The Future of Agriculture - Sarah Bearchell ****

Popular science topics are fairly evenly divided between those that are of pure intellectual interest, such as astronomy or relativity, and those with a direct impact on our lives - such as climate change or quantum physics. There's often a danger with the 'direct impact' that they can be a little worthy and try too hard to be deeply meaningful. For some reason this often seems to be the case with anything food related. But thankfully agriculture is a topic that is both rarely examined and has the potential for plenty of interesting science (and history thereof).

Inevitably climate change does come into the mix, both in terms of its impact on our ability to grow crops and in the greenhouse gas emissions from cow burps, fertiliser and more. To make things more complex, with a growing world population and some parts of the world chronically short of food, we need ways to grow more without impacting the climate in a negative fashion.

It's purely coincidental that I'm reviewing this book soon after covering We Are Eating the Earth, as they have, to some degree, very different approaches to similar problem areas. Both, I think, would agree on the dubious nature of biofuels (though it's not something Bearchell addresses directly), but where Michael Grunwald in We Are Eating reluctantly admits to the environmental benefits of properly managed intensive farming, Sarah Bearchall is much more likely to be supportive of concepts like regenerative agriculture.

However, Bearchell also gives us a range of useful mechanisms to think about changing the way we interact with food and farming whether it be eating bugs, reducing waste, precision plants or automated animal rearing. This is the kind of book where you don't want lengthy expositions and Bearchell packs a lot into a slim volume.

I found the viewpoint here more challenging than I did Grunwald's - while I'm convinced of the threat of climate change, I think there is no point in preaching an ideal picture. We need pragmatic solutions that work with what people will actually do and that make best use of science like genetic modification. While not coming out as explicitly anti-GM, Bearchell can feel wary about this, and occasionally, comes across as an idealist. But being challenged in your views is not a bad thing, and it's an excellent book to read alongside Grunwald's.

Paperback:

Kindle:
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
These articles will always be free - but if you'd like to support my online work, consider buying a virtual coffee or taking out a membership:
Review by Brian Clegg - See all Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly email free here

Comments

It's On You - Nick Chater and George Loewenstein *****

Going on the cover you might think this was a political polemic - and admittedly there's an element of that - but the reason it's so good is quite different. It shows how behavioural economics and social psychology have led us astray by putting the focus way too much on individuals. A particular target is the concept of nudges which (as described in Brainjacking ) have been hugely over-rated. But overall the key problem ties to another psychological concept: framing. Huge kudos to both Nick Chater and George Loewenstein - a behavioural scientist and an economics and psychology professor - for having the guts to take on the flaws in their own earlier work and that of colleagues, because they make clear just how limited and potentially dangerous is the belief that individuals changing their behaviour can solve large-scale problems. The main thesis of the book is that there are two ways to approach the major problems we face - an 'i-frame' where we focus on the individual ...

Introducing Artificial Intelligence – Henry Brighton & Howard Selina ****

It is almost impossible to rate these relentlessly hip books – they are pure marmite*. The huge Introducing … series (a vast range of books covering everything from Quantum Theory to Islam), previously known as … for Beginners , puts across the message in a style that owes as much to Terry Gilliam and pop art as it does to popular science. Pretty well every page features large graphics with speech bubbles that are supposed to emphasise the point. Funnily, Introducing Artificial Intelligence is both a good and bad example of the series. Let’s get the bad bits out of the way first. The illustrators of these books are very variable, and I didn’t particularly like the pictures here. They did add something – the illustrations in these books always have a lot of information content, rather than being window dressing – but they seemed more detached from the text and rather lacking in the oomph the best versions have. The other real problem is that...

The Laws of Thought - Tom Griffiths *****

In giving us a history of attempts to explain our thinking abilities, Tom Griffiths demonstrates an excellent ability to pitch information just right for the informed general reader. We begin with Aristotelian logic and the way Boole and others transformed it into a kind of arithmetic before a first introduction of computing and theories of language. Griffiths covers a surprising amount of ground - we don't just get, for instance, the obvious figures of Turing, von Neumann and Shannon, but the interaction between the computing pioneers and those concerned with trying to understand the way we think - for example in the work of Jerome Bruner, of whom I confess I'd never heard. This would prove to be the case with a whole host of people who have made interesting contributions to the understanding of human thought processes. Sometimes their theories were contradictory - this isn't an easy field to successfully observe - but always they were interesting. But for me, at least, ...

Search This Blog