Regenesis

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Winner of the 2022 Orwell Prize for Journalism | A Sunday Times (London) Bestseller | Shortlisted for the Wainwright Prize for Writing on Conservation

“George Monbiot is one of the most fearless and important voices in the global climate movement today.” —Greta Thunberg

For the first time in millennia, we have the opportunity to transform not only our food system but our entire relationship to the living world.
 
Farming is the world’s greatest cause of environmental destruction—and the one we are least prepared to talk about. We criticize urban sprawl, but farming sprawls across thirty times as much land. We have plowed, 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 and the price of food is rising faster than ever.
 
Now the food system itself is beginning to falter. But, as George Monbiot shows us in this brilliant, bracingly original new book, we can resolve the biggest of our dilemmas and feed the world without devouring the planet.
 
Regenesis is a breathtaking vision of a new future for food and for humanity. Drawing on astonishing advances in soil ecology, Monbiot reveals how our changing understanding of the world beneath our feet could allow us to grow more food with less farming. He meets the people who are unlocking these methods, from the fruit and vegetable grower revolutionizing our understanding of fertility; through breeders of perennial grains, liberating the land from plows and poisons; to the scientists pioneering new ways to grow protein and fat. Together, they show how the tiniest life forms could help us make peace with the planet, restore its living systems, and replace the age of extinction with an age of regenesis.A Sunday Times (London) bestseller
Shortlisted for the Wainwright Prize for Writing on Conservation

“George Monbiot is one of the most fearless and important voices in the global climate movement today.” —Greta Thunberg, activist and author of No One is Too Small to Make a Difference
 
“A brilliant, mesmerizing, vital book. Beneath each square meter of soil live thousands of species, and each chapter of George Monbiot’s eye-opening exploration of that soil and its potential is similarly, dynamically rich-delivering a whole new way of thinking about our agriculture and our diets, our climate and our future. And much needed hope, besides.” —David Wallace-Wells, New York Times bestselling author of The Uninhabitable Earth

“Ambitious and deeply researched … bristling with ideas and imagination.” ―Laura Battle, Financial Times
 
“Eye-opening, persuasive, meticulously researched.” ―Amy Liptrot, The Guardian
 
“This remarkable book, staring curiously down at the soil beneath our feet, points us convincingly in one of the directions we must travel. I learned something on every page.” —Bill McKibben, author of Falter and The End of Nature

“Regenesis is a world-making, world-changing book; at once visionary and rigorous and practicable. It rings and sings throughout with Monbiot’s extraordinary combination of passion, generosity and justice. It is braced by his unshakeable commitment to bettering the planet for all its inhabitants, human and other-than-human. It is a thrilling work, more ambitious even than its predecessor, Feral, and it gripped me as I read. Recognising that “the future is underground”, Monbiot shows us that the possibility for a transformed relationship with food, the living world and each other lies just beneath our feet, right under our noses.” —Robert Macfarlane, New York Times bestselling author of Underland

“How can we ensure that everyone is fed without destroying the biosphere? Regenesis is a lively and deeply researched enquiry that confronts our dilemmas head on. There are no easy answers, but Monbiot provides a brilliant guide to asking the right questions. Transformation is urgently needed and this book shows how it is possible.” —Merlin Sheldrake, internationally bestselling author of Entangled Life

“Wonderful … Monbiot shows that the thin layer on which all terrestrial ecosystems stand is alive with organisms as diverse, fascinating and mysterious as any found above ground. He shatters the shibboleths of farming, showing the way to a radical transformation of agricultural practices and exciting new opportunities for nourishment.” —David Suzuki, founder of The David Suzuki Foundation
 
“This is an important book and a gripping read. It will enflame vested interests on all sides. Because Monbiot has that most aggravating of gifts – the ability lucidly to point out things that people desperately do not want to be true.” —Henry Dimbleby, co-founder of Leon Restaurants and the Sustainable Restaurant Association
 
“George Monbiot is a very skilful writer, and Regenesis shows all his powers at full stretch. He seems to see more fully than almost anyone else in this field, with a clarity of attention both to the smallest realities of a handful of soil and to the widest implications of the way human beings have lived and continue to live in the world. Telling things in the right order doesn’t seem like one of the functions of the imagination, but again and again Monbiot shows that it is, with all the imaginative sympathy of a great storyteller as well as the overarching understanding of a moral visionary. This is a fine and necessary book.” —Philip Pullman, New York Times bestselling author of the His Dark Materials trilogy
 
“People from all walks of life should read this remarkable book. It is in my view one of the two or three most important books to appear this century” —Prof. Sir David King, former Chief Scientific Advisor to the UK Government
 
“Regenesis speaks to us like a poem that begins with a phantasmagoria of that which lies under the soil, offers a magnificent political economy of global food production and concludes with a hopeful vision of a techno-ethical equilibrium between Humanity and Nature. It must be read.” —Yanis Varoufakis, author of Another Now
  
“This book calls for nothing less than a revolution in the future of food – one that will literally transform the face of the Earth, to make food affordable for all while restoring the living world. Such a vision sounds near impossible, but Monbiot reveals the food pioneers whose extraordinary innovations could bring it within reach. Never shying from controversy, Regenesis weaves the poetry of soil into the politics of farming to shake the ground on which we all grow. This is Monbiot’s masterpiece: an urgent and exhilarating journey into remaking what and how we eat.” —Kate Raworth, author of Donut Economics

“Monbiot rolls up his sleeves and pulls on his boots for an uncompromising session of agricultural dragon-slaying and foodie myth-busting. Unafraid to propose a new world order for farming and food production that is kinder to both people and planet, Regenesis is rigorous and restive, but also witty, original and humane. Let us hope it is read, digested and acted on by people, politicians and policy-makers the world over.” —Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, author of The River Cottage Cookbook
 
“As we begin to rethink our relationship with Nature, the unstinting work of George Monbiot becomes ever more valuable. Monbiot has been at the cutting edge of the discussion for decades, and his extraordinary book covers this complex, evolving subject with depth and breadth, sincerity and humour. I never cease to be surprised by the unexpected perspectives he brings to bear, leading me through problems I never envisaged and solutions I never imagined. We are left with the hope that the solutions might triumph, that we might make it through.” —Brian Eno
 
“A fascinating and ultimately positive book … a harmonic vision of how changing our relationship to land use, farming and the food that we eat could transform our lives” —Thom Yorke

 “With rigour, singular bravery and an infectious love for the living world, George Monbiot presents the Silent Spring of our time. Regenesis is an eye-watering reckoning of humanity’s land and food crisis and an astonishing vision of survival and restoration. Monbiot takes us on a journey from the rhizospheres and the drilospheres through soil ecology, cultural myths, to the future of food all bound together with his own wonder-ful, beautifully-written observations. There is no topic more important for planetary survival than land and food, and there is no writer willing to dispense of bullshit, tell us the truth, and take on powerful forces and perceived wisdom like George Monbiot. A visionary, fearless, essential book.” —Lucy Jones, author of The Big Ones and Losing Eden

“A book offering evidence-based hope is a rare thing in these days of climate and nature emergency—yet that’s exactly what George Monbiot has written. Inspiring and compelling, Regenesis sets out a transformative vision of a new food future with the potential to both restore nature and feed the world. Monbiot’s blueprint is both wildly ambitious and deeply practical, and might well be our last best hope of stopping the sixth great extinction.” —Caroline Lucas, MP and former leader of the Green Party of England and Wales
 
“A genuinely brilliant, inspirational book … George Monbiot embarks on a journey of discovery, realising that soil and its role in our life is bigger than everything else. Halfway through, I felt like a child who was bursting to share a secret with anyone who would listen. By the time I had finished reading, I felt as if the purest mountain stream had washed through my brain, and Monbiot had shared the most fundamentally important insight of his life.” —Sir Tim Smit, Founder of the Eden Project
 
“I am so grateful George Monbiot has applied his razor sharp intellect, bountiful curiosity and love for the land to the complex and fundamental issue of what we eat. This book offers a deep dive into the most essential question of our time – how might we feed ourselves without destroying our planet in the process?” —Lily Cole, activist and author of Who Cares Wins
 
“George Monbiot clears paths towards solutions that lie dormant within us, which, if embraced, could transform our world and our societies into better places. He reaches for new ideas that might ignite the collective consciousness in a push to protect, rather than tragically destroy, the biosphere. Read George Monbiot and you will meet the cheerful courage and passion of a fellow traveller on this earth who seeks authentic hope.” —ANOHNI
 
“For anyone who cares about where our food comes from and its impact on the planet Regenesis is essential reading. This deeply researched book lifts the lid on our current methods of food production and all its dirty secrets: but more than that it provides a blueprint for the future. Monbiot pursues the key question: how can we have healthy food that’s cheap enough for everyone to eat? His answers provide critical pathways towards a way to feed the planet.” —Rosie Boycott, journalist and activist
 
“I used to look up to the stars for thoughts of infinity, eternity and divine cooperation. This book revealed to me I could find the same inspiration beneath the soles of my feet in less than a foot of soil. My walks on earth will never be the same as they were. The writing, observation and devotion is infectiously compelling. The learning is deep and immense.” —Mark Rylance, actor
 
“Forget Elon Musk’s dry-as-dust retro sci-fi fantasies, George Monbiot gives us an inspiring vision of the future that is alive and kicking and grounded in the latest scientific discoveries. George Monbiot has combined his gifts as an investigator, interviewer and witty storyteller to create an exhiliarating epic!” —Robert Newman
 
“This passionate, extraordinary book opens up a compelling and vital new dimension: food and the way the world farms.” —Will Hutton, columnist for The Observer and author of The Writing on the Wall

“A magnificent new overview of how we might live and feed ourselves without destroying ourselves … It is riveting … Along with a dazzling array of stats, there’s also impressive investigative reporting … rich food for thought, devastating figures, startling insights and even the odd joke … A hugely important read.” —Christopher Hart, The Sunday Times

“Revolutionary … Rigorous, bold and clear-sighted … To conjure the miracle of more food with less farming, we need to rethink what lies beneath our feet.” —David Farrier, Prospect

“Vivid and memorable… Regenesis is a compelling, deeply researched account of a deeply broken food system and how we might heal it.” —Irish Times

“A compelling story of soil, food and farming.” ―Financial Times

“Ambitious and deeply researched … Monbiot exposes, with journalistic flair, the ‘gulf between perception and reality’ about where and how our food is produced … it includes some fascinating case studies … bristling with ideas and imagination.” —Laura Battle, Financial TimesGeorge Monbiot is an author, Guardian columnist, environmental campaigner and recipient of the 2022 Orwell Prize for journalism. His best-selling books include Feral: Rewilding the Land, Sea and Human Life and Heat: How We Can Stop the Planet Burning. George cowrote the concept album Breaking the Spell of Loneliness with musician Ewan McLennan, and has made a number of viral videos. One of them, adapted from his 2013 TED talk, How Wolves Change Rivers, has been viewed on YouTube over 40 million times. Another, on Natural Climate Solutions, which he co-presented with Greta Thunberg, has been watched over 60 million times.1

What Lies Beneath

It’s a wonderful place for an orchard, but a terrible place for growing fruit. In central England, far from the buffering effect of the sea, the trees are blighted by late frosts. Freezing air flows like water, but here, on this flat plot, dammed by rows of houses, it gathers and pools, drowning the orchard in cold.

Every year, as the trees come into blossom, my hopes crack open with the breaking buds. Roughly two years out of three, they wither with the flowers. Frost curls into the branches like poison gas, shrivelling and blackening the stamens.

By autumn, the orchard is a living graph of spring temperatures. Apple varieties blossom at different but regular dates. Unless a freeze is especially hard, it damages only the open flower. From the trees with and without fruit, you can tell when the frost struck, almost to the night.

Every variety belongs to the same species: Malus domestica, which translates literally as tamed evil. The reasons for the age-old defamation of a lovely tree are complex, but one is likely to be etymological confusion: a dialect name for fruit-, or “malon”-appears to have slipped from Greek into Latin, where it was, so to speak, corrupted: into malum, or evil.

This single species, too good to be true, has been bred into thousands of different forms: dessert apples, cooking apples, cider apples, drying apples, in an astonishing range of sizes, shapes, colors, scents, and flavors. We grow Miller’s Seedling, which ripens in August and must be eaten from the tree, as the slightest jolt in transit bruises its translucent skin. It is sweet and soft, more juice than flesh. By contrast, the Wyken Pippin, hard as wood when picked, is scarcely edible till January, then stays crisp until the following May. We grow St. Edmund’s Pippin, which has skin like sandpaper and is dry and nutty and aromatic for two weeks in September, after which it turns to fluff, and the Golden Russet, whose taste and texture are almost identical, but only in February. The Ashmead’s Kernel, crunchy, with a hint of carraway, my favorite apple, peaks in midwinter. The Reverend W. Wilks puffs up like wool when you bake it, and tastes like a smooth white wine. The Catshead, roasted at Christmas, is almost indistinguishable from mango puree. Ribston Pippin, Mannington’s Pearmain, Kingston Black, Cottenham Seedling, D’Arcy Spice, Belle de Boskoop, Ellis Bitter: these fruit are capsules of time and place, culture and nature.

As every tree requires subtly different conditions to prosper, some do better here than others. Some varieties are so finely adapted to their place of origin that they perform disappointingly on the other side of the same hill. By choosing breeds that blossom at different times, we have sought in this orchard to spread the risk. Even so, in bad years, when frost strikes repeatedly, we lose almost everything.

But yes, despite the many broken dreams, it’s a wonderful place for an orchard. When I arrived this morning, its beauty made me gasp. The first apple trees have come into flower: the pink buds uncurling to reveal their pale hearts. The pear and cherry trees are in full sail, carrying so much white blossom that their branches lift slightly in the breeze.

I walk the rows of trees, smelling them. Every variety has a different, faint scent: some of the blooms smell like hyacinth, some like lilac, some like Daphne or viburnum. I believe I can tell when a flower has been pollinated: the perfume, no longer needed to attract bees and hoverflies, is immediately cut off. The pear blossom, pure white, with twenty black stamens like tiny cloven hooves, stinks revoltingly of anchovies. The cherry petals are beginning to flake from the trees, drifting and feathering in the light wind. The new grass is streaked with shadow. Wood pigeons growl in the plum trees. To have all this within a few hundred meters of our home feels like an astonishing luxury; a luxury for which, between the five families who share it, we pay just £75 a year.

The orchard occupies three adjoining plots on an allotment site. Since 1878 in England, local governments have allotted land for people to cultivate vegetables and fruit. In principle, since 1908, we have all had the legal right to grow.

What this legislation inadvertently spread was anarchy, in its true sense. In other words, it created thousands of self-organized, self-governing communities, otherwise known as commons. Though the local government owns the land, it is managed and run by the people who work it. Our site in Oxford is divided into 220 plots, cultivated by people who have arrived in the city from all over the world. We cross-pollinate each other’s knowledge with grains of peculiar experience.

Seventeen years ago, the allotments seemed to be dying. Only one-tenth of the plots were occupied. The remnant community was desperate for people to take them on: otherwise, the local authority would reclaim the site for housing. They leased me two and a half adjoining plots, one of which was covered in monstrous brambles, snaking three meters into the air. I spent a month cutting the stems with a bush knife and hacking out the rootballs with a mattock. Beneath them sleeping beauty lay. Meadow grasses, cowslips, oxeye daisy, germander speedwell, vetch, knapweed, wood avens, scabious, yarrow, ribwort plantain, cat’s ear, and hawkbit sprang from the soil. The seeds must have lain dormant for decades. I persuaded a couple of friends to join me, and we planted the plots with heritage fruit trees: mostly apples, with a few plums, cherries, and pears, a medlar and a quince.

Just as the trees became productive, I left Oxford and moved to Wales. Abandoning the orchard was among my few regrets. My friends passed it to others, who in turn passed it on. Five years later, unexpectedly, for family reasons, I returned. I didn’t want to be back. But soon after I arrived, one of my best friends in the city told me that some people who had recently moved away had passed him a beautiful orchard, planted on the allotments a few years before. . . . He couldn’t manage it alone, and remembered that I knew something about fruit trees.

It felt like coming home.

Now, though it covers less than one-tenth of a hectare, the orchard sometimes feels like half my world. It is the living calendar that marks my year. We have brought in three other families, creating a miniature commons within a commons. Every couple of months, we organize a work day, with a break for lunch beneath the trees. In late winter and spring, we prune the apples and pears. In May and September, we mow the grass. In June, we thin the fruit. In October, we harvest the apples, store the sound fruit and, if the crop warrants it, spend a frantic day chopping, scratting, pressing, pasteurizing, and bottling the rest, turning some into juice and some into cider.

In midwinter, we wassail the orchard. Wassailing is a scientific procedure deployed to ensure the trees produce a good crop the following season. The methodology consists of singing and drinking cider. According to a well-tested hypothesis, the crop the trees bear is directly proportional to the effort expended: “For more or lesse fruits they will bring, / As you do give them Wassailing.” The hypothesis is not upheld.

Then we begin the cycle again.

By mid-morning I’m six feet from the ground, with a bowsaw and long-handled pruning saw. Our lovely allotment neighbor, Stewart, has decided he is too old to manage his fruit trees, so he has passed his row, which abuts our orchard, to us, completing our three plots. His old trees are in a sorry state, the limbs congested and either sweeping the ground or rising so high that the fruit they bear is unharvestable. So I’m standing in the cherry tree, among branches so packed with blossom that you can barely see the bark, committing a desecration.

Whereas apples and pears can be pruned in the winter, stone fruit has to be pruned when the sap is rising in the spring or early summer. Otherwise, you expose the trees to infection by canker, leafcurl, or silverleaf. This means you must perform the awful sacrilege of carving up a tree in flower or fruit. The snowy branches crash to the ground in a blizzard of petals.

Though this violation offends me, I love pruning. It has almost become an end in itself, as much sculpture as management. When you have completed the big, structural cuts, you trim the remaining twigs back to a bud that points in the direction you want the new growth to follow. As the tree spreads, it assumes the shape you have bidden it to take. I favor the Spanish, or goblet, style, molding the tree into a broad cup. If you get it right, this exposes every leaf to sunlight and the flow of air, eliminating woolly aphids and mildew without the need for chemical controls.

As I move through the tree, I find myself thinking about the likely history of this land. When we turned the soil, we found pieces of the white clay pipes that laborers smoked, some of them patterned with stipples, rings, and vines, bearing the mold lines and fingernail marks of those who made them. We found broken field drains, a donkey shoe, and modern oyster shells, which were sometimes hard to distinguish from the fragments of fossil Gryphaea we also turned up: a gnarly, hooked Jurassic oyster known in these parts as Devil’s Toenails. When the seas were abundant, oysters, even in central England, were the food of the poor. One day, I found half a pearl, bored for the string on which it had hung.

Before it was surrounded by the city, then allotted equally to the townsfolk, this land was farmed, probably-to judge by the combination of field drains and dormant wildflower seeds-in rotation. Some of the surrounding place names contain the suffix -ley or -leys, which often means a temporary pasture, on which hay and forage are grown between arable crops. The oyster shells, concentrated in one part of our orchard, suggest that a tree might have stood there, beneath which the laborers sat to eat their lunch, as we do today. I picture them sprawled in their broad hats, scythes propped against the trunk, between the knuckled roots of a great oak.

We too mow the grass here only with scythes, partly to avoid using fossil fuels, partly to spare the frogs and voles. At first, we hacked at it. The harder we tried, the worse it looked. But one day, I noticed another allotment neighbor, an eighty-year-old Serbian refugee called Angela, watching us incredulously.

Despite all she has witnessed and survived, Angela manages always to find pleasure in life and goodness in people. True to her peasant roots, she presses her surplus vegetables on us, explaining that no one knows what real vegetables are these days, and we won’t know how to cook them properly, but that’s not her problem, as once she has given up her vegetables they are in the hands of God. We give her apples for roasting, medlars (that are better appreciated in the Balkans than they are here), and plums for brewing.

Eventually, she could bear it no longer.

“No, stop! You do it all wrong!”

She took the scythe from my hands. She felt the weight of it, lifting and lowering it slightly as if communing with the tool.

“I do this from when I little girl. I show you.”

She settled the blade into the sward then appeared simply to twitch her broad hips. The grass fell flat. She trundled up the row without breaking a sweat, leaving a perfect lawn, the math laid to one side as if every stalk had been combed into place. (Math means mowing, or the cut grass produced by mowing. The stubble that remains is the aftermath.)

Now I look down from my perch in the cherry tree to the ruined limbs on the ground. I have left just four branches on the tree, more or less at the points of the compass. It looks mutilated. But it will heal. I climb down and start to process the prunings. Nothing here is wasted. We leave the heavy branches at the allotment gate, where people take them for firewood: fruitwood cuts neatly and burns sweetly. I use the sawdust in my smoker: whatever I cook in it takes on the soft dark flavor of the wood. We use some of the slimmer twigs for pea sticks, and stack the rest. After five years, the prunings break down into a rich, dry compost. We spread it around the dripline of the trees. One spring a family of hedgehogs emerged from our stick pile. The babies were curious and unafraid. One of them waddled up to me, sniffed my outstretched hand, then tried to bite it.

Trying to grow fruit, or vegetables, as I did in prodigious quantities when I lived in Wales, reminds me every day of the constraints of biology and climate, and of the way these constraints have
begun to flicker. While I have noticed no consistent change in the frosts that strike the orchard, which are all noise and no signal, other patterns have become impossible to ignore, especially the extremes of drought and rainfall that now afflict our fruit trees,
the rest of the nation and much of the world. Working this tiny patch of land has helped alert me to the scale of the predicament we face, as the conditions that enable us to grow sufficient food begin to shift.

I finish stacking the pile and put my saws and loppers and helmet away. Then I take from the shed a different set of tools, to do something I can scarcely believe I have never done before. I have explored woodlands and rainforests, savannas and grasslands, rivers, ponds, and marshes, tundra and mountaintops, coastlines and shallow seas. But I have never explored, deliberately and thoroughly, the ground beneath my feet.

There are times when I struggle to understand myself, and this is one of them. Why, when I have spent over half a century immersed in the living world, seizing-or so I believed-every opportunity to discover wildlife and understand the ecologies that surround me, have I failed to explore the ecosystem that underlies so many others? Why, when I have spent thirty years growing food, have I neglected the substrate that provides, directly or indirectly, roughly 99 percent of the calories we consume?

Like many people, I like to imagine that I find my own path. But we are all influenced, to a greater extent than we are usually prepared to admit, by social consensus. We think along the lines laid down by others, follow paths already trodden. We see what others see, and ignore what they ignore. We might argue passionately about the small number of issues on which the spotlight falls, but, implicitly and unconsciously, we agree to overlook other topics, often of greater importance. Few are either as important or as dark to us as soil.US

Additional information

Dimensions	0.7500 × 5.3100 × 7.9900 in
Imprint	Penguin Books
Format	General Trade
ISBN-13	09780143135968
ISBN-10	0143135961
Author	George Monbiot
Audience	General / adult
BISAC	TEC003070, SCI092000
Subjects	earth day books, food books, food history, nature books, SCI092000, culinary, sustainable agriculture, environmental science, climate change books, health books, regeneration, food politics, farming books, agriculture books, new climate change books, soil ecology, regenesis monbiot, regenesis, george monbiot, climate change, TEC003070, sustainability, science, health book, conservation, environment, environmentalism, Sociology, Food, farming, global warming, climate, agriculture, vegetarianism, veganism, ecology, natural history, science books