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Michael Grunwald - five way interview

Michael Grunwald is an award-winning journalist and best-selling author who is now a contributor to the New York Times opinion section. His new book, We Are Eating the Earth: The Race to Fix Our Food System and Save Our Climate, is already transforming the debate over how to feed the world without frying it. Mike is a former staff writer for The Washington Post, Time, and Politico Magazine, and the critically acclaimed author of The Swamp (about the Eveglades and Florida) and The New New Deal (about the Obama stimulus bill). He lives in Miami with his wife, Cristina Dominguez, his teenagers, Max and Lina, and his three deranged dogs. 

Why this book?

Food and agriculture generates a third of our greenhouse gas emissions; it's also the leading driver of water shortages, water pollution, deforestation, and biodiversity losses. It occurred to me that I didn't know squat about it, and since I wrote a lot about the climate, a lot of people were probably as ignorant as I was. What I learned is that the crux of most of our environmental problems is that we're eating the earth; two of every five acres of land on the planet are now farms or pastures, while only 1 of every 100 acres are cities or suburbs. We're losing a soccer field worth of tropical forest to agriculture every six seconds. And I quickly realized that our carbohydrate problems are a lot more interesting than our hydrocarbon problems. We basically knew what to do about energy - electrify the global economy and run it on clean electricity - and we were gradually starting to do it. We didn't even know what we need to know about food and ag, and those problems were getting worse every day. So it seemed like an important topic to tackle.

Why do you think the US, the EU and the UK are so resistant to the obvious problems with biofuels?

Two decades ago, solar and wind power were still global rounding errors, a new documentary called Who Killed the Electric Car? chronicled the death of that technology, and farm-grown fuels looked like the only plausible alternative to fossil fuels. Of course, the farm lobby loved biofuel subsidies and mandates, and as I chronicle in the book, the farm lobby has absurd amounts of influence. So when a brilliant and somewhat obnoxious lawyer named Tim Searchinger started publishing scientific papers showing that using farmland to grow fuel instead of food would induce massive amounts of deforestation to replace the food, there was massive pushback, not only in political circles but in academic and scientific circles as well.

Is there any evidence that Tim Searchinger’s ideas are getting traction where they can make a difference? 

Searchinger's revelations - biofuels are a land-use disaster, biomass power is another climate catastrophe masquerading as a climate solution, regenerative 'carbon farming' is mostly bullshit - have shredded a lot of conventional wisdom on those issues. They've forced defenders of those fake climate solutions to come up with increasingly preposterous arguments to justify them, and I tell the stories of a few of those defenders who actually changed their minds. Searchinger certainly hasn't stopped the expansion of biofuels or biomass power or carbon farming, but he's probably helped slow the growth. 

What’s next? 

I'm going to write about food and climate for The New York Times, Canary Media, and anyone else willing to publish me. This stuff is very important and very undercovered, so I want to keep reporting, banging my spoon on my high chair about it.

What’s exciting you at the moment? 

I think my pretty obvious thesis that we need to make more food with less land so that we can eat less of the earth is inspiring some really healthy discussion in the food, agriculture, and environmental worlds. Some regenerative advocates are just pissed off - when I debated an agroecology professor in Berkeley about the importance of high-yield farming, Alice Waters was glaring at me the whole time - but others are grappling with my ideas and even trying to incorporate them with their own ideas. Food and ag people tend to stay in their silos, so to speak, so it's been cool to see some breakouts.

Image credit: Jody Gross

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