George Monbiot’s Ally RePlanet Accused of Smelling “Like Astroturf”

George Monbiot has attacked The Land magazine for having succumbed to “the current wave of conspiracism” in its criticism of his involvement with Mark Lynas and the rebranded ecomodernist group RePlanet, who promote nuclear power, GMOs, and synthetic food.

Monbiot took exception to a lead editorial in The Land (issue no. 32) entitled Rebooting Reality: Ecomodernists want to ‘reboot food’: Mike Hannis smells astroturf. In the editorial, The Land’s co-editor, who is also a Senior Lecturer in Ethics, Politics and Environment at Bath Spa University, wrote about RePlanet and its Reboot Food campaign, as part of which, “RePlanet kindly funded a (Monbiot) speaking tour of Europe, and associated media blitz, promoting Monbiot’s controversial book Regenesis as a statement of their own position.” In Regenesis, it may be remembered, Monbiot promotes synthetic food as a silver bullet for eliminating livestock-related farming, thus enabling the rewilding of vast tracts of rural land.

In his editorial, Hannis pointed out how well RePlanet’s objectives serve the interests of industry. For instance, their Reboot Food campaign explicitly aims to secure state funding for the emerging synthetic food industry. He could equally have pointed to how perfectly RePlanet’s campaigning to suspend organic farming targets and deregulate GMOs synchs with key current campaign goals of the pesticides lobby in Brussels, where RePlanet has an office.

Hannis also noted that although RePlanet says it is “entirely charitably funded and strictly accepts no funding from industry”, it does accept funding from “charitable” foundations which, Hannis says, are “set up by companies and wealthy individuals to further projects they favour. The trail is not hard to follow.”