YouSaid · the spoken record

George Monbiot

lines on the record: 65
first: 2022-06-10
most recent: 2022-06-10
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Farming as a whole occupies 40% of the planet's surface. Of that just the 12% is under crops and 28% of the surface is for grazing by livestock. And this is an amazingly profligate way of producing our food because from grazing alone we get just”
2022-06-10 · Intelligence Squared · The New Food Revolution, with George Monbiot · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I mean, if an alien spaceship landed here, the green men would walk up to the nearest sheep and say, take me to your leader because they would assume that they were the dominant lifeform here and that they've been given the great majority of the land, far more land than we occupy. I mean, in the uplands alone, sheep occupy more than twice as much land as the entire urban environment in the UK and yet produce just a really tiny fraction of our food. Worldwide, it's an even bigger thing because we quite rightly campaign against urban sprawl and urban sprawl is a really bad thing. It's very bad for the countryside, but also very bad for cities. But urban areas worldwide occupy 1% of the planet's surface. And incidentally, loads of the surface is desert or ice cap or rocky mountains, which we can't make much use of.”
2022-06-10 · Intelligence Squared · The New Food Revolution, with George Monbiot · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The plant's activity in the soil by bacteria above all else, we can use that to radically change the way we farm. And one of the outcomes of that new ecology is the recognition that soil fertility is as much a product of its biology as it is of its chemistry. And if you can get the biology right, you need to use much less chemistry.”
2022-06-10 · Intelligence Squared · The New Food Revolution, with George Monbiot · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Fertile land just almost instantly turning into a dust bowl and blowing away. And that famously happened in the 1930s in the United States, but it's happened less famously in several other parts of the world since then. So there is that deep concern that this is the entire basis of our lives and most of the terrestrial life on Earth, and yet we're treating it like dirt. But on the other hand, these astonishing new developments in soil ecology, which are so thrilling, they show us a whole new way, potentially of farming, because as we've begun to understand the soil as a biological structure and understand these amazingly intimate relations between plants, bacteria and fungi in particular and how it's really the regulation of”
2022-06-10 · Intelligence Squared · The New Food Revolution, with George Monbiot · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, so I think there were two drivers there. One was very urgent concern about the state of the soil because soil being a complex system can absorb a certain amount of stress. I mean, all complex systems and just about everything important to us is a complex system, including our own brains and our own bodies. Complex systems can absorb stress and absorb stress. And they have these self-regulating properties which maintain an equilibrium state. But if the stress goes beyond a certain level, they suddenly pass a tipping point and collapse. And soil is no exception to this. So, for instance, if you've degraded and degraded the soil, you might not notice very much until, for instance, the severe drought strikes, whereupon just about overnight the rate of soil erosion rises six thousandfold, and that's called a dust bowl. So you get”
2022-06-10 · Intelligence Squared · The New Food Revolution, with George Monbiot · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“While I was at a farm when I was researching the book, and a couple of the farmhands came running over and they said, are you okay? And I said, what? I said, oh my God, we thought you'd died. And I was lying on the ground with my head in a hole. And I hadn't told anyone what I was doing. So they thought I'd just collapse because I'd been there for like half an hour. And I was just seeing what was living in the soil.”
2022-06-10 · Intelligence Squared · The New Food Revolution, with George Monbiot · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's very similar. I got the same sort of feeling when I brought out this little jeweller's loop, this lens, which you buy for six quid online, and you find the focal length. And it's like, oh, I'm in a different world.”
2022-06-10 · Intelligence Squared · The New Food Revolution, with George Monbiot · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That could be because of dog poo, but yeah, there's a pub I went to once called the Jolly Ploughman, and on the door it said no muddy boots. But yeah, it is a strange thing. It's amazing how we've neglected it. And I think the fact is that soil isn't as beautiful to the eye as many other ecosystems like a coral reef or a rainforest. But once you understand it, it's as beautiful to the mind. When you work out its extraordinary biological relations and the way in which the plants are dependent on this astonishingly rich web of life, then you began to begin to see this as just as wonderful and fascinating and enlightening as snorkeling on a coral reef.”
2022-06-10 · Intelligence Squared · The New Food Revolution, with George Monbiot · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And all that makes it tremendously resilient. It's a very, very tough structure, which is why, in the state of nature, it doesn't all wash off the land. If it weren't a biological structure, if it were just a heap of minerals and organic material, it wouldn't have that robustness and it would be swept off with any major rainstorm or wind or anything like that. And it's only because of the life in the soil that soil exists. And it's only because soil exists that we exist and everything that we've made and everything in our lives, it's totally dependent on the ground beneath our feet.”
2022-06-10 · Intelligence Squared · The New Food Revolution, with George Monbiot · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Properties in the way that they hold water hold oxygen and the rest of it, whatever happens to the soil. And then the slightly larger soil creatures, the little micro arthropods, a tiny little scuttling creatures, which you can only really see with a strong lens, but are unbelievably abundant. You can have like several hundred thousand under one square meter of ground in groups which you never knew existed. I mean, it's like magic. As soon as you find the focal length, they just woof. The whole thing is alive with all these weird and wonderful forms of life. Well, they then turn those tiny little bacterial clumps.”
2022-06-10 · Intelligence Squared · The New Food Revolution, with George Monbiot · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I was ecologically bored in truth. I'd pretty well discovered everything that there is to discover around here in terms of wildlife. Seen all the birds, identified all the plants. And I was thinking, what can I explore? What is there left? And then I thought, oh, hang on, I'm standing on it. And it is one of the richest and most abundant ecosystems on Earth. It's as diverse an abundant as a coral reef or a rainforest. Like a coral reef, it's a biological structure. It's actually created by the creatures that live in it. And so starting at the bottom of the food chain, the bacteria in the soil, which are super abundant and amazingly diverse, they use the carbon in the soil as cement. They turn it into cements, which they stick together all the little mineral particles with and create the chambers in which they live, which have almost”
2022-06-10 · Intelligence Squared · The New Food Revolution, with George Monbiot · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, with the help of my wonderful allotment neighbour, who's a Serbian refugee she's now in her eighties, and she watched us with utter perplexity and despair as we hacked at the grass and said, oh, no, no, no, no. I do this when we're a little girl. I show you. And she just, it's like it's almost like her arms didn't move. She just a little twist of the body and the grass just falls flat all in the same direction. And we were staring. How do you do that? And she sort of taught us the movement. And I can't claim any great expertise, but at least we make it look as if someone's been over it. And we use scythes not because we're trying to recreate any bucolic idle, but because we don't want to harm the frogs and the voles and the other creatures that live on the plot. And it's just a much more ecologically sensitive way of managing it.”
2022-06-10 · Intelligence Squared · The New Food Revolution, with George Monbiot · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Out and planted about forty heritage fruit trees, mostly old apple varieties. And it's quite amazing how the ecosystem has changed since I did that. We've seen yellow ants come in, I don't know where from, but have built these astonishing anthills everywhere. You can scarcely walk across it now without tripping up because it's covered in these big anthills. I think at the last count, 17 species of wildflower, which, well, their seeds must have been dormant in the soil. And at this time of year with the flowers in bloom beneath the trees, the apples forming, the cherries ripening, it is one of the most beautiful places you could visit. And I feel astonishingly lucky that we have this almost on our doorsteps between the five families we pay $75. Pounds a year for the privilege. It's really a remarkable thing to be able to enjoy.”
2022-06-10 · Intelligence Squared · The New Food Revolution, with George Monbiot · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Thanks, Alice. Well, this is an orchard which I share with four other families, and I planted it across three plots on an allotment site 18 years ago now. And at the time, it's hard to believe now, there was almost no demand for allotments. And the local association was desperate to get people to take up the plots because otherwise the council would have reclaimed the site for housing. And unfortunately we did lose lots of allotment sites in that time. And now there's desperation to get hold of a plot of land to grow stuff. But we were very lucky in that I managed to secure these three plots. They were covered in 10 foot brambles. I hacked my way through it like the prince in sleeping beauty and eventually managed to clear the site, dig the bramble.”
2022-06-10 · Intelligence Squared · The New Food Revolution, with George Monbiot · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Welcome to Intelligence Squared. I'm Connor Boyle, coming up George Mombio, the writer and activist, discusses our relationship with food and its relationship with a planet experiencing devastating climate change. Is the era of carte blanche menu all over? George Mombio is known as a columnist for The Guardian and as an author and campaigner who is telling the world that the time for action on the climate crisis is now his latest book, Regenesis, Feeding the World without Devouring the Planet, looks at how we can lessen the impact of food consumption and farming on the global environment. He joined our host for this podcast Alice Thompson, columnist and interviewer for the Times to talk about it. Here's Alice with more”
2022-06-10 · Intelligence Squared · The New Food Revolution, with George Monbiot · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT