A New Book Says Tech-Supported Industrial AG Will Feed the World. Agroecologists Would Like a Word.

Blocking a too-hot sun with aerosolized particles. Re-freezing melted glaciers. Sucking carbon out of the air, then storing it deep underground. For every current and pending catastrophe being wrought by human-caused climate change, there’s an ambitious workaround touted by tech enthusiasts as our salvation from ourselves. Agricultural systems are not immune, and a cycle of news in which researchers warn that we are on track to produce too little food for a growing population only fans the flames of innovation fire. By now, decades and billions of dollars have been poured into manufacturing insect-based proteins, tinkering with kelp to reduce cattle methane burps, and developing pepper-picking robots to replace vulnerable human workers.

A host of such (mostly unsuccessful) technological Hail Marys make appearances in “We Are Eating the Earth,” a new book by journalist Michael Grunwald. The book touts the need for a new tech-fueled Green Revolution to meet the dual challenge of feeding the world and keeping ecosystems intact — by amping up production while simultaneously preventing deforestation for new farmland. Proposed here is that farms as many people think of them — tidy rows of fruits and vegetables happily photosynthesizing beside munching livestock, perhaps in their very own communities — are inefficient, defunct and necessitate devastating land-use changes the planet cannot withstand. The only way we will survive, this argument goes, is to move quickly toward innovation, even if it comes with doses of worker and animal welfare abuse — and failure, à la fake meat.