The Green Gettysburg Book Club met once again last Friday at 9:00 AM to plan our discussion of Regenisis: feeding the world without devouring the planet by George Monbiot, a British journalist and environmental activist. Monbiot has written several books and has a regular column in the Guardian newspaper. An archive of his columns, arranged by topic, is available here: https://www.monbiot.com/ Interesting stuff covering a wide range of topics!
Regensis begins with a careful look at the life in the soil beneath our feet. With the help of a 40X “loupe” (or magnifying glass), Monbiot explores the hidden world in a spadeful of soil from the community “allotment” that he and friends have planted with apple and other fruit trees. The experience, he says, is like snorkling for the first time, breaking through the surface of the water into a whole new realm. That spadeful of soil, Monbiot maintains, offers more species diversity than the Serrengeti or Amazon. But it will also have important things to teach about how the things plants need to grow and bear fruit are created and maitained and then made available to plants. This knowledge, he will argue later in the book, could help us design new ways to grow our food that are less damaging to the the natural world that sustains us.
At the mention of “new ways to grow our food,” you may begin to suspect that George is coming after your cheeseburger and fries, and you might be right. We’ll just have to see what he has in mind. Judging by his columns for the Guardian, he is also a fierce critic of the neoliberal order described so effectively by Sally Weintrobe in The Psychogial Roots of the Climate Crisis, which we read earlier this year. No doubt there will be plenty to talk about as we work our way through Monbiot’s book!
Since not everyone has the book at this point, and some prefer a paper copy which will take a while to arrive, we decided on Friday to hit the pause button and talk about something else next week: Degrowth. In particular, we decided to take a look at a NYT article from June 6 by Jennifer Slazlai entitled, “Shrink the Economy, Save the World?” The article is available here https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/08/books/review/shrink-the-economy-save-the-world.html. But for those without a subscription I will also “gift it” in a separate email. Other perspectives on degrowth are also welcome, so if you have additional links on the topic that you would like to share, please send them along.
Don’t forget, it you don’t regularly get the Zoom link for our online meeting and would like to, just let me know! Now is a great time to join the discussion as we start something completely new.
Take care,
Will Lane, host
Green Gettysburg Book Club