We Are Eating the Earth
The Race to Fix Our Food System and Save Our Climate
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- 14,99 €
Beschreibung des Verlags
From the author of New York Times bestseller The New New Deal, a groundbreaking piece of reportage from the trenches of the next climate war: 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, 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.
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In this bracing report, journalist Grunwald (The Swamp) explores the challenges of developing a more sustainable agricultural system through an extended profile of Tim Searchinger, a hard-charging environmental lawyer whose skepticism of claims about ethanol's viability as a fossil fuel alternative inspired him to take on a second line of work as an agriculture researcher at Princeton University. Grunwald details how in the late aughts, Searchinger's research on how a congressional mandate for plant-based fuels exacerbated deforestation (producers razed land to grow corn that could be transformed into ethanol) helped turn the tide against them in environmental circles. Instead, Searchinger argues that humans should avoid the creation of new farmland by making existing tracts more productive. Surveying ongoing controversies over how to do so, Grunwald explains that while some believe replacing beef with plant-based meat would reduce methane emissions, the foods are ultraprocessed and unhealthy, and that while some decry GMOs as unnatural, Searchinger believes they hold promise for boosting harvests. In capturing Searchinger's "pain-in-the-ass tenacity" and iconoclastic spirit, Grunwald offers a myth-busting overview of current debates around how to improve the world's agricultural systems. This provides much food for thought.
