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George MonbiotJuly 3, 2025 at 1:58 AM EDT

1. At the Tipping Points conference in Exeter yesterday, I spoke about the likelihood of food system collapse: a massive existential threat few people's radar. If you want a handle on the issue, here's the submission I made to a parliamentary committee. + 🧵 monbiot.com

2. We need to do four things all at the same time. A. Ensure that 8, 9 or 10 billion people receive a healthy and sufficient diet. B. Do so without destroying Earth systems. C. Rewild as much land and sea as we can, to stop and reverse 6th Great Extinction drivers. D. Prevent food system collapse. 3. People tend to get siloed, in every profession. What I see in almost all food discussions is a focus on either A or B or C, but very seldom on all three, and even less often on A,B,C and D. Yet we will fail unless we address all 4. 4. So you get people saying "here's how we can increase yields to ensure there remains enough food for everyone." Yes, but where's the water going to come from? How will you protect the soil? What about #Insectageddon? 5. Then you get other people saying (in fact this theme now dominates discussions): "Look at my regenerative farming model. It's conserving soil and killing less wildlife." Great. But your yields have fallen by 75%. So either someone else must intensify or more land must be used to grow food. 6. Then other people say, "we must rewild the world". Yes. But it's not going to happen without major dietary change. Eg we can't have grass-fed beef (the most land-hungry of all products) and rewilding. In fact, it drives a massive de-wilding. At this point, half the enthusiasts shuffle away. 7. But scarcely anyone's saying, "we must prevent systemic collapse in the global food system". I'm not talking here about external drivers, such as environmental and geopolitical shocks (though they're likely triggers). I'm talking about the system's internal dynamics, destroying its resilience. 8. It suffers from very similar instabilities to the global financial system before 2008. Some fragilities are even more advanced than some of the financial drivers before Lehman Brothers went down. This is the least understood of the 4 issues, but could be the one that hits us first and hardest. 9. In fact, it could happen tomorrow, triggered by a relatively small event in an obscure corner. It could be an IT outage, a corporate failure, a speculative surge, an export restriction, a supply bottleneck: the butterfly's wingflap that tips over a system which has lost its resilience. 10. So we need to be working on all four issues all at the same time. This is the point of my book Regenesis, where I try to navigate this incredibly fraught 4-dimensional problem and produce some workable solutions. penguin.co.uk

11. This, sadly, is why some people absolutely hated it: because it doesn't offer any comfort to their siloed perspectives. And boy, are people wedded to their silos! But all one-dimensional approaches will fail. 12. This is a highly complex food-system polycrisis, embedded within an even bigger and even more complex Earth-system polycrisis. Simplistic and blinkered approaches are not just non-solutions. They are a very large part of the problem. The thread on one page: skywriter.blue