-
See Our Summer
Books to Watch!
The Race to Fix Our Food System and Save Our Climate
by Michael Grunwald
From the author of New York Times bestseller The New New Deal, a groundbreaking piece of reportage from the trenches of the next climate war: the fight to fix our food system.
Humanity has cleared a land mass the size of Asia plus Europe to grow food, and our food system generates a third of our carbon emissions. By 2050, we're going to need a lot more calories to fill nearly 10 billion bellies, but we can't feed the world without frying it if we keep tearing down an acre of rainforest every six seconds. We are eating the earth, an ingenious phrase coined by Michael Grunwald, and the greatest challenge facing our species will be to slow our relentless expansion of farmland into nature. Even if we quit fossil fuels, we'll keep hurtling towards climate chaos if we don't solve our food and land problems.
In this rollicking, shocking narrative, Grunwald shows how the world, after decades of ignoring the climate problem at the center of our plates, has pivoted to making it worse, embracing solutions that sound sustainable but could make it even harder to grow more food with less land. But he also tells the stories of the dynamic scientists and entrepreneurs pursuing real solutions, from a jungle-tough miracle crop called pongamia to genetically-edited cattle embryos, from Impossible Whoppers to a non-polluting pesticide that uses the technology behind the COVID vaccines to constipate beetles to death. It's an often infuriating saga of lobbyists, politicians, and even the scientific establishment making terrible choices for humanity, but it's also a hopeful account of the people figuring out what needs to be done—and trying to do it.
Michael Grunwald, bestselling author of The Swamp and The New New Deal, builds his narrative around a brilliant, relentless, unforgettable food and land expert named Tim Searchinger. He chronicles Searchinger's uphill battles against bad science and bad politics, both driven by the overwhelming influence of agricultural interests. And he illuminates a path that could save our planetary home for ourselves and future generations—through better policy, technology, and behavior, as well as a new land ethic recognizing that every acre matters.
"Grunwald does the important work of translating the legal, scientific, and often esoteric aspects of the issue into immediate action. Ambitious in scope, the book provides a roadmap of environmental policy relating to agricultural land in the past few decades and the emergency we're now facing. An accessible and alarming look at the planet's land crisis." —Kirkus Review
"In this bracing report, journalist Grunwald...offers a myth-busting overview of current debates around how to improve the world's agricultural systems. This provides much food for thought." —Publishers Weekly
"Engaging, informative, witty, convincing, and ultimately sobering offering… While the content is disturbing, Grunwald's delivery helps gets his message across: the need for land-use reform, immediately." —Booklist
"The quest to feed humanity's voracious appetites is consuming ever more land around the world. We Are Eating the Earth is an indispensable guide to the thorniest problem in global economics and environmental policy—an issue that most advocates ignore, but that we urgently need to face if we want to have any hope of solving it." —Matthew Yglesias, author of One Billion Americans
"Food is now as big a climate challenge as oil, and We Are Eating the Earth is the most vivid and inspiring reckoning with this wicked problem written in this age of climate crisis." —David Wallace-Wells, New York Times bestselling author of The Uninhabitable Earth
This information about We Are Eating the Earth was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Michael Grunwald is the bestselling author of two widely acclaimed books, The Swamp and The New New Deal. He's a former staff writer for The Washington Post, Time, and POLITICO and winner of the George Polk Award for national reporting, the Worth Bingham Award for investigative reporting, and many other journalism prizes. He lives in Miami.
The Whyte Python World Tour
by Travis Kennedy
Rikki Thunder, drummer for '80s metal band Whyte Python, is on the verge of fame, love—and a spy mission he didn’t expect.
The Original
by Nell Stevens
In a grand English country house in 1899, an aspiring art forger must unravel whether the man claiming to be her long-lost cousin is an impostor.
The World's Greatest Detective and Her Just Okay Assistant
by Liza Tully
A great detective's young assistant yearns for glory, but first they have learn to get along in this delightful feel good mystery.
Angelica
by Molly Beer
A women-centric view of revolution through the life of Angelica Schuyler Church, Alexander Hamilton's influential sister-in-law.
.png)
These Blue Mountains by Sarah Loudin Thomas
"[An] atmospheric tale of unexpected hope." —Lisa Wingate, New York Times bestselling author
Your guide toexceptional books
BookBrowse seeks out and recommends the best in contemporary fiction and nonfiction—books that not only engage and entertain but also deepen our understanding of ourselves and the world around us.
