I’ve been at least a part-time environmental journalist for more than 25 years, and food and agriculture is arguably the biggest environmental problem—the biggest driver of water shortages, water pollution, deforestation, and biodiversity loss, and the second-biggest driver (after fossil fuels) of climate change. And it occurred to me in 2019 that I didn’t know squat about it! I realized that if I was spectacularly ignorant, others probably were, too, and I’ve been obsessed ever since.
This wonderful history by the author of 1491 and 1493 tells the story of Norman Borlaug, the “wizard” who believed high-tech, high-yield agriculture could feed the world and prevent the destruction of nature, and William Vogt, the “prophet” who believed our unsustainable growth would doom the planet and ourselves.
Borlaug essentially launched the Green Revolution that has tripled the world’s crop and livestock yields, preventing mass starvation and deforestation. But modern-day enviros point out that it hasn’t prevented all starvation and deforestation, and the ideological battles that Mann recounts are still being fought today.
In forty years, the population of the Earth will reach ten billion. Can our world support so many people? What kind of world will it be? In this unique, original and important book, Charles C. Mann illuminates the four great challenges we face - food, water, energy, climate change - through an exploration of the crucial work and wide-ranging influence of two little-known twentieth-century scientists, Norman Borlaug and William Vogt.
Vogt (the Prophet) was the intellectual forefather of the environmental movement, and believed that in our using more than the planet has to give, our prosperity will bring us to…
This is a classic work of environmental history, an exploration of not only the growth of Chicago but the inextricable links between the city and its countryside.
Today, there’s an even sharper distinction between the food producers who live in rural areas and the food consumers who live everywhere else, politically as well as economically, and it’s not always clear who’s making the bigger mess. But this is an essential book about the rise of Big Ag and its impact on the landscape.
In this groundbreaking work, William Cronon gives us an environmental perspective on the history of nineteenth-century America. By exploring the ecological and economic changes that made Chicago America's most dynamic city and the Great West its hinterland, Mr. Cronon opens a new window onto our national past. This is the story of city and country becoming ever more tightly bound in a system so powerful that it reshaped the American landscape and transformed American culture. The world that emerged is our own.
It is April 1st, 2038. Day 60 of China's blockade of the rebel island of Taiwan.
The US government has agreed to provide Taiwan with a weapons system so advanced that it can disrupt the balance of power in the region. But what pilot would be crazy enough to run…
Foer is best known as a brilliant novelist, but he’s also a vegan activist, and We Are the Weather is one of the first and most memorable books to make the point that our taste for meat is ravaging the planet and destabilizing the climate.
It is a strange book—the first 63 pages are mostly a rumination on the Holocaust and various forms of psychological denial—and Foer, a magnificent writer, is a somewhat less magnificent analyst of science and politics.
But his key point is vital and unassailable: The earth is becoming an animal farm, and if we’re going to avoid a climate catastrophe, we’re going to have to eat less animal flesh.
This amazing narrative history of the invention of synthetic fertilizer is arguably a bit off topic, except that the subtitle could have ended: …That Fed the World, But Now Generates 10 Percent of Agricultural Emissions.
Nitrogen fertilizer was probably the most important invention of the 20th century, even more so than TV or the bomb; half the 8 billion people on Earth wouldn’t be here without it.
But the Haber-Bosch chemical process that literally converts fossil fuels into nutrition has created all kinds of environmental problems, including not only greenhouse gases but nitrate pollution that has created a dead zone the size of Connecticut in the Gulf of Mexico.
Now a new scientific race is on, because farmers will need to produce 50 percent more calories by 2050 to feed the growing world population, but they’ll have to do it with a lot less fertilizer pollution and other agricultural messes.
A sweeping history of tragic genius, cutting-edge science, and the Haber-Bosch discovery that changed billions of lives—including your own.
At the dawn of the twentieth century, humanity was facing global disaster: Mass starvation was about to become a reality. A call went out to the world’ s scientists to find a solution.
This is the story of the two men who found it: brilliant, self-important Fritz Haber and reclusive, alcoholic Carl Bosch. Together they discovered a way to make bread out of air, built city-sized factories, and saved millions of lives.
It is April 1st, 2038. Day 60 of China's blockade of the rebel island of Taiwan.
The US government has agreed to provide Taiwan with a weapons system so advanced that it can disrupt the balance of power in the region. But what pilot would be crazy enough to run…
I think it gets a lot wrong about agriculture, and it’s responsible for a lot of romantic myths about what farms that will make it very difficult for us to eat less of the earth—starting with the idea that the environmental tragedy of agriculture was intensification (chemicals and other modern practices that allowed farmers to grow more food per acre) rather than extensification (the transformation of nature into agriculture as farmers use more acres to grow food).
But Pollan is a beautiful writer, and he identified many real problems with industrial agriculture; there’s a reason his book has inspired so many not-nearly-as-compelling copycat books about regenerative agriculture.
What shall we have for dinner? Such a simple question has grown to have a very complicated answer. We can eat almost anything nature has to offer, but deciding what we should eat stirs anxiety. Should we choose the organic apple or the conventional? If organic, local or imported? Wild fish or farmed? Low-carb or low-cal? As the American culture of fast food and unlimited choice invades the world, Pollan follows his next meal from land to table, tracing the origin of everything consumed and the implications for ourselves and our planet. His astonishing findings will shock all who care…
That epiphany about my ignorance led me on a five-year research journey, and this book is the result. I was amazed by how little the world knows about how our food affects our planet, and how much of what we think we know just isn’t so.
The big idea is that, well, we’re eating the earth. Two of every five acres of the earth’s land are now farms or pastures. Our natural planet is becoming an agricultural planet. Our food story is really a land story, and I tried to tell that story through a brilliant, passionate, relentless, somewhat obnoxious protagonist named Tim Searchinger, who figures out the eating-the-earth problem and how we can start to solve it.
