Regenesis — Feeding the World Without Devouring the Planet

While I highly recommend reading the book, for my sake, and yours, I’m summarizing the book before I return it to the library. There is no way I’ll remember it all if I don’t write it down.

Mr. Monbiot is British so the examples of environmental devastation throughout the book are from the English countryside. So are the farmers who are testing out ways to successfully farm regeneratively. But Monbiot’s goal is to deal with the problem of environmental damage caused by agricultural production worldwide. The book’s teachings and its solutions apply to us all.

Regenesis is a dense read, so I appreciated the author’s humor. In chapter one he speaks of the scientific procedure of wassailing the orchard.

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…The hypothesis is not upheld…Then we begin the cycle again.

Chapter 1- What Lies Beneath

Monbiot is just now joining the group of farmers, microbiologists and soil scientists who understand the importance of the soil. He explains that he has explored ecosystems around the world, from the tundra to the mountaintops and yet has not explored “deliberately and thoroughly, the ground beneath” his feet. He is fascinated that there may be “several thousand species beneath one square meter” — beneath the plant life that we see.

Having a degree in zoology makes him even more astounded to find creatures unknown to him in the soil, entire phylum according to some authorities. While looking at a soil sample with his 40x magnifying loupe, he sees what he takes for a tiny white centipede.

‘When I peer at one closely through the lens, I notice that instead of fifteen pairs of legs or more that a centipede possesses, it has twelve… It’s a creature called a symphylid.”

A member of a phylum he realizes he has never encountered before.

Monbiot admits that he has much to learn about soil biology, but what he knows, he explains well. I learned about plant and fungi co-dependence.

The plant feeds the fungi with carbohydrates and lipids that it makes through photosynthesis; the fungi feed the plant with nitrogen, phosphorus and other elements they scour from the ground and transport with greater efficiency than the plants can manage…Fungi are crucial to the plant, perhaps to an even greater extent than their green partners, they mesh the soil together, defending it from erosion, absorbing the rain that falls on it, and locking up the carbon it contains.

Monbiot then goes on to discuss bacteria, making a comparison of the human gut bacteria to the soil rhizosphere that-

not only digests food, but also helps to protect plants from disease. Just as the bacteria that live in our guts outcompete and attack invading pathogens, the microbes in the rhizosphere create a defensive ring around the root. Plants feed beneficial bacteria species so that they crowd out pathogenic microbes.

The chapter goes on to describe all sorts of organisms in the soil, from ‘Angel’s Glow’ caused by soil eating nematodes, to the importance of earthworms. On the soil ecosystem he concludes:

In truth we scarcely know it. So neglected has this ecosystem been, so little money and effort has been invested in comprehending it, that we are only beginning to unearth its complexities. The small funds available for studying soil life have mostly been spend on finding new ways to kill it: in other words, to destroy agricultural pests. And that we establish our truths from information that’s patchy and shallow… Widely accepted claims are based on hearsay and myth, while scientific findings, however dramatic and intriguing, are scarcely known beyond a small circle of specialists.

Our agricultural systems need to change course. Monbiot wants to ensure that we head in the right direction and questions everything. He states:

Our beliefs about food and farming are dominated by fables and metaphors that describe not the world as it is, but an idealized, simplified planet, prompting us to make catastrophic mistakes.

For us to protect life on earth, we must understand the future lies underground.

Stay tuned for Chapter Two and read the book.

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This post was previously published on MEDIUM.COM.

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