This book by Chris Smaje is an extended polemic against the ideas expressed by environmentalist George Monbiot in ReGenesis, where he asserted that farming was a major contributor to climate change and the decline in biodiversity. “We can produce more food with less farming,” he suggested.
Both Smaje and Monbiot share concerns about climate change, destructive agriculture and rapacious consumerism. But while Monobiot advocates an “eco modernist” approach to meeting the world’s dietary requirements with technology and vegan foodstuffs Smaje is grounded in the ecology of sustainable mixed use farming in which animal waste is used to benefit the soil and support growing plants.
Smaje says his essay is not intended “as a personal attack on Monbiot or anyone else. It is intended as an attack on the anti-ecological dystopia he and others now seem intent on summoning.”