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“Beware of simple solutions to complex problems. That is a crucial lesson from history; a lesson that intelligent people in every age keep failing to learn.”[1] Having wisely counseled thus just 5 years ago in a trenchant critique of ecomodernism, environmental journalist George Monbiot’s recent op-ed in The Guardian surprised a lot of people. In fact, one is left dizzingly disoriented by Monbiot’s recent about face, in which he promotes farm-free, ‘lab-grown food’ using the very arguments he previously deconstructed and debunked when they issued from ecomodernist precincts.[2]
Monbiot and other cheerleaders for lab-grown food promote it as a quick way to arrest the juggernaut of industrial agriculture, skirting the messy and slow realm of politics.[3] Without question, industrial agriculture – and the globalized, industrial-corporate food system more broadly – is an unmitigated environmental and social disaster. In order to tackle climate chaos, soil loss, water depletion, biodiversity destruction and much more, this system must come to an end, quickly. Yet in promoting what Monbiot terms “farmfree food” as a solution to these crises, a key word from his analysis goes almost entirely and mysteriously missing: ‘industrial.’
Proponents of lab food and other technological fixes fail to clarify that the many environmental problems they enumerate stem from large-scale, industrial agriculture and the globalized food system – whether of plant crops, animals, or their various entanglements.[4] They completely elide the hugely substantive differences between small-scale, diversified, agroecological and organic farming on the one hand, and large-scale industrialized agribusiness on the other, instead citing controversial papers that argue, for example, in favor of confined animal feedlot operations (CAFOs) on the theory that they have lower GHG emissions vis-à-vis open grazing (the findings of which are at best debatable [5]), or that high-yielding agricultural systems generally have lower emissions than low-yielding ones.[6] Sadly, even though the authors of the latter study have made it clear that they were not arguing that organic farming is necessarily low-yielding – and thus their paper shouldn’t be seen as an endorsement of status quo industrial farming – this is exactly how it has been appropriated by chemical industry propagandists like the American Council on Science and Health (ACSH). This notorious anti-environmental front group [7] – which “defends fracking, BPA, and pesticides” and is funded by a rogue’s gallery of corporate polluters – approvingly cited the same paper in an article with the provocative title, “Conventional Farms Are Better for Environment Than Organic Farms.”[8]
Farmfree foodies as well as agribusiness hacks like the ACSH extrapolate from that study to conclude that the choice now is between intensification (meaning more production on existing farmland, usually through heavy inputs of chemicals) and extensification (assuming that eco-friendly farming necessarily is less productive and thus will need more land, in turn displacing wildlands). This is sometimes referred to as the “land-sparing vs. land-sharing” debate – a simplistic,[9] controversial and far from settled [10] debate, but one frequently deployed by industry apologists to greenwash agribusiness. A lot of the assumptions from the so-called land-sparing (i.e. intensive, industrial farming) side are questionable: for example the supposed universally low productivity of small/organic/agroecological farming; and the erroneous contention that intensification of existing farmland means wildlands will automatically be ‘spared’ [11] (rather than being colonized by capitalist forces with chemical-intensive agriculture regardless, i.e. intensification plus extensification, or with concrete, asphalt, subdivisions, et al). Monbiot’s stance today in support of lab grown food not only ignores the flaws in these assumptions, it also runs counter to the arguments he made so well in his 2015 take-down of ecomodernism.
Regarding the impacts of agriculture on biodiversity – the destruction of which Monbiot is rightly panicked about – it is surprising that the lab-grown food crowd neglects research demonstrating the promise of interwoven ‘matrices’ of highly productive, small-scale agroecological farms and biodiversity[12], and the high compatibility of small-scale agroecology with biodiversity conservation – research that undermines his blunt generalization that “Every hectare of land used by farming is a hectare not used for wildlife and complex living systems.” (See, e.g., here,[13] here,[14] here,[15] here,[16] and here[17]). He really means, every hectare of land used by industrial, chemical-intensive, monocultural farming is a hectare not used for wildlife and complex living systems.
The benefits of small-scale diversified agriculture are well-established – including that it’s more productive per unit of land [18] and creates more livelihoods [19]. Why are proponents of lab grown food embracing a narrow technofix for our environmental crises, while ignoring the burgeoning movements of agroecology, food sovereignty, permaculture, indigenous food systems and so much else collectively comprising the worldwide local food movement? These represent a florescence of initiatives that not only address ecological concerns, but also help heal the disastrous alienation of people from nature and from each other.
It appears that promoters of this technology posit that even the best of farms, no matter how diversified, regenerative, and wildlife-friendly, represent a diminishment of the wild, a simplification of nature – an impact – that lab grown food can miraculously free us from. How? By ending farming and fishing, removing farmers from the countryside and fishers from the oceans and depositing them in cities. In other words, lab grown food heralds an acceleration of urbanization. But does urbanization magically efface our impact on the living planet, does it spare the countryside and wildlands, releasing them for ecological relief and restoration? Hardly. This is a popular ecomodernist fantasy built on spurious and fanciful claims of the ‘dematerialization’ and ‘weightlessness’ of a future globalized, high-tech society.[20]
Eliminating farming and farmers, especially in the global South where they still comprise majorities and thus putting urbanization into hyper drive, would merely hasten the projected need for a doubling of the global building stock – that is, adding 2.48 trillion square feet (230 billion m2) of new floor area – by 2060, or “the equivalent of adding an entire New York City every month for 40 years.”[21] All this new construction will mostly be of concrete, the “most destructive material on Earth”, behind only coal, oil and gas in carbon emissions and accounting for almost 1/10 of the world’s industrial water use.[22] This spells ecological armageddon.
That ‘farmfree food’ is also farmer-free food is not an insignificant matter in places where the majority of livelihoods are still in small-scale farming. A conversion to lab grown food would lead to mass displacement of farmers. For those lucky enough to find other forms of employment, what would those be, exactly? Sedentary service sector jobs tied to middle-class standards of living via consumerism? This is no environmental boon, no material ‘decoupling’ of society from the planet, but rather a diffusion, externalization, and thus intensification of net impacts.
Worse, this echoes the prescription of those who would grab tribal and peasant agricultural lands for corporate or state-led industrialization in ‘fast-developing’ countries around the world (e.g. here [23] and here [24]), and of course mimics the industrializing, anti-farmer prescriptions for agriculture that have afflicted much of the global North.[25] Apart from their environmental impacts, such land-grabbing, dispossession, and forced migration in search of work exacts devastating psychological, linguistic and other cultural losses in the process of estranging people from their traditional territories and lifeways. This is an anti-people and anti-environment agenda, and it’s clear that those swooning over lab-grown foods and high-tech agriculture really haven’t thought through the catastrophic and violent ramifications – especially for the still-farming majority in the global South.
Urbanization is an environmental wreck for other reasons. For one, urban living produces more waste: “A city resident generates twice as much waste as their rural counterpart of the same affluence. If we account for the fact that urban citizens are usually richer, they generate four times as much.”[26] Urbanization and its outsourced ecological footprints do not spare forests, either, but rather hasten their demise, according to science journalist David Biello:
“a statistical analysis of 41 countries revealed that forest loss rates are most closely linked with urban population growth and agricultural exports from 2000 to 2005 – even overall population growth was not as strong a driver …. In other words, the increasing urbanization of the developing world – as well as an ongoing increase in consumption in the developed world for products that have an impact on forests, whether furniture, shoe leather or chicken fed on soy meal – is driving deforestation, rather than containing it, as populations leave rural areas to concentrate in booming cities.”[27]
Similarly, research has shown that urbanized, affluent, consumerist countries are the primary threats to biodiversity ‘hotspots’ around the world – threats linked to production for international trade.[28]
What about the mental health implications of pulling people off the land and into urban zones? Many countries today are beset by an epidemic of loneliness as well as increasing rates of depression, schizophrenia and chronic stress – afflictions that are closely linked to high-stress, competitive neoliberal economies and exacerbated by urban living.[29] Not surprisingly, research has shown that human psychological health is better-served by small-scale, rural, and community living.[30]
Community is a “potent cure” for mental illness and loneliness,[31] but the lab-grown food craze disregards the important role played by local food economies – which link local farmers, consumers, and institutions in mutually interdependent webs – in rebuilding communities torn asunder by the heartless advance of the global consumer culture. Community can be built in other ways besides local food systems, but the latter – being based in substantive, material interdependency – are key to forging robust, durable, resilient bonds.
Moreover, gardening and small-scale farming – especially when done cooperatively in groups (thus preventing the labor from becoming onerous for any one person) and in conditions of economic security (i.e., not the kind of highly exploitative conditions endured by many farmworkers on industrial farms) – are known to be good for physical and mental health precisely because of their relative lack of technology and ‘labor-saving’ devices. “Despite the popular prejudice,” Robert Netting pointed out in his classic book Smallholders, Householders, “labor-saving is not the chief end of life, and farm work is not a bad thing.”[32] These activities involve manual labor, bodily exertion and movement, expose us to microbes beneficial to health,[33] and enable us to connect to nature and other people.[34] By simply supplying people with factory-derived sustenance, lab grown food will rob us of this potential source of meaning and health.
An important factor underlying today’s ecological crisis is our alienation from the natural world, which leads to our ignorance about and thus indifference towards its destruction (e.g. here and here [35]). We – and crucially, our children – need to play in and interact with the natural world, including through “fieldwork in the countryside.”[36] The expanding technological sphere has already alienated us disastrously from the natural world. Deepening the technologization of agriculture through developments like lab grown food will hasten this separation in one of the last vocations where the rift could, with a shift towards small-scale agroecology, be repaired.
It’s true that one can interact with the natural world in ways other than food production, and more and more research is revealing the powerful health and social benefits of spending even small amounts of time in natural areas.[37] Yet as Chris Smaje observes, “making people mere spectators of the natural world is unlikely to do either people or the natural world a long-term favour.”[38] If the spectator-recreationist model of connecting with nature were sufficient to the cause of mending our estrangement from the world and provoking its salvation, we should have already solved the ecological crisis based on national park visitation numbers alone. The fact that we haven’t reveals the model’s inability to materially alter our economies and ways of living. Wendell Berry argues that good stewardship of land and a healthy relationship with the rest of nature “turns on affection”, and affection requires intimate, long-term, physical interaction with the land and the kind of dense ecological knowledge and wisdom that only such interaction produces. By obviating the need for hands on the land – more “eyes per acre” as Berry has called for – lab grown food is inimical to forging this affection, and can only accelerate our alienation from and indifference to nature, to its detriment and ours.[39]
Dealing with these myriad consequences of a boom in lab grown food – its potentially devastating effects on our communities, our mental health, and our societies – would not be a simple thing. Mass displacement of farmers and accelerated urbanization would have to be mitigated at a policy level, and the consolidation of corporate power within the lab grown food industry would have to be held firmly in check. Yet pessimism about governments’ ability to properly regulate our food systems is why some people are giving up on the entire constellation of ecological farming possibilities in the first place, and becoming attracted to techno-fixes. But will regulating lab grown food be any less messy, political, or slow than simply changing agriculture for the better?
Stepping back and looking at all these strands together, it seems clear that what we urgently need – for both holistic environmental and social protection and well-being – is precisely the reversal of high-tech, farmer-displacing developments of the lab grown food ilk, and political-economic support for the sustainable re-inhabitation of the countryside through localization and decentralization of our food systems. In the face of unemployment, the potential of small-scale, diversified, less-mechanized agriculture to generate jobs and livelihoods is considerable;[40] what’s more it’s necessary to effect a transformation toward a regenerative, fossil-fuel-free agroecological future.[41] This is exactly what the international food sovereignty movement is calling for through networks like La Via Campesina, what so many young people are aspiring to through organizations like the National Young Farmers Coalition in the US and the Landworkers’ Alliance in the UK, and what the local food movement is espousing all over the world. To support a ‘farm-free’ future is to pull the rug out from these, some of the strongest allies in the struggle against corporate agribusiness and globalization.
Hopefully those sincere environmentalists who are attracted by the siren song of lab-grown food will take a hard look at the multiple social and environmental implications of a world without farmers, and see that this techno-fix actually supports an industrial food system that is rotten to the core.
In addition to the work already happening at the grassroots, major policy changes will be required to radically transform the food system in ways that bridge the gap between humans and the land. This in turn will require massive pressure from below on policymakers who, for the most part, are servile to corporate power and under the sway of conventional economic assumptions.
This is not a ‘simple solution’ to the complex problems of food and the environment. But in the long run it’s probably the only real one.
Photo: Impossible Foods
[1] Monbiot, G. (2015) ‘Meet the ecomodernists: ignorant of history and paradoxically old-fashioned’, The Guardian, 24 September. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/georgemonbiot/2015/sep/24/meet-the-ecomodernists-ignorant-of-history-and-paradoxically-old-fashioned
[2] Monbiot, G. (2020) ‘Lab-grown food will soon destroy farming – and save the planet’, The Guardian, 8 January. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jan/08/lab-grown-food-destroy-farming-save-planet
[3] Smaje, C. (2020) ‘Of chancers and last-chancers’, Small Farm Future blog, 12 January. https://smallfarmfuture.org.uk/2020/01/of-chancers-and-last-chancers/
[4] GRAIN and IATP (2018) ‘Emissions impossible: How big meat and dairy are heating up the planet’, GRAIN and the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy (IATP), 18 July. https://grain.org/en/article/5976-emissions-impossible-how-big-meat-and-dairy-are-heating-up-the-planet
[5] Stanley, P.L. et al. (2018) ‘Impacts of soil carbon sequestration on life cycle greenhouse gas emissions in Midwestern USA beef finishing systems’, Agricultural Systems, Volume 162, May. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0308521X17310338
[6] Balmford, A. et al. (2018) ‘The environmental costs and benefits of high-yield farming’, Nature Sustainability 1. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-018-0138-5
[7] Kroll, A. and Schulman, J. (2013) ‘Leaked Documents Reveal the Secret Finances of a Pro-Industry Science Group’, Mother Jones, 28 October. https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/10/american-council-science-health-leaked-documents-fundraising/
[8] American Council on Science and Health (2018) ‘Conventional Farms Are Better for Environment Than Organic Farms’, 22 September. https://www.acsh.org/news/2018/09/22/corporate-farms-are-better-environment-organic-farms-13438
[9] Fischer, J. (2015) ‘To all editors, reviewers and authors: time to move on regarding land sparing’, Ideas for Sustainability, 8 October. https://ideas4sustainability.wordpress.com/2015/10/08/to-all-editors-reviewers-and-authors-time-to-move-on-regarding-land-sparing/
10] Pearce, F. (2018) ‘Sparing vs Sharing: The Great Debate Over How to Protect Nature’, Yale Environment 360, 3 December. https://e360.yale.edu/features/sparing-vs-sharing-the-great-debate-over-how-to-protect-nature
[11] Kremen, C. (2015) ‘Reframing the land-sparing/land-sharing debate for biodiversity conservation’, Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences Vol. 1355. https://food.berkeley.edu/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/Kremen-2015-Annals_of_the_New_York_Academy_of_Sciences.pdf; and Kremen, C. and Miles, A. (2012) ‘Ecosystem Services in Biologically Diversified versus Conventional Farming Systems: Benefits, Externalities, and Trade-Offs’, Ecology and Society 17(4). https://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol17/iss4/art40/
[12] Perfecto, I., Vandermeer, J. and Wright, A. (2019) Nature’s Matrix: Linking Agriculture, Biodiversity Conservation and Food Sovereignty, 2nd Edition, London: Routledge. https://www.routledge.com/Natures-Matrix-Linking-Agriculture-Biodiversity-Conservation-and-Food/Perfecto-Vandermeer-Wright/p/book/9780367137816
[13] Chappell, M.J. and LaValle, L.A. (2011) ‘Food security and biodiversity: can we have both? An agroecological analysis’, Agriculture and Human Values 28. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10460-009-9251-4
[14] Tuck, S.L. et al. (2014) ‘Land use intensity and the effects of organic farming on biodiversity: a hierarchical meta‐analysis’, Journal of Applied Ecology 51(3). https://besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/1365-2664.12219
[15] Barthel, S., Crumley, C. and Svedin, U. (2013) ‘Bio-cultural refugia – Safeguarding diversity of practices for food security and biodiversity’, Global Environmental Change 23 (5). https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0959378013000757
[16] Kremen, C. and Miles, A. (2012) ‘Ecosystem Services in Biologically Diversified versus Conventional Farming Systems: Benefits, Externalities, and Trade-Offs’, Ecology and Society 17(4). https://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol17/iss4/art40/
[17] Pimbert, M.P. (2018) Food Sovereignty, Agroecology and Biocultural Diversity, London: Routledge. https://www.routledge.com/Food-Sovereignty-Agroecology-and-Biocultural-Diversity-Constructing-and/Pimbert/p/book/9781138955363
[18] GRAIN (2018) ‘Hungry for land: small farmers feed the world with less than a quarter of all farmland’, GRAIN 28 May. https://www.grain.org/article/entries/4929-hungry-for-land-small-farmers-feed-the-world-with-less-than-a-quarter-of-all-farmland
[19] Netting, R. McC. (1993) Smallholders, Householders: Farm Families and the Ecology of Intensive, Sustainable Agriculture, Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press.
[20] See also, Kalt, T. (2019) ‘The Myth of the Green City: Mapping the Uneven Geographies of E-Mobility’, in Vormann, B. and Lammert, C. (eds.) Countours of the Illiberal State: Governing Circulation in the Smart Economy, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. https://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/distributed/C/bo46294983.html; and Hornborg, A. (2019) ‘A globalised solar-powered future is wholly unrealistic – and our economy is the reason why’, The Conversation, 6 September. https://theconversation.com/a-globalised-solar-powered-future-is-wholly-unrealistic-and-our-economy-is-the-reason-why-118927
[21] Architecture 2030 (2019) ‘Why the Building Sector? https://architecture2030.org/buildings_problem_why/
[22] Watts, J. (2019) ‘Concrete: the most destructive material on Earth’, The Guardian, 25 February. https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2019/feb/25/concrete-the-most-destructive-material-on-earth
[23] Srivastava, M. and Gopal, P. (2009) ‘What’s holding India back? Business is battling farmers over land, putting $98 bn in investments, and an industrial revolution, on hold’, The Economic Times, 10 October. https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/whats-holding-india-back/articleshow/5105413.cms
[24] Chauduri, P.P. (2009) ‘Bright lights, dim policy: Farm policies hinder the movement of rural Indians to cities. This undermines their progress’, Hindustan Times, 2 June. https://www.hindustantimes.com/india/bright-lights-dim-policy/story-wZ4zccjF09irfHJ5ke3uZL.html
[25] Fitzgerald, D. (2010) Every Farm a Factory: The Industrial Ideal in American Agriculture, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
[26] Hoornweg, D., Bhada-Tata, P., and Kennedy, C. (2013) ‘Environment: Waste production must peak this century’, Nature 502(7473), 30 October. https://www.nature.com/news/environment-waste-production-must-peak-this-century-1.14032
[27] Biello, D. (2010) ‘City Dwellers Drive Deforestation in 21st Century’, Scientific American, 8 February. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/city-dwellers-drive-21st-century-deforestation/
[28] Moran, D. and Kanemoto, K. (2017) ‘Identifying species threat hotspots from global supply chains’, Nature Ecology & Evolution 1, 4 January. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-016-0023
[29] Monbiot, G. (2014) ‘The age of loneliness is killing us’, The Guardian, 14 October. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/oct/14/age-of-loneliness-killing-us; Monbiot, G. (2016) ‘Neoliberalism is creating loneliness. That’s what’s wrenching society apart’, The Guardian, 12 October. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/oct/12/neoliberalism-creating-loneliness-wrenching-society-apart; Bond, M. (2017) ‘The hidden ways that architecture affects how you feel’, BBC Future, 5 June. https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20170605-the-psychology-behind-your-citys-design
[30] Geher, G. (2016) ‘The Urbanization-Mental Health Connection: Three evolution-based reasons that humans were shaped for small-scale living’, Psychology Today, 28 August. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/darwins-subterranean-world/201608/the-urbanization-mental-health-connection
[31] Monbiot, G. (2018) ‘The town that’s found a potent cure for illness – community’, The Guardian, 21 February. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/feb/21/town-cure-illness-community-frome-somerset-isolation
[32] Netting, R. McC (1993) op cit.
[33] Miller, D. (2013) ‘How dirt heals us’, Yes Magazine, 7 December. https://www.yesmagazine.org/issue/food-health/2013/12/07/how-dirt-heals-us/
[34] Feldmar, J. (2018) ‘Gardening could be the hobby that helps you live to 100’, BBC Worklife, 10 December. https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20181210-gardening-could-be-the-hobby-that-helps-you-live-to-100; Pretty, J.N. et al. (2017) ‘Green Mind Theory: How Brain-Body Behaviour Links into Natural and Social Environments for Healthy Habits’, International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health 14; http://www.pnas.org/content/112/28/8567
[35] Monbiot, G. (2012) ‘Housebroken’, George Monbiot blog, 19 November. https://www.monbiot.com/2012/11/19/housebroken/; and (2014) ‘Why we couldn’t care less about the natural world’, The Guardian, 9 May. http://www.theguardian.com/environment/georgemonbiot/2014/may/09/why-we-couldnt-care-less-about-the-natural-world
[36] Monbiot, G. (2013) ‘The problem with education? Children aren’t feral enough’, The Guardian, 7 October. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/oct/07/education-children-not-feral-enough
[37] Williams, F. (2017) The Nature Fix: Why Nature Makes Us Happier, Healthier, and More Creative, New York: W.W. Norton.
[38] Smaje, C. (2020) Op cit.
[39] Berry, W. (2015) ‘Farmland Without Farmers’, The Atlantic, 19 March. https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2015/03/farmland-without-farmers/388282/
[40] Netting, op cit.
[41] Ries, C. (2019) ‘A Green New Deal Must Prioritize Regenerative Agriculture’, Truthout, 9 May. https://truthout.org/articles/a-green-new-deal-must-prioritize-regenerative-agriculture; Heinberg, R. (2006) ‘Fifty Million Farmers’, Resilience, 17 November. https://www.resilience.org/stories/2006-11-17/fifty-million-farmers/
Great analysis, covering all the bases! Game on between the transhumanist high tech divorced from the biosphere vision of the future versus a human recoupling with the biosphere. Also farm free means continued large business/corporate rule with the money siphoning up to a small elite. Which reminds me, we need to go to a non debt based, no interest based money system where money is purely a medium of exchange and not a store or source of wealth. But that’s a topic for another time.
I agree with Jeff, above: well done on covering all the bases and putting forth a compelling argument.
But I feel its a shame it has to be “game on.”
What if instead of “game on,” George Monbiot and Alex Jensen were to sit down on the same side of the table in a spirit of mutual respect and humility, place your shared love of nature and our planet and its remaining wilderness and biodiversity upon the table before you, and explore together how we might feed ourselves, keep small scale food growers (who I think love the land and nature too) in a job, and protect/rebuild the biodiversity we so fear to loose?
All of the points made in this article seem resoundingly true to me. But I know George Monbiot to be an intelligent and discerning person who has never feared doing the research and exploration to turn up every aspect of an issue. What has to be true for him, in his view of the world, for him to support lab-grown food? How does it feel to be in his position? What informs and shapes his point of view?
In his article he says, he can “see some drawbacks” to lab-grown food. What drawbacks does he see? He mentions some of the concerns mentioned in this article: support for farmers who would lose their jobs, pressure on governments to ensure the widest possible distribution of ownership of the new technologies.
What other common ground might there be?
Why does it have to be “either/or”? Are there any grounds on which both view points combined might be able to point to “and”? My personal knee jerk reaction is the same as the long, thought-out viewpoint presented in this article, but what might I be missing?
What could open, respectful, honest, courageous, compassionate, humble discussion–as long and as deep and as nuanced as it takes–between two writers/thinkers (who care about the issue as much as these two do and are as qualified to discuss it) reveal that we may continue to miss so long as we sit on opposite sides of the table, defending one view point?
In his article Monbiot also says that “This is a time of momentous choices, and we should make them together.”
Unless I’m missing something, both sides of this debate want the same thing. We want to feed ourselves in ways that hold nature as sacred.
If there is an enemy here, it is industrial agriculture. But even to hold industrial agriculture as an enemy is a trap that keeps us in the mind set of war that has gotten us into trouble in the first place.
Bickering with each other from opposite sides of the table keeps us entrenched in our own positions and pointing the finger at each other while we fail to see each other’s common humanity, to examine the assumptions that both sides are making, or to explore “third alternatives.”
Just to clarify, I have a lot of respect and admiration for George Monbiot – I am a big fan of most of his work, and as you can see the from the endnotes, his own past work is frequently referenced to raise larger concerns around lab-grown food. I definitely endorse your plea for respectful discussion and dialogue, and hope this didn’t give an impression otherwise. Thanks for commenting.
George Monbiot lost any positive reputation when he revealed himself as a cheerleader of US/NATO imperial conquests in the Middle East and joined the defamation campaign against Syrian President Dr. Bashar al-Assad.
His piece about farm-free food aligns perfectly with PR-efforts of the big industrial food corporations (Nestle, PepsiCo, Kraft Heiz, Mondelez, Danone, Archer Daniels Midland, etc.), owned by the billionaire class. They produce farm-free food since a long time.
I have the privilege to grow much of my food in a subsistence garden at the edge of a large forest. The garden is btw. rather a forest garden, with many fruit trees, berry bushes, and grapevines.
Yet on one side is a huge field. It is fortunately not intensively cultivated, but when the farmer occasionally sprays herbicides, my garden is full of dead bumblebees. When the farmers tractor, big as a battle tank, drives by, everything stinks of diesel fumes.
All this will end when the new coronavirus spreads.
It will spread quickly in the malls, supermarkets, and offices, as the ubiquitous air-condition units distribute germs efficiently. It will spread quickly as people are packed in urban centers and travel long distances in mass transport because of global supply chains, workplace specialization (which makes commuting necessary), global mega-corporations, and tourism. It will spread quickly as human immune systems are compromised by ten thousands of man-made chemicals, most of them untested for their safety, by microwave radiation (smartphones), by an unnatural sedentary lifestyle, pollution of air, water, soil, and unhealthy industrial food.
The farm tractor drives by and I think: This will end soon.”
The farmer will not be able to sell his crop as global trade is disrupted. If he tries to sell his harvest to locals, nobody will buy it, people will rather buy their food from local organic farmers and gardeners whom they trust. The farmer will find out that his land is worth nothing, because the soil is degraded and poisoned by the agro-chemicals which he poured on it. Without these chemicals nothing will grow and he will go bankrupt. Maybe he can get a job as farmhand on an organic farm.
The coronavirus disaster will not be the last pandemic. There will be other infectious diseases, there will be chaos and everything will change. Globalization, global trade, tourisms, industrial farming, and the industrial production of food will end, among other things.
Good so!
I fully agree with Kate’s comment. I’ll try to make mine short: In his recent film ‘Apocalypse Cow’ (https://www.channel4.com/programmes/apocalypse-cow-how-meat-killed-the-planet), George Monbiot made it very clear that horticulture was excluded from his lab-grown food scenario: all vegetables, fruits, nuts, herbs, mushrooms, most seeds and probably all pulses too. That’s at least three quarters of the whole food plant-based diet I have been eating for nearly four decades – a type of diet which has been shown in numerous studies to be best for both human and planetary health.
In his film, Monbiot showed Tolhurst Oganic, a 17 acres horticulture farm which has, also for four decades, been producing healthy organic fruit and vegs in a profitable way whilst enriching what used to be very poor soil, boosting biodiversity and often achieving negative emissions – all without any animal inputs (manure, bone meal, etc) nor chemical fertilisers. https://farmcarbontoolkit.org.uk/sites/default/files/downloads/case_study_-_tolhurst_organics_v3.pdf
Monbiot has also often praised agroforestry and permaculture, for instance: “Even better are some of the methods that fall under the heading of permaculture– working with complex natural systems rather than seeking to simplify or replace them. Pioneers such as Sepp Holzer and Geoff Lawton have achieved remarkable yields of fruit and vegetables in places that seemed unfarmable: 1,100m above sea level in the Austrian alps, for example, or in the salt-shrivelled Jordanian desert.” (https://www.permaculture.co.uk/articles/soil-why-are-we-still-destroying-it)
What Monbiot has been stressing for some years now, backed by much science, is the huge inefficiency of meat and dairy. Study after study has shown that the carbon footprint of animal-based foods is much higher than even the worse plant-based foods (even when removing from the equation the methane emissions from ruminants, as shown by this recent analysis (https://ourworldindata.org/carbon-footprint-food-methane), and they are also the worst for land use, biodiversity, water use, water pollution, air pollution, eutrophication – plus antibiotic resistance, zoonoses (e.g. coronaviruses) plus many other human health problems as well as the ethical issue of commodifying animals.
Of course the situation is different in rich countries and the Global South but even in the latter the increase in droughts/desertification and floods from climate chaos is making animal husbandry increasingly more unsustainable.
I am sitting on the fence about lab-grown food as I would much prefer if it was well understood that Western countries are suffering from an excess of protein consumption and that the widespread adoption of whole food plant-based diets, rich in fruits, vegs and nuts, would be a win on all fronts.
I could easily subsist on a healthy diet if all meat, dairy and grain production was to stop tomorrow, so their replacement by lab-produced food doesn’t feel terribly relevant to me directly.
I do not think for a second that Monbiot would want to “pull people off the land”. I believe his vision of rewilding very much includes humans in different roles. And I also do not agree with everything written here about urbanisation, and some of the sources you quote do not agree either. The main article you cite about waste explains, for instance, that “Japan issues about one-third less rubbish per person than the United States, despite having roughly the same gross domestic product (GDP) per capita. This is because of higher-density living (…).”
Various other studies show that because services tend to be better in urban than rural areas, waste is better handled. See for instance this graph on the disposal of human excreta https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/open-defecation-in-rural-areas-vs-urban-areas .
Yes, clearly richer people have a larger footprint than poorer ones, and cities tend to draw in richer people, but it’s not urban life per se that is the problem. After decades of living rurally I have moved to London precisely to shrink my footprint – ditching my car and doing everything on foot, bicycle or public transport. I am lucky to live in a city with many green spaces so I actually see wildlife far more frequently here than I did in rural Devon (Southern England), where I was surrounded by meat and dairy farms, and wildlife – badgers, foxes, many birds etc – were killed by farmers who were very protective of their land and forbid trespass. This felt oppressive.
Thanks for your thoughtful comment. I am aware that George Monbiot has previously praised things like agroforestry, permaculture and small diversified farms generally, for example in the 2015 piece of his that I refer to a couple of times. But this is nowhere apparent in his piece endorsing lab-grown food that I am responding to here, and neither are the potential impacts on the overall ‘alternative’ food movement explored – a lacuna I was exactly trying to question. Though horticulture and veg are excepted in his scenario, it is not obvious to me why lab-grown food that can mimic grain- or meat-based food would not also be able to do the same for fruit, veg, nuts etc., and thus similarly undermine land-based horticulture.
In total agreement with your observation that “Western countries are suffering from an excess of protein consumption and that the widespread adoption of whole food plant-based diets, rich in fruits, vegs and nuts, would be a win on all fronts.” Whether there’s room in this for some animal-based products, in much smaller quantities, produced in radically opposite ways to industrialized confined factory farming, as part of small-scale integrated agroecological operations, is of course a separate debate, though I tend to think the answer is yes, in line with the positions and analyses of organizations like GRAIN that I highly respect. My positions also stem from experience in traditional peasant cultures in countries like Peru and India over the years, which, though of course not perfect (nothing is), have nonetheless persisted over centuries and include matrices of grain, vegetable and fruit production, reliance on plenty of wild/uncultivated foods/herbs, and limited integration of animals for manure, labor, wool and (comparatively modest amounts of) meat.
I also do not believe that Monbiot would want to pull people off the land, but in his piece he does acknowledge that this technology will displace farmers: “governments should be investing in helping farmers into other forms of employment, while providing relief funds for those who will suddenly lose their livelihoods.” I am simply arguing for more careful consideration of the full social implications of this technology if it really were to take off, especially (as I emphasize a few times) for the majority farming population of the Global South.
On the matter of urbanization and waste, I do not think the overall point that there is a positive relationship between the two is debatable. Here’s another source: https://www.globalcitizen.org/en/content/worlds-worst-cities-for-waste/. “The more urbanized and industrialized a country becomes, the more trash it produces…. The world’s 27 megacities produce 12% of global waste, according to a PNAS study from 2015.” This relationship holds even though the total amounts may differ a lot from one country to another. Japan may produce less waste per capita than the US, but undoubtedly urban Japan produces more than rural Japan, and in any case, the fact that Tokyo produces less per capita has to do with aggressive policies, rather than density (i.e. I disagree with this assertion from the piece I cited; density may be more energy efficient in terms of, for example, walkability as compared to the suburbs, but why should density as such result in lower per-capita waste generation?). The bigger point is to look at the total ecological footprint of cities, and the distant resource origins and waste sinks needed to sustain them. According to the Global Footprint Network, “In many countries, one or two major urban centers are major contributors to the national Ecological Footprint and also run significantly higher per capita Footprints than the average for their nations….Our Mediterranean Report, for instance, found that the resource demands of citizens in Athens exceeds the biocapacity of all of Greece.” (https://www.footprintnetwork.org/our-work/cities/)
The “better handling” of waste that may be found in some cities compared to rural areas, is likely in actuality to merely be better collection and removal for dumping (or incinerating) elsewhere, euphemistically known as “waste management.” This also obtains in the case of human excreta that you refer to: consider the trainload of ‘excreta’ from NYC that was stranded in Alabama for several months. “The train was originally bound for Big Sky landfill, located about 20 miles east of Parrish, Alabama, according to the AP. But even though the landfill has taken sewage from New York since early 2017, the nearby town of West Jefferson obtained an injunction to stop the contents of this particular train from reaching its destination, the AP reported. The biosolids have caused the town to become “infested with flies” and it “smells of dead rotting animals as well as human waste.” (https://www.livescience.com/62349-poop-train-biosolids.html) In other words, urban areas do a good job of handling human waste… by dumping it in rural areas, even ones over 900 miles away (as in this case), using fossil-fueled transport. Again, this is part of the common misperception of cities as being more ecologically “efficient”, without looking at the huge, dispersed cumulative impacts.
No doubt there can be higher impact lives lived in rural places compared to cities, and kudos to you for living more lightly and mindfully in London. I wish most people in cities would do likewise. The kind of rural living I am advocating is similarly about deliberately, consciously living more lightly; i.e. I am not referring to merely geographically being located in the countryside yet still totally dependent on fossil fuels, supermarkets et al., rather, something more like integrated villages based on small-scale agroecology. In any case, if the prognostications of future urbanization actually come to pass, I stand by my contention that that portends ecological devastation.