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George Monbiot

@GeorgeMonbiot

May 24

#RegenesisFact 5: When healthy soil is air-dried, the relative humidity inside the tiny clumps made by its microbes and small animals remains at 98%. In other words, these clumps are more or less impervious to desiccation: a property that at first sight looks like magic. 🧵

It’s not magic, but nor is it accidental. The vast internal surface area that makes it possible is a feature of biological construction. The little clumps (called aggregates by soil scientists) are not just made within the soil. They are the soil. Without them, it would collapse.

Just as corals and other species are reef-builders, bacteria, fungi and small animals are soil-builders. In making homes for themselves, they build the ecosystem on which almost all terrestrial life depends.

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George Monbiot

@GeorgeMonbiot

May 23

There are plenty of claims about "regenerative ranching". But regenerative of what? Unless livestock numbers are so low that trees can return to formerly-forested land, it is not regenerative of ecosystems. And if they are that low, food production levels are tiny.

Regenerative ranching, formerly known as ranching.

As for carbon sequestration, many of the claims fall somewhere on the spectrum between bullshit and outright fraud. But these inflated claims are now big business.
science20.com/spencer_robert…

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George Monbiot

@GeorgeMonbiot

May 23

#RegenesisFact 4. This one will come as a shock to many people. Unless I’ve missed something, there is no major farm product as environmentally damaging as organic, pasture-fed beef.
Here’s the reasoning: 🧵

i. Arguably the most important of all environmental metrics is the amount of land we use. Land used for extractive industries is land that cannot be used for wild ecosystems such as forests, wetlands and savannahs, on which the great majority of terrestrial species depend.

ii. By far the greatest use of land by people is for grazing by livestock – ie pasture. While human habitation occupies 1% of the planet’s surface, and crops occupy 12%, livestock grazing occupies 28%.
This represents a truly massive *ecological opportunity cost*.

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George Monbiot

@GeorgeMonbiot

May 21

#RegenesisFact 2. Sargassum is a floating seaweed once found mostly in the Sargasso Sea. But now, for 6 months in most years, it forms a continuous belt from the Gulf of Mexico, down the South American coast, across the Atlantic and all the way to the shores of West Africa.🧵

In other words, in most years since 2011, a 9000-kilometre blanket of floating weed now forms. That’s almost a quarter of the circumference of the Earth. The cause, scientists believe, is “increased deforestation and fertilizer use in Brazil”.

As Brazil has become a global supplier of animal feed (mostly soy), huge areas have been cleared and fertilised. Fertiliser and minerals released from the soil wash from the fields and pour down the Tapajós, Xingu, Tocantins and other rivers.

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George Monbiot

@GeorgeMonbiot

May 20

For the next few weeks, I’ll post a daily #RegenesisFact: an astonishing thing I learnt while researching the book. Here’s #1.
Up to 40% of the rain in parts of East Africa seems to be caused by farmers watering their fields in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, 4000-6000 km away.🧵

When farmers pump water out of a river or the ground, then spread it across their fields, they greatly increase its surface area. Evaporation and transpiration from their crop plants cause a vast release of water vapour.

From Feb to April, the vapour released from the irrigated fields is picked up by the prevailing winds, blowing SW across the Arabian Sea. After travelling 000s of kilometres, this air hits the coast of Africa, rises and cools. The vapour condenses, and some of it falls as rain.

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George Monbiot

@GeorgeMonbiot

May 19

The global food system looks like the global financial system in the approach to 2008.
Years of warnings that it was heading this way were ignored by governments.
My column.
theguardian.com/commentisfree/…

Hunger has been rising since 2015. For most of this time, food has been super-abundant and prices have been low. So, why? Because of the escalating transmission of shocks – speculative surges, supply chain disruptions, bottlenecking – across a system that’s losing its resilience.

These shocks, until 2020, scarcely affected rich nations, so we ignored them. But they caused major issues for poor nations with weak currencies, which stand at the end of the queue.

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