Michael Grunwald: We Are Eating the Earth

Learn from a leading journalist why we can't save the climate without fixing food. Then we eat: reception with refreshments follows.
About this Event

Michael Grunwald has spent three decades making comfortable people uncomfortable—as a George Polk Award–winning reporter for The Washington Post, Time, and Politico, and as the bestselling author of The Swamp and The New New Deal. His new book opens with a confession: after twenty years on the climate beat, he had scarcely thought about food. Almost nobody has. The food system generates roughly a third of global emissions; farms and pastures already claim two of every five acres of land on Earth, while our much-lamented cities and suburbs take up one in a hundred; and a soccer field of tropical forest vanishes into farmland every six seconds. A world that quit fossil fuels tomorrow would still eat its way into catastrophe.

Grunwald follows the land-use math wherever it leads, which is how he has managed to quarrel with nearly everyone: with the right over climate denial and Big Ag boosterism, and with the left over its own enthusiasms — biofuels, farm-to-table romance, the hope that the climate can be grazed back to health. Environmentalists, agribusiness lobbyists, and animal advocates have all taken their shots; he keeps answering with numbers, and with an unfashionable optimism about human ingenuity. His prescription is unglamorous and radical at once: grow more food on less land, and spare what remains of the wild. Come for Grunwald’s keynote and stay for lively debate and discussion afterwards.