WE ARE EATING THE EARTH: The Race to Fix Our Food System and Save Our Climate, klaxon in your ear

WE ARE EATING THE EARTH: The Race to Fix Our Food System and Save Our Climate
MICHAEL GRUNWALD
Simon & Schuster (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$29.99 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: From the author of New York Times bestseller The New New Deal, a groundbreaking piece of reportage from the trenches of the next climate the fight to fix our food system.

Humanity has cleared a land mass the size of Asia plus Europe to grow food, and our food system generates a third of our carbon emissions. By 2050, we’re going to need a lot more calories to fill nearly 10 billion bellies, but we can’t feed the world without frying it if we keep tearing down an acre of rainforest every six seconds. We are eating the earth, an ingenious phrase coined by Michael Grunwald, and the greatest challenge facing our species will be to slow our relentless expansion of farmland into nature. Even if we quit fossil fuels, we’ll keep hurtling towards climate chaos if we don’t solve our food and land problems.

In this rollicking, shocking narrative, Grunwald shows how the world, after decades of ignoring the climate problem at the center of our plates, has pivoted to making it worse, embracing solutions that sound sustainable but could make it even harder to grow more food with less land. But he also tells the stories of the dynamic scientists and entrepreneurs pursuing real solutions, from a jungle-tough miracle crop called pongamia to genetically-edited cattle embryos, from Impossible Whoppers to a non-polluting pesticide that uses the technology behind the COVID vaccines to constipate beetles to death. It’s an often infuriating saga of lobbyists, politicians, and even the scientific establishment making terrible choices for humanity, but it’s also a hopeful account of the people figuring out what needs to be done—and trying to do it.

Michael Grunwald, bestselling author of The Swamp and The New New Deal, builds his narrative around a brilliant, relentless, unforgettable food and land expert named Tim Searchinger. He chronicles Searchinger’s uphill battles against bad science and bad politics, both driven by the overwhelming influence of agricultural interests. And he illuminates a path that could save our planetary home for ourselves and future generations—through better policy, technology, and behavior, as well as a new land ethic recognizing that every acre matters.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: If one emerges from this read an ardent capitalist, political "conservative", and a climate-change skeptic, one is defective intellectually and morally.

Honestly I could end the review there because anything else I say will only be repetition of these statements with embellishments.

We are at a crossroads in many areas of our existence as a species. We have access to immense mountains of information and have little training to contextualize and interpret it. We are, for the first time ever, able to see with our own eyes, the entire Earth as it appears from space...a literal god's-eye view...and have done nothing to make that unique in humankind's entire history as a species awareness part of our worldview. We act as though problems are local, or localizable, and have just one cause so need only one solution.

Nothing in Nature supports this delusion. It is debunked in immense bodies of data collected, analyzed, and tested over generations now. Bad-faith arguments made by profit-seeking entities have ruined, to an extent I naïvely thought was actually impossible, the very idea of the data we already have being usable to start patching up the mess we have before us.

Books like this one walk you through the way we know what we know...briskly, but with integrity and expertise balanced by enthusiasm...and what we can in fact do now to make a positive impact on the course we're taking. I could wish for more viewpoints drawn from our Global Southern neighbors, and the women who outside the West perform the vast majority of food growth and harvest. I could wish for a less preaching-to-the-choir bent to the narrative.

But I can't fault Author Grunwald's data sources or synthesis. I can't fault his palpable sense of urgency. I can't help but wish more of y'all would get the message he's putting out: Action is the need and it's an urgent one.