual growth in livestock numbers. Virtually all of this increase is in the intensive chicken and pork industries; very little is caused by cattle or sheep. Monbiot cites USDA figures showing that the number of cattle in the world has increased by 15 per cent over the last 50 years, but all of this increase occurred between the years 1971 and 1975. According to United Nations data, this figure severely underestimates the number of cows in Africa. But both sources agree that in USA, Russia, East Asia, and Europe the number of cattle is falling. The UK cattle population has declined by 25 per cent since the early 1980s [2].
What then of the factory farmed pigs and chickens that account for nearly all of the annual 2.4 percent increase in livestock numbers? They are mostly fed on cereals and soya beans, grown on arable land. Sixty percent of the UK’s arable land is used to grow feed crops for animals and on top of that we import large quantities of soy and maize from ‘ghost acres’ in the Americas.
The surest way to reduce the impact of farming upon the natural environment would be to stop using vast areas of arable land to grow monocultural crops to feed to pigs and chickens at inefficient conversion rates. Monbiot’s enthusiasm for doing away with this inefficient way of producing protein, and releasing several million acres of UK land for other uses is shared by large numbers of people within the agro-ecology and regenerative farming movements. But that is where agreement ends. Monbiot would like to rewild any land so spared, whereas many in agro-ecological circles would prefer to see some of it used to enable a return to mixed organic farms where ruminant livestock are part of the fertility building cycle, and the protein from factory farmed animals is replaced by pulses.
A month after the publication of Regenesis, the Sustainable Food Trust (SFT) released its report Feeding Britain from the Ground Up, which advocates halving grain production, encouraging mixed organic farming, growing more peas and beans and ensuring waste food and by-products are fed to livestock. The SFT calculates that in this manner the UK could maintain or even increase existing levels of food self-sufficiency, while allowing an extra 2.5 million hectares for tree planting and nature recovery (see page 12 of this issue).
A major weakness of Regenesis is that it doesn’t give a fair hearing to this approach. There is no analysis of what it might achieve or require in the way of land-use reallocation, or what carbon and environmental benefits it might bring. The one case study Monbiot provides of such a farm is an experimental project on poor land with an absurdly low level of productivity. I agree with him that too many agro-ecological farmers are “yield blind… [using] large areas of land to produce small amounts of food”. But he too is blind to examples of far more productive organic mixed farms, such as those which provide case studies for the SFT report.
Nor does he make any mention of default livestock — farm animals that can be fed off crop residues, food waste, or grass maintained for other purposes, such as nature conservation, fertility building or open spaces. This was an approach he endorsed back in 2010 [3].
Since then, much research has been carried out showing that these “ecological leftovers” are substantial – notably Hannah van Zanten’s calculation that the processing and food wastes generated by the sort of vegan diet that George advocates, when fed to livestock, produce meat sufficient to meet more than a quarter of all human protein requirements [4]. If this was one of the 5,000 academic papers that Monbiot claims to have read during the research for this book, he apparently thought it was of no significance. (See also the recent report from WWF, covered on page 12 of this issue.)
Homo High-Rise
Monbiot’s strongest argument for the development and propagation of bacterial studge is founded on environmental justice. While his favourite food is a “green peppercorn and lemongrass coconut broth”, and he has a horror of lardy cake, most people like to eat animal protein and fat, not least manual workers. There is growing demand from the poor of the world to consume it at the rate that people in industrial countries enjoy, or indeed at the rate that we enjoyed it in the pre-agricultural Pleistocene past in which the metabolism of homo sapiens evolved.
The only way that this demand could currently be satisfied is by feeding yet more cereals and soya to pigs and chickens in factory farms, which would be an environmental and animal welfare disaster. However unappealing the prospect may be of having the majority of our digestible protein produced in a laboratory by white-coated geeks, it is surely better than ploughing up increasing tracts of virgin forest to feed animals incarcerated in a prison from which the only exit is death.
Or perhaps not? The production of studge requires large amounts of hydrogen, produced by electricity. As noted in issue 30 of The Land, almost every industry currently reliant on fossil fuels is looking to hydrogen to reduce its carbon emissions [5]. A recent paper by AH MacDougal et al warned that if limited supplies of renewable energy are used to manufacture edible biomass instead of replacing fossil fuels, the long term result would be increased global warming:
“Maximum warming reduction from bacilliculture would require deploying the technology only after decarbonisation has reached its limits.” [6]
However, suppose within a few decades there is a flowering of the hydrogen economy, and sufficient renewable energy is available to produce bacterial protein cheaper than soy protein, lab-grown fat cheaper than palm oil, and cultured carbs cheaper than wheat or barley. Given the smorgasbord of fake steaks, sham hams and other skeuomorphic delicacies which Monbiot anticipates could be fabricated using studge as a raw material, it is not hard to imagine the new diet being accepted by inhabitants of the vertical metropolitan sprawl that already thrives in countries such as China and South Korea [7].
But what of the two billion peasants worldwide who currently make their living from farming? Are they to be dispossessed of their lands and herded into high-rise buildings to peer at the natural world through a computer screen, and occasionally troop down to the gymnasium for exercise, while their former fields are invaded by scrub? With everybody eating the same substance, will the demise of agriculture herald the final convergence of tribal, regional and national cultures into one banal global monoculture? This is a scenario that captains of industry, whether of capitalist or Sino-communist persuasion, aided and abetted by their techno-vegan eco-consultants, will no doubt be happy to accelerate.
An Agricultural Revolution
There is, however, an alternative application for the studge, which is to feed it to animals. That after all is what the soya protein that it is destined to replace is used for – and it is what scientists originally thought their studge would be used for.
If it ends up fed to pigs and chickens in factory farms on the periphery of megacities, that would be a disaster both for the incarcerated animals and for peasant farmers unable to compete with this scale of industrial production. It would result in vast surpluses of nitrogenous phosphate-rich slurry concentrated in places where they served no purpose.
On the other hand if – and it is a big “if” – factory farms fell out of favour, and instead the studge were distributed to smallholders and family farms scattered across the land mass, it could provide a boost to organic agriculture, especially in less developed countries.
As Monbiot points out, countries in the global south are blessed with ample amounts of solar energy with which to manufacture the stuff. If it were made available cheaply to peasant farmers, then they might choose to eat it if times were hard; but otherwise they would probably find it more advantageous to feed it to their livestock and sell the resulting milk and meat to town-dwellers who were bored with eating studge.
The result would be an increase in the volume of manure available to farmers, and a corresponding improvement in the fertility, health and yield of their soils. In the clover-fuelled agricultural revolution of early modern times, European crop yields rose spectacularly through the expedient of being able to keep more livestock, a double bonus.
A hydrogen-fuelled agricultural revolution could do the same for farmers in the tropics. It would render the chemical fertilisers of the fossil-fuelled Green Revolution redundant, replacing them with manure that would increase soil organic matter and carbon, and improve moisture retention. Increases in yields could help to stem further incursions into tropical forest and savannah.
Priorities
Is this a science fiction fantasy? Perhaps, but no more so than Monbiot’s farm-free dystopia. However much one may disagree with his conclusions, one may thank him for raising important questions and intriguing possibilities in a highly readable book. Perhaps he is making extreme proposals simply in order to shift the boundaries of the debate, and hence the perception of what is mainstream, a tactic known as the radical flank effect.
The main worry is his repeated characterisation of farming as “the most destructive human activity ever to have blighted the earth”. Agriculture has a lot to answer for; but does it really bear comparison with the threat to life on Earth as we know it from the oil and coal industry?
Farming and livestock husbandry have been with us for around 12,000 years. The curves that describe human population growth, global atmospheric CO2 levels and the extraction of fossil fuels all share the same exponential rise over the last century, and that is no coincidence. The imperative is not to stop farming, but to phase out fossil fuels very quickly. Cavalier polemics that cast primary responsibility for our predicament elsewhere are a dangerous diversion.
Simon Fairlie.
This article originally appeared in The Land Issue 31, 2022.
Rebooting Reality
Ecomodernists want to “reboot food”: Mike Hannis smells astroturf.
2023
Listen to The Science, demands the widespread rallying cry, even though there is clearly no such singular thing. Whether the topic is climate, virology or gender, the diversity of purportedly scientific publications is such that (rather like quotes from the Bible) one can be brandished as evidence for almost any view, however outlandish.
There will always be outliers, and sometimes these are genuinely important. But that doesn’t mean all such publications carry equal weight. Science can be done well or badly, results can be presented honestly or disingenuously, and the standards applied by journals can vary from impossibly stringent to effectively non-existent.
Despite mischievious claims to the contrary, this has not yet rendered the whole exercise pointless. As the sheer number of published studies on all topics has exploded, so the idea of “scientific consensus” has become increasingly central. This has arguably worked pretty well in the case of climate change, where surveys have repeatedly shown that over 97 percent of published scientific literature supports the hypothesis that human activity is warming the Earth. Putting it mildly, this does seem like something that should persuade most open-minded people, and broadly speaking this has now happened.
Information Deficit?
“Listen to the Science!” might have been a reasonable demand to make of someone who still didn’t believe human activity was causing climate change. But that was yesterday’s conversation, and the slogan is much less useful in the context of today’s debates. These are messy political and ethical fights about what priority acknowledged environmental objectives should be given relative to other social goals. They cannot be short-circuited by appealing to science as a source of unarguable truth, attractive though this option may seem.
Environmental movements have long been hamstrung by naive “information deficit” models of communication. Yet it is still often claimed that decision makers, corporate bosses and humble “consumers” are under-informed about impending eco-doom, and would behave more virtuously if only they had more accurate information. History does not support this view. Oil companies researched climate change in depth long ago, but recognising a threat to profits, kept their findings secret and carried on regardless. Governments will not voluntarily introduce strong regulation that might displease lobbyists, reduce growth or lose them the next election, even though people actually want them to do so. These are complex political problems, requiring political solutions. They cannot be resolved just by ‘listening to the science’.
Ecomodernist Epiphanies
Against this background, some degree of scepticism is warranted when prominent people claim that the siren voice of science has whispered in their ear and convinced them that previous ethical or political beliefs were mistaken.
Connoisseurs of such epiphanies may remember the notorious case of Mark Lynas, whose Damascene conversion to the exaggerated merits of genetic modification led him to disavow his (apparently also exaggerated) earlier role in anti-GM campaigning, and eventually to become an enthusiastic ambassador for GM agriculture, paid by the Gates Foundation, via the so-called Alliance for Science.
Lynas was an author of the Ecomodernist Manifesto, which promoted the idea that high technology and entrepreneurial innovation could largely “decouple” human civilisation from the natural world, removing physical limits to growth and deliberately splitting the planet between curated ‘wilderness’ and intensive human settlement. He is now a central figure in a new organisation called RePlanet, which he describes as
Imagine…
Like the Ecomodernist groups it emerged from, the RePlanet network is very active in pushing environmental NGOs and political parties to support nuclear power and genetic modification. Currently though, its most high profile campaign is one called Reboot Food, in whose fantasy narrative the world will be rescued from the cruelty and ecological destruction of existing agriculture by heroic technological breakthroughs, in particular precision fermentation (PF). Visitors to the RePlanet website are invited to
As often discussed in these pages, the plausibility of a global move to high-tech veganism and extreme rewilding is highly questionable. Adding the idea that this would somehow feed the world stretches credibility to the limit. For instance, many of ‘the world’s poorest’ are subsistence pastoralists, who would presumably be told (by whom is unclear) to give up their livestock and accept the ‘rewilding’ of whatever grazing land they previously had access to. This misguided idea is far from new, but previous efforts by NGOs and governments to impose it have usually gone pretty badly (as noted by one G. Monbiot – see eg The Land issue 30, p35). The twist this time around, that involuntary vegans in the Global South would somehow be provided with ‘abundant food’ from their local fermentation plant, suggests either considerable cynicism or a remarkable ignorance of real world politics and economics.
Smells Like Astroturf
How best to promote this curious vision to the world? Enter Lynas’s old Oxford friend and sparring partner George Monbiot, who has of course recently had a surprising epiphany of his own about such matters. In late 2022, RePlanet kindly funded a speaking tour of Europe, and associated media blitz, promoting Monbiot’s controversial book Regenesis as a statement of their own position.
The explicit aim of Reboot Food is not only to change public perception, but also to secure government funding for the emerging PF industry. Applicants for a recently advertised £47K job as Campaign Manager were set this task:
RePlanet calls itself ‘pro-science’ and says it is ‘entirely charitably funded and strictly accepts no funding from industry’. However it very much does accept funding from ‘charitable’ foundations set up by companies and wealthy individuals to further projects they favour. The trail is not hard to follow.
As has been astutely noted by GMWatch, ‘Monbiot fits neatly into the ecomodernists’ rebranding exercise, [but] teaming up with Lynas is a seriously bad idea’. In short, Monbiot of all people is surely well-equipped to see that RePlanet has all the hallmarks of a sophisticated astroturf organisation, whose real job is to advance industry interests, not least by weakening EU regulations around agrochemicals and ‘novel foods’.
One of the two people recruited to join Lynas as the public faces of RePlanet UK, Joel Scott-Halkes, attended COP27 as part of a delegation from the Canadian Nuclear Association, after co-writing a bizarre article with Lynas entitled ‘How I came to love (and even hug) nuclear waste’. His core interest however seems to be food, on which he recently tweeted that ‘puritanical anti-science Greens’ who support EU regulations on GM which are ‘unfounded in science’ are thereby ‘holding back actual planet saving’. Such messaging perfectly suits the interests not only of PF start-ups, but more importantly of industry giants like glyphosate maker and GM seed merchant Bayer.
Is This “The Science”?
Scott-Halkes and his new colleague Emma Smart are best known as repeatedly arrested Extinction Rebellion activists. This connection has been prominently flagged, no doubt to make RePlanet seem like a radical grassroots organisation.
While “Listen to the Science” remains a core XR slogan, it seems fair to assume that many XR supporters would not share RePlanet’s industry-friendly ecomodernist interpretation of it. Science does not mandate the adoption of any particular technology, diet or economic system. It cannot replace political and ethical deliberation, or dictate “solutions” to be rolled out across the world, controlled by investors in high-tech industries.
XR have called for 100,000 people to gather at Parliament Square on 21 April. Some may perhaps attend with a view to demanding nuclear power, genetic modification and precision fermentation. Most, hopefully, will not.
Mike Hannis
This article originally appeared in The Land Issue 32, 2023.
Precision and Prohibition
George Monbiot accuses The Land of bucolic romanticism. Mike Hannis and Simon Fairlie respond.
2023
Following publication of issue 32 we received a letter from George Monbiot, which you can read below along with responses from two of the magazine’s editors.
The pdf also includes a longer response by Chris Smaje to recent writings of Monbiot’s calling for “the end of most agriculture”.
Dear Friends
Before my book Regenesis was published, I gave some thought to where the main opposition was likely to come from. I guessed it would take the form of an unintentional alliance between bucolic romantics and Big Meat. Just as the Southern Baptists in the United States, by pushing for Prohibition, opened the door to Al Capone and his chums, so the romantics would play John the Southern Baptist to the meat industry. It has played out just as I feared, especially in the pages of The Land.
The Southern Baptists had no solution to the demand for alcohol except temperance, eventually enforced by law. The romantics in these pages have no solution except temperance to a drive that’s just as strong: the rising demand, as wealth increases, for energy-dense (especially protein-rich and fat-rich) foods. There’s a term for this trend: Bennett’s Law.
While I think we can all agree that a high-yield agroecology is the best means by which our grain, fruit and vegetables should be produced, there is no way it can meet the spiralling global demand for protein and fat. Nor should it try.
New sources, especially unicellular organisms, can meet the growing demand for fat and protein while using a fraction of the land, water and fertiliser required for meat production. I understand why you might instinctively reject this approach. But the question none of you will answer is what you propose instead. Your writers seek to rip down the only viable alternative I can see to an exponential rise in livestock production to meet the rising demand for energy-dense foods, without suggesting a replacement.
Rather than attempt an answer to the existential crises caused by the escalating demand for animal products, The Land retreats into fantasy. It proposes, in effect, a Neolithic production system to feed a 21st-century population with 21st-century appetites. You don’t have to be John the Baptist to see how that will go. As so often in matters of food and farming, it’s all about the pictures, while the numbers are either ignored or denied.
Far worse, just as David Bellamy and his ilk denied the radiative forcing impact of carbon dioxide because they didn’t like the sight of wind turbines, some writers in your pages deny the radiative forcing impact of methane because they don’t like the sound of alternative proteins. There are two ways of describing this tendency. One is motivated reasoning. The other is climate denial. You should be ashamed to entertain such claims in your magazine.
I now begin to wonder whether The Land is taking an even grimmer turn. The latest edition’s lead editorial peddles two staples of the current wave of conspiracism. The first is its conflation of proposition with imposition. Some of us have proposed new means of producing protein. Somehow The Land translates this into subsistence pastoralists being “told … to give up their livestock”. This is a classic example of the conspiracy ideation now deployed against almost all proposed environmental measures. Induction hobs are greener? They’re coming for your gas cooker! A 15-minute city? You’ll be forced to stay in your home!
The second is the “dark forces” theme. Reboot Food is transparent about who funds it, what it is and what it wants. But, without advancing a shred of evidence, you accuse it of being “a sophisticated astroturf organisation, whose real job is to advance industry interests”. The only parts you missed are the Great Reset and the Illuminati.
If you have a viable and realistic means of addressing the greatest of our environmental dilemmas – the vast and rising impact of livestock on all Earth systems – I would love to hear it. If it is better than the approach I’ve supported, I would be delighted to adopt it. But I go back to The Land again and again, and find nothing.
By attacking the only genuine threat to its hegemony, you are rolling out the blood-red carpet for Big Meat. It is time you asked yourselves some tough questions.
Yours sincerely
George Monbiot
No Time For Hedging
Dear George
Thank you very much for your letter. Sorry that our publication schedule has left you waiting several months for a reply.
If there is an analogy here with Prohibition, the Southern Baptist role is played by those whose rigid ethical convictions blinker them into thinking they can impose a massive cultural shift in consumption patterns on everyone else. If they succeed, the part of Al Capone may be played by black market meat dealers, with supply chains even murkier than today’s.
Demand for meat is demand for meat, not “demand for energy-dense foods”. Few would deny that this demand has become unsustainable and urgently needs to be reduced. But few would agree that it can or should be eliminated entirely. The two claims are distinct, and their conflation makes sense only from a perspective distorted by dogmatic veganism.
Your proposed global transition away from agriculture is at least as utopian as the agroecological visions which you mock as “romantic”. I respect and share your desire to free food chains from the poison of corporate manipulation. But the technologies you endorse, if implemented at the scale you suggest, are likely to further intensify the industrialisation and centralisation of food production, and thereby have the opposite effect.
These themes will be addressed by others on the following pages, but first I would like to respond briefly to your comments on my editorial in isssue 32. The implications of your proposals for subsistence pastoralists in the Global South are very real – there’s no “conspiracy ideation” involved. (We have published many articles criticising such thinking, including my own editorial in this issue on 15-minute cities, which I hope you’ll agree with.)
Those rich in land and capital might well, as you recommend, adopt some combination of horticulture, rewilding, and growing feedstock for the hungry bioreactors. Big Food would simply shift resources from Big Meat to Big Fermentation. But pastoralists don’t have these options. It is disingenuous to suggest they would not be impacted.
Should governments and publics in richer countries further embrace the vilification of livestock keeping, the priorities of aid agencies, NGOs, and their donors, would shift accordingly. This would significantly increase existing pressures on the livelihoods of pastoralists, who as you know tend to depend on grazing marginal land they don’t own, in countries where government policy is subject to the whims of such agencies. These pressures frequently result in people having to give up their livestock, with all the cultural devastation that involves. Often the land is then dishonestly reframed as “pristine wilderness”, to be profitably monetised by unsustainable and extractive tourism enterprises – including the archaic trophy hunting industry you inexplicably defend.
RePlanet are indeed transparent about the fact that they are funded from the very deep pockets of hedge fund Quadrature Capital, via its Quadrature Climate Foundation. QCF also fund “Greens for Nuclear” (see page 27), and no doubt other groups engaged in the persuasion they describe as key to their “mission”:
“Our mission is to urgently shift the current global climate trajectory towards a better future through philanthropic giving and the persuasion of others to join in the effort.”
Curiously this mission does not extend to Quadrature’s own business. Their website explains that, like a medieval indulgence, transferring funds into QCF magically resolves any conflict between their purported values and the fact that they make their billions by investing in literally anything, including oil and arms companies [8]. This epic greenwash bears quoting in full:
“In line with our desire to positively contribute to society, and with QCF’s work focused on fighting the climate crisis, we evaluated the pros and cons of removing all stocks that are inconsistent with the Paris Agreement of limiting the global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees from our investable universe. We do not hold stocks for long periods of time, instead we trade in and out and are as likely to be short as long. The only impact we have is to make them more efficient by adding liquidity, and the value of this additional liquidity is negligible compared to the donations made to the foundation. We therefore look to trade all stocks irrespective of their underlying business model and so our regulatory reports may show long positions that don’t align with our values.”
Such people will clearly never fund any version of environmentalism that involves challenging economic growth or capitalist “business as usual”. But their logic aligns perfectly with the ecomodernist project of “persuading” governments to smooth the way for techno-fixes which promise to resolve inconvenient issues like climate change while opening vast new frontiers of profit for Big Tech and its investors. They therefore fund organisations like RePlanet, who promote such “solutions”.
In this context “trust the science” tends to become “trust the market”, which as you have done more than most to show, is a short cut to perdition. I look forward to reading your updated analysis of the agendas pushed by your new friends – not to mention some of your old ones.
Mike Hannis
Between Two Evils
Dear George
Thanks for your letter which gives us an opportunity to explore the rifts that exist within the green movement on these issues. But first, some of the allegations you make about the stance taken in The Land are wrong. Take for example this statement:
“Your writers seek to rip down the only viable alternative I can see to an exponential rise in livestock production, ie unicellular organisms, to meet the rising demand for energy-dense foods.”
I don’t know who you are referring to. In my review of your book Regenesis (see The Land issue 31, page 48) I stated that the strongest argument for studge, as some of us call it [9], is an environmental justice one, to meet the rising demand for high protein in poor countries; and that, provided there is sufficient available renewable energy, then “it is not hard to imagine the new diet being accepted by inhabitants of the vertical metropolitan sprawl that already exists in countries such as China and South Korea” [10].
I suggested that peasant farmers “might choose to eat it if times were hard; but otherwise they would probably find it more advantageous to feed it to their livestock and sell the resulting milk and meat to town dwellers”. This is a reasonable suggestion. Studge is a potentially welcome replacement for soya protein from South America. Currently the bulk of soya protein is fed to animals, and I see no reason why that might not also be the case for studge. This could provide a better way of injecting fertility into peasant soils, via animal manure, than through the acquisition of artificial nitrogen. This would help to keep two billion peasant households living and working on their land, whereas using studge to replace farmed food, as you suggest, would force them off it.
A second accusation you make is that
“Some writers in your pages deny the radiative forcing impact of methane because they don’t like the sound of alternative proteins. There are two ways of describing this tendency. One is motivated reasoning. The other is climate denial.”
As far as I know nobody has written anything denying the radiative forcing of methane in the nearly 2,000 pages so far published by The Land. Most of the material we have published about methane has been written or edited by me, and I have never denied its global warming impact. In my main article on the subject (The Land 24, p24) I wrote:
“It is vital that livestock numbers do not increase around the world because that would generate more methane in the atmosphere and cause global warming.”
Is it possible to be much clearer than that?
I come now to the remarks that begin and end your letter: that The Land has entered into “an unintentional alliance between bucolic romantics and Big Meat” and that we “are rolling out the blood-red carpet for Big Meat”.
This is a bizarre allegation, given that we have written and published countless articles decrying industrial pig and chicken farms, opposing the import of soya protein, in favour of taxing meat, and advocating a decline in the consumption of both grazed and factory fed animals.
The charge that we are in cahoots with “Big Meat” only makes sense when seen through the lens of vegan fundamentalism which chooses to view all forms of livestock rearing as equally reprehensible despite the widely acknowledged fact that the environmental impacts of different kinds of animal husbandry vary wildly. Regenesis makes no mention of default livestock.
As for comparing The Land with Southern Baptists, that really takes the biscuit. It is not we who are advocating prohibition, but proselytising vegans such as yourself. To pursue the analogy through the cartoon below, The Land is a voice of temperance, speaking out against intemperate meat consumption on the one hand and intemperate condemnation of animal husbandry on the other.
As you point out prohibitionists are in unconscious league with bootleggers, and the same is arguably the case for vegans and Big Meat. If all the six million or so vegans and vegetarians in Britain had instead demanded modest quantities of meat from animals that were humanely reared and fed from sustainable sources, and been prepared to pay for it, then the livestock industry would probably have shifted further in a benign direction than it has in response to mass abstention.
You say:
“If you have a viable and realistic means of addressing the greatest of our environmental dilemmas – the vast and rising impact of livestock on all Earth systems – I would love to hear it. But I go back to The Land again and again, and find nothing.”
Demand for meat is increasing at an unsustainable level; but so too are air flights taken by a global elite, concrete skyscrapers, container loads of plastic crap imported from China, obsolescing computers, and all the other elements of the capitalist lifestyle, each of which will have its own “Bennet’s Law”. We consider global warming to be a more pressing threat to human civilisation and to existing biodiversity, and that, in your own words, “curtailing climate change must become the project we put before all others” [11].
The Land does not, as you do, have a magic potion that will solve the world’s environmental dilemmas. Life on Earth is too complex for that. At best we have a bundle of proposals and ideas that we think point a way forward, and which, among other things, would reduce the impact of livestock. A list of some of these is provided below.
In any case, it is not the mission of The Land to promote a single solution to the world’s problems. We are a magazine committed to the land rights movement that you fired up in the 1990s, and as such we have a responsibility to scrutinise, in respect of environmental justice and access to land, the projects of those who put forward or try to impose solutions.
So, for example, we are by no means opposed to rewilding in principle, but we agree with you that “like all visions, rewilding must be constantly questioned and challenged”. We fully support your view that “it should happen only with the consent and enthusiasm of those who work on the land. It must never be used as an instrument of expropriation or dispossession”. And, like you, we “do not think that extensive rewilding should take place on productive land” [12].
It now seems that you have abandoned these principles. By calling for ‘the end of most agriculture’ and advocating a vegan diet as ‘the best way to save the planet’ you are threatening the livelihoods of some 600 million farming households, more than two billion people [13].
You seem to be in a state of denial about this, but it is hard to see how the end of farming and animal husbandry could mean anything else. Your brand of agribashing veganism is driving a wedge between the majority of progressive rural landworkers and a large cohort of progressive urban consumers, and threatens to split the green and environmental justice movement in two.
Recently two reports were published proposing a shift in the UK towards agroecological methods broadly similar to changes that The Land has been advocating [14]. Given that they foresee a reduction in livestock numbers, lower methane and carbon emissions, and an increase in the land area devoted to nature, one would have thought that you would be supportive. Animal husbandry, however much you might wish it, is not going to disappear overnight and this a step in that direction. But instead of welcoming these reports, you publish agribashing and vegan propaganda, prompting a group of prominent agroecologists, who ought to be your allies in the fight against Big Meat, to write a letter of protest [15].
As for studge, we have no problem in principle with what might prove to be a useful alternative to soya protein, especially in the tropics, where solar energy is more available. The thing we object to is the way you have weaponised it in your campaign against farmers. Please desist. And if you want people to stop calling it studge, then think of a better name.
George, we have huge respect for much of what you write, and for all you have done for the green movement, but in this case we think you are making a tactical blunder. You are letting your idea of perfection stand in the way of a commonly agreed good. We call upon you to join The Land, the Landworkers Alliance, the growing agroecology movement and green consumers everywhere in a united campaign against Big Meat.
The Land’s Proposals for Livestock Farming
- Level down meat consumption (and indeed all luxury consumption) in industrial nations, so as to level up living standards for the bulk of humanity.
- Stop feeding animals inefficiently on grain that could be fed to humans. This will very likely happen if energy becomes scarce in the absence of fossil fuels.
- Grow nitrogen-fixing pulses such as beans and peas, and clover leys instead.
- Focus on default livestock, ie “animal products and services which arise as the integral co-product of a wider agro-ecological system” – eg by consuming waste and surpluses, recycling fertility, wildfire prevention, conservation grazing, providing traction etc.
- Reduce the beef herd but maintain dairy production since it is far more efficient than beef in terms of yield per hectare.
- Impose a VAT tax on meat, penalising large scale producers, and hence benefiting small-scale producers. Proceed to meat rationing if necessary.
- Keep food waste, processing waste, crop residues, meat and bone meal, etc in the food chain, rather than burning or composting it.
- Revert to a mixed farming system, where nitrogen fertility is derived from leguminous leys grazed by mostly dairy ruminants.
- Shift away from chemical fertilisers and pesticides and towards organic agriculture, based on obtaining nitrogen through legumes, and recycling other nutrients.
- Structure labelling, certification and licencing regulations to benefit organic producers and penalise chemical use.
- Focus plant breeding research on improving organic yields.
- Investigate sustainable alternatives to artificial fertilisers; studge fed to livestock to produce more manure is one possibility.
- Stop the mass transfer of high quality nutrients, notably soya and palm oil from poor countries to rich countries.
- In regions of high natural biodiversity, help pastoralists, forest dwellers, and other indigenous peoples protect their culture and environment from incursions by mining companies, loggers, agribusiness, fraudulent offsetting schemes, mass tourism and other threats.
- More human muscle power and brain power applied to the land, less monster machinery and data farming.
Simon Fairlie
This article originally appeared in The Land Issue 33, 2023.
Seven Fantasies of Manufactured Food
Chris Smaje explains why further industrialisation of food chains should be resisted.
2023
The Land’s editors have been doing a good job of tracking and critiquing a disturbing new development in the mainstream food narrative, namely the trumpeting of food (principally protein) manufactured industrially via bacterial reproduction as part of a purported ‘rebooting’ of the food system [16]. I hope my new book will add strength to their analysis [17]. This article summarises some of my finding s and highlights seven fantasies at the heart of the manufactured food movement that make it so problematic.
Manufactured food is the latest iteration of agricultural improvement ideology. This ideology has a long history, involving expropriation and enclosure of land and the dismissal of local and indigenous food and farming knowledges, in favour of expert-led high technology. Nowadays it’s concentrated mainly in corporate hands via government enablement in the Global North – even if it’s often justified as pro-poor, pro-nature and climate friendly.
If those pressing the case for manufactured food were just limited to the usual suspects, it would probably be wisest to ignore them. But since a farm-free future is being enthusiastically endorsed by political radicals and environmentalists seemingly oblivious to its fundamental defects, it seems necessary to speak out. Prominent among these endorsers is George Monbiot, whose recent book Regenesis (reviewed in The Land #31) has played a key role in popularising the manufactured food agenda. My own book, and my analysis in this article, take aim principally at Monbiot’s book, since it’s the clearest and most detailed articulation of the arguments.
Energy Fantasy
The favoured candidates for the manufactured food future are hydrogen-oxidising bacteria which, when placed in a stainless-steel bioreactor and fed hydrogen, oxygen and various other chemicals, produce a protein-rich biomass slurry that can probably be made non-toxically edible for humans. The advantage from a nature conservation perspective is that the process has a lower land footprint than its agricultural equivalents, so it may in theory be able to spare more land for nature, if it can be made to work at scale.
But, as ever, there are downsides. One critical question is how to get hold of the hydrogen. You can obtain it from fossil fuels like natural gas, but that has obvious environmental drawbacks. Or you can obtain it by electrolysing water using clean electricity. The problem with this is that it takes an awful lot of energy. If you make various assumptions about the energy costs of the bacterial protein route that are generous to it to the point of absurdity, it minimally uses around seventy times more energy per kilo of protein than the most energy-efficient large-scale agricultural method, soy cultivation. That comparison neglects the energy input into soy from sunlight, which I consider a justifiable omission because it highlights the key argument against manufactured protein – solar energy comes to us freely, whereas generated electricity doesn’t.
Producing enough manufactured protein to feed all of humanity would, again making very generous assumptions, use almost all the world’s present low-carbon electricity and more than nine times its solar-generated electricity, the latter being the most realistic option for future expansion of clean electricity worldwide. These figures ignore the energy costs arising from the fact that the industrial and solar energy infrastructure to produce the manufactured protein have an expected operational life of twenty-five years, meaning that the thousands of tonnes of stainless-steel and the nine million plus hectares of solar panels (a considerable land take in itself) required to meet humanity’s protein needs would have to be replaced every two to three decades, at vast additional energy and other costs.
And all this is only to meet human food protein needs. To meet human food energy needs as well via food manufactured from hydrogen-oxidising bacteria would require well in excess of ninety times the world’s current supply of solar electricity. If you believe there will soon be a global supply of cheap, low-carbon electricity orders of magnitude beyond present levels, then it’s possible to entertain the notion that a farm-free future of manufactured food beckons. But there are few grounds for that belief. Currently, over 80 percent of global energy consumption and over 60 percent of global electricity generation is fossil-fuel based, and humanity is using more fossil energy per capita than ever before. It may be that those percentages will start declining, but it’s hard to see where the rapid and massive surge in low-carbon electricity required for a farm-free future is going to come from. It’s also hard to argue that food production should have priority access to low-carbon electricity, given that – unlike just about every other industry seeking to decarbonise by accessing clean energy – farming can make use of free solar energy directly [18].
Industrial Fantasy
So it seems likely that manufactured food probably won’t fly on energetic grounds – which is just as well, because if it does it’s likely to be disastrous on political and economic grounds. One of those grounds is corporate monopolisation of the food system. I suspect the key backers of manufactured food don’t see this as a problem at all, but prefer to keep quiet about it. The political radicals who’ve rallied to the cause, however, surely do need to explain how to avoid corporate monopoly.
Monbiot’s argument is basically that we mustn’t let it happen. The largely inglorious if noble history of trying not to let it happen in other industrial sectors doesn’t inspire an awful lot of confidence on that front, but Monbiot turns this failure on its head to craft a kind of “if you can’t beat them, join them” argument in favour of manufactured food: when it comes to corporate monopolisation of the food system, the genie is already out of the bottle [19].
That’s true up to a point, but it’s much less true of farming than it is of manufacturing industry. If you take a generous geographical slice of any country you’ll find a plethora of gardens, allotments, and small or sometimes large farms producing food for local consumption. You won’t find a plethora of small workshops producing cars, computers, mobile phones or more or less any other manufactured consumer item. Land for food production, while certainly subject to monopolisation and enclosure, is inherently less subject to this than industrial and energetic infrastructure, because it’s harder to generate economic and political economies of scale.
Monbiot projects manufactured food as a kind of local cottage industry under community control. But he musters no structural arguments to explain how the sector would escape the logic of monopoly concentration that applies in every other industrial sector. This makes it hard to see his vision as anything other than an industrial fantasy. He emphasises the importance of keeping food prices low to mitigate poverty, but apparently fails to appreciate that, globally, low food prices support monopolisation and exacerbate poverty. Fighting food monopoly is indeed essential, but doing so requires widespread and secure access to productive land.
Agroecological Fantasy
The fantasy that manufactured food can evade corporate monopolisation begets a more surprising and worrisome fantasy, that this technology is compatible with agroecology and peasant lifeways. Unlike other environmentalists who have embraced expert-led, top-down techno-fixing and publicly repudiated previous commitments to grassroots localism and agroecology, Monbiot insists that his case for manufactured food remains compatible with them.
I find it hard to square this with the narrative drive of his book that lands ultimately on manufactured food and anti-pastoral as respectively the technical and cultural solutions to food system problems, and hard to square with his dismissal of what he’s called “neo-peasant bullshit” or with remarks such as this about intensive agriculture: “the problem is not the adjective, it’s the noun” [20]. It’s also hard to square with the visions of some of his associates in the Reboot Food movement who want to see a world of 90 percent urban residence, 75 percent farmland rewilding, and the elimination of most livestock.
By some estimates small farms of five hectares or less occupy the majority of the agricultural area in lower income countries – and Monbiot criticises the food sovereignty movement for insufficiently emphasising the need to not farm. Given this scenario, poor farmers in their multitudes who farm for their livelihood would therefore have to seek a different livelihood, and in our present world of agrarian and industrial underemployment that’s a tall order. There seems no question that, if the proposals of the manufactured food movement were implemented, then poor small-scale farmers would be in the firing line for expropriation.
Agricultural improvement ideology has always been relaxed about small farm expropriation as the price of “progress”. But it’s troubling that someone with Monbiot’s impressive track record of opposing enclosure so forcefully denies this implication of manufactured food. His own earlier writings have shown as well as anyone how narratives around wilderness conservation and agrarian efficiency have been used against small-scale farmers, peasants and pastoralists who lack political voice, and who are clearly not the major culprits in the human assault on the natural world [21]. Yet his indiscriminate fusillades against agricultures of all kinds in Regenesis and the fantasy that manufactured food is a pro-agroecology initiative risk doing exactly this.
Regenesis places an inordinate emphasis on yield increase as a way of cutting agricultural land-take. As well as betraying a one-sided approach to the evidence on land-sparing, this misses the way that often ecocidal but labour-sparing industrial inputs like pesticides have fed a spiral of arable overproduction, leading to the expropriation of poor farmers and the explosion of the grain-fed industrial meat sector. This over-emphasis on yield improvement indicates a lack of agroecological vision.
It’s not that yield improvement is necessarily a bad idea, but in agroecological terms it’s only one factor among many that farmers and citizens must factor into complex decisions about how best to generate wellbeing for local human and biotic communities.
The excessive pursuit of yield improvement culminates in overproduction, corporate monopoly and inattention to other aspects of local ecological wellbeing. Asking big, global questions about how humanity can produce enough food cheaply enough on the smallest possible land area provides a framing only for big, global answers that cannot be agroecological. A better starting point is to ask instead how people and wildlife can live well locally and coexist.
Urban Fantasy
The manufactured food vision is radically urban. Even Monbiot, agroecological affectations aside, suggests that concentrated urbanism is a “simple mathematical” reality, that will inevitably defeat local food movements’ attempts to negotiate terms with it. It would be more accurate to call it a complex historical reality, built on processes of enclosure, expropriation, monopolistic food price scouring and cheap energy. All of these are entailed in the case for manufactured food, but equally all are likely to be unravelled by climate, energy and economic crises. The urban fantasy of the manufactured food vision is that something like present patterns of global urbanism will somehow emerge unscathed from this.
The fantasy has three elements. First, the unprecedented levels of urbanism across much of the world today are a product of the cheap fossil energy that enables cities to import water, materials, food and fuel, and to export their wastes. The notion that present levels of urbanism can be sustained, let alone increased, in the face of emerging energy constraints and the numerous challenges climate change poses to most large cities is fantastic enough. To suppose that this can be done while further devoting vast energetic resources to manufacturing food piles fantasy upon fantasy.
Second, urban workforces worldwide increasingly face economic precarity for much the same reasons that agrarian workforces do: the overproduction of high energy-input goods by price-scouring monopolies pushes people out of the manufacturing sector, and into low-paid urban service sector jobs unlikely to generate secure prosperity. Yet the manufactured food vision involves stacking the urban decks with countless more impoverished rural escapees in search of new work. This urbanisation fantasy is not a recipe for human wellbeing, or political stability.
Third, climate change, energy insecurity and capital vulnerability act as threat multipliers to a global trading and political system that large cities especially depend upon to function. It’s probably unwise to assume that current patterns of peaceful worldwide seaborne trade, built on large and vulnerable containerised vessels, will last long into the future.
This makes it equally unwise to assume the long-term prospects are good for large cities that can’t source their needs within a realistic local hinterland, which is most of them. Proposals to increase non-local dependencies on the high-tech industrial plant and energy facilities required to manufacture food don’t seem well fitted to this emerging reality.
Climate and Livestock Fantasies
A major focus of the Reboot Food agenda and of Regenesis is the need to reduce the planetary impact of livestock, including livestock’s climate impact. I won’t dwell on this point because it’s been so well covered in The Land by Simon Fairlie and other writers, although in my own book I do discuss livestock climate impacts in some detail.
Livestock do unquestionably have a climate impact, so of course there’s a case for reducing this. The bigger question is how to weigh that case against climate mitigation in other sectors.
Monbiot has started using the term “denialism” in respect of those who suggest the fossil energy sector rather than livestock should be front and centre of attention, but inasmuch as the livestock climate narrative implies there’s equivalence between the two sectors, such accusations rebound.
It’s impossible to discuss livestock farming (or farming in general) as if this sector were somehow wholly separate from fossil energy. Modern agriculture is a secondary industry enabled by and entirely dependent upon fossil energy. Without that enabler, it would have to be thoroughly reconfigured along local and agroecological lines, with low climate-impact livestock as a key component. Redressing the primary climate problem of fossil fuels intrinsically redresses the secondary one of livestock. It doesn’t work the other way around.
This tendency to frame agriculture as a malfeasant autonomous force is a recurrent problem in Regenesis and in the broader manufactured food narrative. It leads to an emphasis on fanciful technologies to deliver a post-agricultural world, technologies that will be ineffective because they don’t address underlying problems like fossil energy and the integration of global markets around the demand pull of urban consumers.
In other words, the main problem with capitalist, fossil-fuelled agriculture is not the noun, it’s the adjectives.
Nature Fantasy
Still, there’s no doubt that present human activities are exacting a dreadful toll on wildlife, nor that agriculture, while not the only cause, is certainly in the forefront of this. Monbiot makes various totalising statements about this in Regenesis which aren’t well supported by his evidence, such as the claim that ‘the great majority of the world’s species cannot survive in farmed landscapes of any kind’. If this were true, then it might arguably suggest a need for a farm-free urban future for humanity.
But since the energetics and economics behind this are fanciful, we have little option but to continue farming while taking as little toll on wildlife as possible. How to do so is a complex matter involving philosophical as well as biological questions, which isn’t reducible to simplistic nostrums like improving yields or cutting land take.
I try to negotiate this complex terrain in Chapter 3 of my own book, landing on the argument that the human impact on other organisms will only be lightened if we make ourselves true protagonists in our local biotic communities, by generating our livelihoods as far as possible from their ecological base. Perhaps this is my own nature fantasy, because we’re a very long way from achieving that right now.
But the notion that humans can best protect nature by abstracting themselves from it through high-energy cities and food factories, making nature an object of wondrous contemplation rather than practical livelihood, strikes me as more fantastic still. Certainly, there’s plenty of evidence to suggest that the pursuit of urbanism, energy increase and high-yielding agriculture brings little benefit to wildlife [22].
Solutionist Fantasy
A common approach to contemporary dilemmas, much favoured by journalists and writers, involves presenting a litany of apparently intractable problems before pulling some dramatic solution out of the air (or, in the case of manufactured food, the water), like a conjuror pulling a rabbit from a hat, purportedly rescuing us and our high-energy, urban, consumerist ways in the nick of time. Usually the touted solution is hatched by people working in well-funded laboratories or research facilities in the Global North. The manufactured food vision in Monbiot’s Regenesis exemplifies this approach.
To reject this mythic structure invites the hostile question “well, what’s your solution, then?” To say that you don’t have one as such, or that you reject solutionism, invites the derisive charge that you have nothing worthwhile to say, or that you’ve succumbed to empty despair. This is the self-legitimating solutionist fantasy at the heart of the case for manufactured food.
I’d suggest instead that once you give up on the notion that any singular solution can save a high-energy, urban-capitalist consumerism that can’t and shouldn’t be saved, endless small local vistas open up for supporting human communities, livelihood autonomies and wild ecologies.
This is the essence of the peasant way, which has long had to pick up the pieces when grander schemes of world-redemption come crashing down. Not solving humanity’s problems, but addressing human problems. Not protecting Nature, but living renewably within the dictates of the local ecological base. Not inventing a grand new system, but building local autonomies from the inevitable failure of such systems.
The most likely way the pressing problems that the food rebooters rightly highlight can be “solved” is to iterate this endlessly at the local level, which will involve communities working out how to create their own plausible local “we” [23]. This is the main task that demands “our” attention. It’s plenty to be getting on with. But if the food rebooters get their way, I fear there’ll be a lot more damage to undo.
Chris Smaje
This article originally appeared in The Land Issue 33, 2023.
[1] FAO, State of the World’s Forests, 2020.
[2] The discrepancy between USDA and UN-FAO data is analysed at Global Cattle Inventory: USDA v FAO, https://cairncrestfarm.com
[3] G. Monbiot, “I was Wrong about Veganism”, The Guardian, 6 Sept 2010.
[4] H. van Zanten et al, “The Role of Livestock in a Sustainable Diet: a Land-Use Perspective”, Animal 10:4, 2016.
[5] S. Fairlie, “Is There Life After Fert?”, The Land 30, 2022.
[6] A. H. MacDougal et al, “Estimated Climate Impact of Replacing Agriculture as the Primary Food Production System”, Environmental Research Letters, 16:12, 2021, available at https://iopscience.iop.org
[7] K. Feng and K. Hubacek, “Carbon Implications of China’s Urbanization”, Energy, Ecology and Environment vol 1, pp. 39-44, 2016.
[8] Details of Quadrature’s holdings in companies including Chevron and Northrop Grumman are listed in monthly regulatory filings. See https://uk.investing.com/pro/ideas/quadrature-capital-ltd
[9] Since no one has proposed a convenient generic name for it, some of us at The Land have taken to using the term “studge” after the breakfast cereal Filboid Studge, that readers of Saki may remember was marketed on the basis that “people will do things from a sense of duty that they never attempt as a pleasure”. The laboratory that George Monbiot visits calls its product “solein”, a portmanteau word combining “solar” and “protein” but, ominously, this is a registered trade mark.
[10] G. Monbiot, Heat, Allen Lane, 2006, p. 15.
[11] G. Monbiot, Heat, Allen Lane, 2006, p. 15.
[12] All three quotes from G Monbiot, Feral, Penguin, 2014, pp. 11-12.
[13] G Monbiot, Regenesis, p. 187. and “The Best Way to Save the Planet? Drop Meat and Dairy”, The Guardian, 8 june 2018.
[14] Feeding Britain, by the Sustainable Farming Trust, and Modelling an Agroecological UK in 2050, by the French think tank IDDRI.
[15] “Demonising Organic Beef and Lamb Won’t Help Save the Earth”, The Guardian, letters, 25 Aug 2022.
[16] See http://www.rebootfood.org; G. Monbiot, Regenesis, 2022; “Monbiotic Man”, The Land 31; “Rebooting reality” The Land 32.
[17] C. Smaje, Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future, Chelsea Green, 2023.
[18] Figures mentioned in this section are detailed in Chapter 2 of Saying NO.
[19] See Saying NO, Chapter 5.
[20] Regenesis p. 90. Further examples in Saying NO, Introduction & Chapter 5.
[21] Monbiot 2003 No Man’s Land. See also “Pastoral Care” in The Land 30.
[22] See Saying NO, Chapter 3.
[23] See Saying NO, Chapter 7.
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