If you want a general overview of news and articles on regenerative food, farming and land use, you can follow the newsfeed "Cook Organic Not the Planet" by the Organic Consumers Association (OCA), and/or sign up for OCA's weekly online newsletter (you can subscribe online, or text "Bytes" to 97779.)
You can also visit the Regeneration International website, where you'll find this list of books on regenerative agriculture.
Solving the soil, health, environmental and climate crises
Without going into extensive detail here (you can read the references above), we need to connect the dots between our soil, public health, environment and climate crises. As the widely-read Mercola newsletter puts it:
Virtually every growing environmental and health problem can be traced back to modern food production. This includes but is not limited to:
" Food insecurity and malnutrition amid mounting food waste
" Rising obesity and chronic disease rates despite growing health care outlays
" Diminishing fresh water supplies
" Toxic agricultural chemicals polluting air, soil and waterways, thereby threatening the entire food chain from top to bottom
" Disruption of normal climate and rainfall patterns
Connecting the dots between climate and food
We can't really solve the climate crisis (and the related soil, environmental, and public health crisis) without simultaneously solving the food and farming crisis. We need to stop putting greenhouse gas pollution into the atmosphere (by moving to 100-percent renewable energy), but we also need to move away from chemical-intensive, energy-intensive food, factory farming and land use, as soon as possible.
Regenerative food and farming has the potential to draw down a critical mass of carbon (200-250 billion tons) from the atmosphere over the next 25 years and store it in our soils and living plants, where it will increase soil fertility, food production and food quality (nutritional density), while re-stabilizing the climate.
The heavy use of pesticides, GMOs, chemical fertilizers and factory-farming by 50 million industrial farmers (mainly in the Global North) is not just poisoning our health and engendering a global epidemic of chronic disease and malnutrition. It's also destroying our soil, wetlands' and forests' natural ability to sequester excess atmospheric carbon into the earth.
The good news is that solar and wind power, and energy conservation are now cheaper than fossil fuels. And most people are starting to understand that organic, grass-fed and freshly-prepared foods are safer and more nutritious than chemical and GMO foods.
The food movement and climate movements must break through our single-issue silos and start to work together. Either we stop Big Coal, Big Oil, fracking, and the mega-pipelines, or climate change will soon morph into climate catastrophe, making it impossible to grow enough food to feed the planet. Every food activist needs to become a climate activist.
On the other hand, every climate activist needs to become a food activist. Our current system of industrial food, farming and land use, now degenerating 75 percent of all global farmland, is "mining" and decarbonizing the soil, destroying our forests, and releasing 44-57 percent of all climate-destabilizing greenhouse gases (carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, and black soot) into our already supersaturated atmosphere, while at the same time undermining our health with commoditized, overly processed food.
Solving the crisis of rural poverty, democracy and endless war
Out-of-touch and out-of-control governments of the world now take our tax money and spend $500 billion dollars a year mainly subsidizing 50 million industrial farmers to do the wrong thing. These farmers routinely over-till, over-graze (or under-graze), monocrop, and pollute the soil and the environment with chemicals and GMOs to produce cheap commodities (corn, soy, wheat, rice, cotton) and cash crops, low-grade processed food and factory-farmed meat and animal products. Meanwhile 700 million small family farms and herders, comprising the 3 billion people who produce 70 percent of the world's food on just 25 percent of the world's acreage, struggle to make ends meet.
If governments can be convinced or forced by the power of the global grassroots to reduce and eventually cut off these $500 billion in annual subsidies to industrial agriculture and Big Food, and instead encourage and reward family farmers and ranchers who improve soil health, biodiversity, animal health and food quality, we can simultaneously reduce global poverty, improve public health, and restore climate stability.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
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