Risen Apes, Not Fallen Angels: The Future of Food and Nature (Part I of III)

The price of abundance has been the loss of connectivity with nature and with ourselves. It doesn’t have to be this way.

Part I: Regenesis

How do we meet the challenge of feeding almost ten billion people by 2050[1], in an increasingly chaotic climate, without further wrecking the planet?

There are two potential solutions. The first is regenerative agriculture – growing food while restoring the soil and nature. The second is moving production indoors, thus allowing land to revert to abundant ecosystems completely free from human pressures.

I’m going to explore these two approaches by reviewing and contrasting two recent books: "Regenesis" by George Monbiot and "English Pastoral" by James Rebanks. Both are beautifully written, and I thoroughly recommend them to anyone interested in these topics.

But writing this proved far more challenging than I expected. Because in peeling back the layers of what I thought was an entirely practical challenge – how we feed the world without destroying nature – I found something much deeper.

It turns out that to understand the question, we must also understand things about ourselves.

Our relationship with food and nature touches something radical, that is rooted[2] in the deepest aspects of our collective consciousness and genetic inheritance. The impulse to seek food is ingrained in our evolutionary history - there are good reasons for grabbing what you can, when you can because you never know where your next meal is coming from. Moderation can be a recipe for extinction. And, after 2 million years of human history, it seems we have quite suddenly and spectacularly succeeded. For most of us on Earth, hunger is mercifully no longer a threat.

Yet, this plenty has come at a cost. We have fundamentally reshaped nature and bent it to our will. We have degraded the biosphere over centuries in ways we are not capable of seeing due to the transient nature of our lifespans. And yet we remain entirely dependent on it.

Furthermore, since the dawn of civilisation the idea of working the land been fundamental to our notions of what a fulfilling life is. Until very recently farming was the principal form of employment across the world and the idea of a rural idyll, of the simple life of being outside and working within nature, holds appeal to this day given our office-bound existences.

Farming was not just a line of work; it was also a social existence, a world in of itself. It was by necessity a group activity, where social traditions were wrapped around the ebbs and flows of the seasons. That social world has gone.

And so, in unravelling the tangled stands of this question, we must explore the importance of connectivity – connectivity between us and nature, connectivity between ourselves.

Our modern system has severed bonds – between us and nature, between us and the process of obtaining our food, and between each other. Bonds that are fundamental to our ability to live.

The price of abundance is the loss of connectivity.

But first, let’s explain the two visions of Monbiot and Rebanks.

Regenesis is an exceptionally good book – a steel fist in a green velvet glove. It is loaded with thorough research and arguments underpinned by a deep foundation of data. It is expansively broad in scope yet written in exquisite prose. Monbiot’s short-form journalism can border on the polemic, but what he does uniquely well in his books is to dig deeper, explaining what truly underpins things.

In "Regenesis," for example, he sets out the role of complex, adaptive systems in the production of food. This explanation provides the reader with a new and fundamentally better understanding of the challenges we may face in coming decades, viscerally describing how a sudden “phase transition” could fundamentally affect the food system: “How can you detect whether a complex system might be approaching a tipping point? It begins to flicker…. Flickering is now what the global food system is doing.” [3]

Monbiot presents a cogent argument for why land use is the single most important ecological metric we should consider:

“I now believe that [land] is the issue that makes the greatest difference to whether terrestrial ecosystems survive or perish. The more land we require, the less is required for other species and the habitats they need, and for sustaining the planetary equilibrium states on which we might depend.” [4]

For Monbiot using land use as the principal reference for evaluation of different practices is illuminating. For example, it highlights what for him is a key floor in organic farming – that with yields that are typically lower it uses more land to produce the same amount of food. [5]

As an aside, organic farming is not the only treasure of the environmental movement to be caught in Monbiot’s crosshairs – no-dig practices, pasture-fed livestock, and free-range chicken all receive his criticism.

At a deeper level Monbiot argues that the heart of the problem lies within us, in the grooves of our cultural memories. The true malefactor, in his view, is the “root metaphor” of the pastoral life as an idyll:

“Bucolic nostalgia shuts down our moral imagination, unstrings our critical faculties, stops us from asking urgent and difficult questions. But at a time of ecological catastrophe, we cannot afford this indulgence”. [6]

We romanticise farming and the life of the shepherd or cowboy, yet livestock farming, particularly beef and sheep, is extraordinarily destructive. Beef herds emit around 100 times more greenhouse gases per kg produced compared to peas. [7] ?Sheep, meanwhile, turn flourishing environments into barren grass deserts (“sheep-wrecked,” as the author Guy Shrubsole has put it[8]).

We are often blind to this because the bulk of the damage occurred before we were born. The ecosystems of a few decades ago, which we might view as pristine landscapes subsequently eroded, were in fact already massively depleted by hundreds, if not thousands, of years of farming. We have no concept of the extraordinary systems of life that were present in deeper history.

“Shifting baseline syndrome” means we underestimate the damage that farming has caused over millennia. But the cultural power of farming runs deep – indeed, the myth of the noble shepherd is hardwired into the core of the Abrahamic religions (“the Lord is my shepherd” etc.), and in the West, we probably underestimate how much Christian thinking still drives how we think and feel, even if we consider ourselves as atheists or wobbling agnostics. [9]

Monbiot investigates ways in which food can be grown in harmony with nature, allowing for the renewal of soil and wider ecosystems. This includes regenerative agriculture (essentially growing things while restoring soil) and permaculture (using perennial crops, which grow for many years, removing the need to replant and smash the soil annually). He explores the concept of agroecology, which involves creating “food networks that aren’t dominated by seed or chemical companies, grain barons, or supermarkets, but are independent and self-organised”. [10] However, while these methods hold deep attraction given their return-to-nature credentials, he finds flaws and challenges; they are simply not able to operate at the scale needed to support our global food system.

He reluctantly but categorically dismisses the idea that carefully managed livestock rotation can restore the soil, regenerate vegetation, and draw down carbon dioxide. After a month of reviewing the kind of “holistic approaches” employed, he concludes that there is scant evidence of their effectiveness. The levels of carbon stored in the soil are far more uncertain than previously thought, and, worse, corporations funding projects in the area are supporting ongoing livestock farming and possibly contributing to deforestation. [11]

In his view, these ostensibly sustainable practices fail, and as a consequence, the entire system of land-based agriculture is doomed:

“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”. [12]

For Monbiot, it is simply too hard to grow enough food to feed the global population without catastrophically degrading our natural systems. The land footprint required, especially if meat and dairy products remain part of our diet, is too big.

The consequential answer, in his view, is technology – which moves production indoors, not through vertical farming of crops (which he also criticizes), but through artificial production of protein using practices such as “precision fermentation.” This process uses microbes as tiny food factories to produce proteins using renewable energy inputs and from almost negligible land footprints – far, far smaller than the most efficient agricultural method, US soybean production, even accounting for the land required for wind, solar, or nuclear energy production. [13]

Just to clarify: vertical farming refers to the indoor cultivation of plants such as leafy greens (i.e., herbs and salad items), using artificial light from LEDs. The challenge is that this approach requires electricity and must compete with open field or glasshouse production of crops, where sunlight is, of course, free. Monbiot refers to the long history of financial failures in vertical farming. Precision fermentation and other microbial techniques, however, can produce proteins – and also fats – directly from raw ingredients, and thus compete against meat and dairy production.

Precision fermentation also provides solutions for meat alternatives in applications where plant-based products have struggled in recent years. For instance, Monbiot tests the technology by eating a pancake with protein produced by a Finnish company. Pancakes require protein, traditionally through the use of eggs. To date, plant-based approaches have not been able to replicate the consistency achieved with eggs – they simply lack the requisite elasticity and richness. Using protein powder derived from precision fermentation, however, the pancake is rich, succulent, luxurious:

??????????????? “in that thin crêpe is wrapped our best hope of restoring the living planet”. [14]

These little-known techniques of using microbes as food engines may play a fundamentally important role in the effort to bend the arc of our future toward living in balance with the Earth. However, the vision of our salvation coming from vats in laboratories is jarring to our sense of what food is. It does indeed seem unnatural.

In Part II, I will explore a contrasting picture of what the future may hold; one in which we remain set within the landscape, where we are a part of nature, as we always have been.

[1] UN forecasts – refer to: https://www.un.org/en/development/desa/population/events/pdf/other/21/21June_FINAL%20PRESS%20RELEASE_WPP17.pdf.

[2] The word “radical” was first an adjective, borrowed in the 14th century from the Late Latin radicalis, itself from Latin radic-, radix, meaning "root." And the earliest uses of radical are indeed all about literal roots, hinging on the meaning "of, relating to, or proceeding from” a root. Refer to an explanation here.

[3] Regenesis, George Monbiot, 2023, paperback edition, Penguin Random House, page 39.

[4] Regenesis, page 77.

[5] Regenesis, page 74. Note, however: the actual relationship between organic farming and yields, as compared to conventional approaches, is more complex than a simple or consistent difference in yields. Any gap in yields between organic and conventional farming may narrow or reverse in the long term, if organic practices can contribute to soil health. And there is evidence that organic farming promotes more resiliency, with yields 30% higher during times of extreme weather – refer to the Rodale Institute: https://rodaleinstitute.org/science/farming-systems-trial/?utm_source=chatgpt.com.

[6] Regenesis, page 224.

[7] Our World in Data – Environmental Impacts of Food, refer to:

https://ourworldindata.org/environmental-impacts-of-food#:~:text=Producing%20a%20kilogram%20of%20beef,1%20kilogram%20of%20greenhouse%20gasses.

[8] The Lost Rainforests of Britain, Guy Shrubsole, HarperCollins Publishers, 2023.

[9] For an explanation of the power that Christianity holds over us to this day refer to Dominion: the Making of the Western Mind, James Holland, 2019.

[10] Regenesis, page 168.

[11] Regenesis, page 86-89.

[12] Regenesis, page 90.

[13] Regenesis, page 188.

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