The Sunday Times bestseller
Shortlisted for the Wainwright Prize
A New Statesman and Spectator Book of the Year

'This book calls for nothing less than a revolution in the future of food' Kate Raworth

From the bestselling author of Feral **, a breathtaking first glimpse of a new future for food and for humanity

** Farming is the world's greatest cause of environmental destruction - and the one we are least prepared to talk about. We criticise urban sprawl, but farming sprawls across thirty times as much land. We have ploughed, 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.

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 revolutionising our understanding of fertility; through breeders of perennial grains, liberating the land from ploughs 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.

Review

GEORGE MONBIOT IS THE* WINNER OF THE 2022 ORWELL PRIZE FOR JOURNALISM
SHORTLISTED FOR THE JAMES CROPPER WAINWRIGHT PRIZE FOR WRITING ON CONSERVATION*

One of:
New Scientist’s “15 of the best science non-fiction books to savour on your holiday”
Amazon ’s “Best science books of 2022”

Praise for Regenesis :**

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

“Wonderful . . . Monbiot shatters the shibboleths of farming and 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.”
—David Suzuki

“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, author of Entangled Life

“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

“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. 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

“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.”
—David Wallace-Wells

“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. . . . [It] 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

“ 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. Recognizing 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

“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

“I never cease to be surprised by the unexpected perspectives Monbiot brings to bear, leading me through problems I never envisaged and solutions I never imagined.”
—Brian Eno

“Inspiring and compelling . . . 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

“A genuinely brilliant, inspirational book. . . . 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.”
—Tim Smit, Founder of the Eden Project

“Remarkable . . . I learned something on every page.”
—Bill McKibben

“Monbiot rolls up his sleeves and pulls on his boots for an uncompromising session of agricultural dragon-slaying and foodie myth-busting. 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

“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

“George Monbiot reaches for new ideas that might ignite the collective consciousness in a push to protect, rather than tragically destroy, the biosphere. Read 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.”
—Rosie Boycott

“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 exhilarating epic.”
—Robert Newman

“You may think you are across environmental and climate change issues, but think again. This passionate, extraordinary book opens up a compelling and vital new dimension: food and the way the world farms.”
—Will Hutton

“With rigour, singular bravery, and an infectious love for the living world, George Monbiot presents the Silent Spring of our time. Regenesis is an astonishing vision of survival and restoration. 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

“[ Regenesis ] help[s] us explore how our food and environment are intertwined. . . . This book looks at the importance of soil ecology, innovative protein sources, and more solutions that work to solve both our interconnected land conservation and hunger crises.” *
— Smithsonian Magazine *

“A fascinating, informative, eccentric look at the future of farming and food.”
**— Kirkus Reviews

“ Regenesis , a magnificent new overview of how we might live and feed ourselves without destroying ourselves, Monboit begins with the soil—and it is riveting. . . . George Monbiot’s ideas to solve the planet’s ecological crisis are radical.”
—The Times (UK)

“[ Regenesis ] explores the destruction, exploitation, and economic senselessness of farming. But there is hope too. Monbiot offers a treasure trove of solutions and a vision for a sustainable, healthy, equitable world.”
—New Scientist

“Never hectoring, always highly readable, Regenesis is an intelligent, deeply researched passion piece that ranges from microbiology to social justice by way of apple trees and GM wheat. There is a temptation when writing about enormous topics to oversimplify, to distinguish your own approach by promoting a single definitive solution. Monbiot resists this. He acknowledges, even embraces, the complexity of the crisis we face. . . . That is the greatest strength of this book: Monbiot’s beautifully simple explanation of why none of this is simple. . . . [G]lorious. . . . [U]rgent, essential reading. . . . If a book can change hearts and minds about one of the most critical issues of our time, this rational, humane polemic is it.”
—The Guardian

“This rigorous, bold, and clear-sighted book makes clear that what matters is the system, and the soil on which it’s founded. To conjure the miracle of more food with less farming, we need to rethink what lies beneath our feet.”
—Prospect Magazine

“A compelling account of a deeply broken food system and how we might heal it.”
—The Irish Times

“[A]mbitious and deeply researched.”
—Financial Times

“In the finest tradition of George Orwell’s journalism, George Monbiot draws on a vast reserve of knowledge to write with wit, elegance, forensic insight, and sustained and justified anger about the most important, and most neglected, crisis facing humanity. His targets range from organised crime to criminal political indifference and he leaves us in no doubt about what we must do to survive.”
—The Orwell Prize for Journalism 2022 judges

“ Regenesis , as the book’s name suggests, is intended to be hopeful. Its main aim is to explore solutions that might just answer the food system’s central dilemma: how to produce more (and better) food for more people using less land.”
—Post Magazine

“Cruising past farmlands in America—and elsewhere in the world—it’s hard to imagine that so much green could be so damaging to the Earth. But author George Monbiot makes a compelling case that it often is.”
—Daily Herald

“George Monbiot is challenging common practices and beliefs about farming and food production. . . . [ Regenesis ] makes an argument against animal farming while making a case for advancing the science of soil technology and bacteria pioneering.”
—CBC

“[D]eeply moving. . . . [Monbiot] applies his fierce intellect and rich empathy to answering the question posed. . . can we feed billions of human beings without wiping out the world’s wildlife, and without undermining the complex life support systems that we call nature?”
—Ecologist

“Monbiot calls passionately for an end to [the] cycle of destruction. . . . He makes powerful arguments. . . . [and] cares deeply.”
—The New York Review

“George Monbiot is. . . an exceptional prose writer. The book is profoundly thrilling. . . . [R]evelatory. . . . [It’s] the transformative power of language and ideas that make Regenesis not only a timely book, but also a work of great beauty.”
—The Tyee

“ Regenesis unflinchingly outlines the damage farming does to the planet.”
—Big Issue

“[A] vital new book. . . . [Monbiot] has taken an enormously complex subject, conducted painstaking research, and written a highly readable book.”
—Jacobin

“George Monbiot reveals there is one industry destroying the Earth at a faster rate than any other —and that’s farming. Regenesis. . . sets out an extremely bleak future for the earth—within his lifetime—if we do not find a different way to feed ourselves instead of by farming livestock.”
—Cambridge Independent --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

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. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.

About the Author

George 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. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.