Simon Fairlie

Within the first few chapters I thought that this book might become one of those that I proselytise for; at the end of it, I find myself fighting the urge to order ten more copies so I can pass them out come the holidays.

And all this despite the fact that I was really turned off by the hyperbolic jacket description.

Part of the reason I don't immediately buy ten more copies is that it's not an easy read -- Fairlie's argument is scientifically rigorous, and even though he explains the math in a way that a lay audience can understand, it's still more of a 201 text than a 101 text. And, unfortunately, the subjects of food security and permaculture don't appear (yet) to be of interest to a general audience.

But they should be. The underlying message of this book, the Big Idea that we have so much trouble accepting, is that the Earth is a closed system -- a fabulously complex one, and one that we understand very imperfectly, but one which we cannot escape taking part in and affecting. From this premise, Fairlie examines the two ends of the ideological spectrum: the arguments for continuing industrialization of agriculture and high meat consumption; and the arguments for a vegan lifestyle, whether achieved organically or through technological fixes.

Being, as I said earlier, a 201 text, Fairlie spends most of his time taking down the vegan argument, assuming that anyone reading the book is already fairly convinced that industrialized agriculture is an unsustainable system. The way he does this is by showing, again and again, the sorts of cycles various nutrients pass through, and the many ways that domestic animals have been bred to faciliate those cycles. Industrialization has usurped those roles by making it possible to mine for or synthesize much of that; but this creates vast inefficiencies, and it is those inefficiencies that vegans hold up as reasons to eliminate livestock altogether. Fairlie is quite convincing in showing the way numbers have been manipulated by both sides of the argument, and in making the reader question whether the low-tech sort of agriculture practiced by humanity for thousands of years was perhaps the most efficient system yet designed.

I do not agree with him on every point; being from the urban elite, his picture of a re-ruralized future was, quite frankly, frightening to me, and I am not so dead-set against developing technologies that mimic the roles livestock traditionally held rather than going entirely back to animal-power. But the greatest strength in this book is that Fairlie invites the reader to argue with him, making his own prejudices transparent and giving the reader as much unbiased information as is possible. He is also, being English, understandably most knowledgeable about (and interested in) the British Isles and their ecology; there are several sections that are useful to an American reader only for the template they provide, rather than any of Fairlie's specifics. Still, this is overall an important book, and one I hope finds a wider audience.… (mehr)