WE ARE EATING THE EARTH

A journalist and bestselling author reports on the critical condition of our food system.

In the midst of our climate change crisis is a land crisis. Within the next 25 years, current trends predict that “the world’s farmers will clear at least a dozen more Californias’ worth of land.” Agriculture is the main driver of deforestation, as well as of water shortages and biodiversity loss. That means mass deforestation lies in our future, which will wipe out essential carbon sinkholes like the Amazon rainforest, as well as countless wetlands, prairies, and diverse ecosystems. As populations expand, it’s an unavoidable fact that we need our planet to produce more food—according to Grunwald, it needs to produce “even more calories over the next 30 years than it had produced over the previous 12,000”—an imposing challenge. How to meet that demand without decimating critical habitat is the fraught question at the heart of the book. Grunwald gathers decades of history and research to examine how we got here and where we can go in the future. Along the way, he critiques biofuels and says environmental policy has not always been a productive mode for our planet’s health. He commends the many scientists doing critical work on the ground. Among them is Tim Searchinger, a “brainiac among brainiacs” who appears as a guide through these pages. Grunwald does the important work of translating the legal, scientific, and often esoteric aspects of the issue into immediate action. Ambitious in scope, the book provides a roadmap of environmental policy relating to agricultural land in the past few decades and the emergency we’re now facing.

An accessible and alarming look at the planet’s land crisis.