David Montgomery - Co-author of “What Your Food Ate: How to Heal Our Land and Reclaim Our Health”
One Planet Podcast · Climate Change, Politics, Sustainability, Environmental Solutions, Renewable Energy, Activism, Biodiversity, Carbon Footprint, Wildlife, Regenerative Agriculture, Circular Economy, Extinction, Net-Zero
English - August 24, 2022 13:11 - 1 hour - 56.4 MB - ★★★★★ - 137 ratingsDocumentary Society & Culture Education How To Homepage Download Apple Podcasts Google Podcasts Overcast Castro Pocket Casts RSS feed
David R. Montgomery teaches at the University of Washington where he studies the evolution of topography and how geological processes shape landscapes and influence ecological systems. He loved maps as a kid and now writes about the relationship of people to their environment, and regenerative agriculture. In 2008 he was named a MacArthur Fellow. He is the author of award-winning popular-science books (King of Fish, Dirt, and Growing a Revolution) and co-authored The Hidden Half of Nature, The Microbial Roots of Life and Health and What Your Food Ate: How to Heal Our Land and Reclaim Our Health with his wife, biologist Anne Biklé.
"The last few decades have seen an explosion of information in terms of how our actions affect the natural world and arranging from, the climate to the soil, to water. There's an awful lot of things that we've been doing. That are degrading the life support systems of a planet that our descendants are going to depend on.
We need to quite radically to readdress many of those basic issues about how we live in the land, how we raise our food, and reframe the way we think about them in terms of how to pass on the world in better shape than we got it. We're at a point where we now have the knowledge to be able to try and think about doing that, in terms of the soil, we have the examples of regenerative farmers who've been very good at figuring out ways to farm in a way that uses less fossil fuel, that builds soil's organic matter back up that I think would actually produce healthier food for the human populace.
We really are this century in a place where the shape of humanity for centuries to come is gonna be influenced by the choices we make over the next few decades. We've got 20, 30, 40 years, probably, to get off fossil fuels and to reshape agriculture in ways that make the climate and our soil sustainable. It's crazy for humanity to be distracting ourselves with conflict between people at a time when the whole future of humanity is really at stake in terms of what we do this century. What really matters is the state of what we leave for those who will follow us and try and make the world a better place."
Photo credit: Cooper Reid