Farming is the world's greatest cause of environmental destruction - and the one we are least
prepared to talk about. We criticise urban sprawl but farming sprawls across thirty times as
much land. We have ploughed fenced and grazed great tracts of the planet felling forests
killing wildlife and poisoning rivers and oceans to feed ourselves. Yet millions still go
hungry. Now the food system itself is beginning to falter. But as George Monbiot shows us in
this brilliant bracingly original new book there is another way. Regenesis is a breathtaking
vision of a new future for food and for humanity. Drawing on astonishing advances in soil
ecology Monbiot reveals how new discoveries about the world beneath our feet could allow us to
grow more food with less farming and transform our relationship with the living planet. He
meets the people who are unlocking these methods from the fruit and vegetable grower who is
revolutionising our understanding of fertility through breeders of perennial grains
liberating the land from ploughs and poisons to the scientists pioneering new ways to grow
protein and fat. Together they show how the tiniest life forms could help us resolve the
biggest of our dilemmas: how to feed the world without devouring the planet. Here for the
first time is a thrilling vision of abundant cheap and healthy food which could trigger a
shift as profound as the invention of agriculture. Here is a new cuisine that would let us make
peace with the planet restore its living systems and replace the age of extinction with an
age of regenesis.
