Siren Song: digging into the lure of food ecomodernism

I’ve been having an interesting offline debate recently with physicist Tom Murphy, author of the excellent Do the Math blog. I’ll write about it in my next post. In essence, Tom is more certain than I am that human agricultural civilization is a busted flush. Since I generally get it in the neck for my doominess on this point, it’s nice to be in discussion with someone who’s further down that line – especially when it’s as interesting and friendly as the one I’ve had with Tom.

But in this post I’m going to mention a different interlocutor – one who now seems to sit on the more usual ‘we can sort this with tech’ side of the line and with whom the ‘debate’, if that’s what you could call it, hasn’t been friendly at all. While I’ve tried swearing off further engagement with the writing of George Monbiot, a recent Guardian article of his is such a perfect microcosm of the difficulties and dangers of ecomodernism (more on that term below) as applied to the food system that I think it merits attention.

For the most part, I’m not going to dive too deeply into the details of George’s argument and evidence here – I’ve done that before, to little avail. It’s more useful, I think, to look at the article as a piece of literature or rhetoric, and tune in to the story it wants to tell.

I’d parse that story as follows. There’s a problem with agriculture – it’s something quite technical, to do with a trade-off between crop yields and environmental impact. There’s a farmer near Oxford called Tolly who miraculously seems to have solved this problem and “found the holy grail of agriculture” – high yields and low impacts. His solution involves soil management which somehow affects the behaviour of soil bacteria, but nobody quite understands how he’s done it. If we could characterise soils more scientifically, then maybe this holy grail could be replicated and scaled up – but how can we do that? George meets a scientist for a drink in a pub in Oxford and it emerges from their conversation that there might be a way. The results are (literally) seismic.

“We stared at each other. Time seemed to stall. Could this really be true?”

With $4 million of start-up money from the Bezos Earth Fund George and two colleagues (a seismologist ...