For a while it has seemed that Monbiot’s works exist in two largely separate universes. His works either look at corporate power, corruption, and capitalism; how this affects the both the environment and society, often with a focus on social justice. And his other work that focuses on biodiversity, land use, and rewilding, often attacking farming as as perhaps the key cause of environmental crisis. Reading Monbiot and Hutchinson’s book the Secret History of Neoliberalism with Monbiot’s Regenesis is an interesting excercise in examining these tensions.

The Secret History really is a very good book. It starts off with an examination of how capitalism needs an outside, an external unvalued area, from which Nature can be appropriated, exploited for free, laid waste to, and then capitalism will move somewhere else, and exploit that. Its a good introduction to the concept of uneven development. It focuses on elite power, how neoliberalism has been pushed by the wealthy since the post-war period as a way to enrich and empower themselves. It talks of how neoliberalism hollows out democracy, a vital part of society, leaving the facade still standing, but behind it, there is nothing, all meaningful politics take place behind closed doors, through lobbying, secret networks and dark money. He shows how capitalism itself isolates and separates us from one another. Thatcher said there was no such thing as society, and neoliberalism makes this true by eroding and destroying community and connection.

In Regenesis the focus is on the destruction of industrial farming. In between expressing joy and wonder at soils, complex ecological systems, and all sorts of wildlife, he rages at the sheer volume of meat production, the enormous global scale of its footprint on the world. He talks of the massive number of inputs and outputs of this system in the UK, which have eroded the very fertility of the soil that we need to produce food, making farms even more dependent on fertlisers, pesticides and other chemicals. This has overhelmed huge parts of the UK countryside with pollution, leaving much of the UK completely inhospitable to wildlife. Politicians and government bodies deliberately looking the other way, giving the green light to the decimation of wildlife. He calls meat production the key problem facing society, citing statistics about the vast volume of CO2 being emitted by animal farming being an enormous and largely ignored cause of climate breakdown. Various new technologies such as synthetic food, precision fermentation and new approaches to (arable) farming are positioned as the solution.

These books fail to seriously speak to each other. In Regenesis doesn’t really bring in analysis of elite power or capitalism, it is oddly left to one side. The neoliberalisation of farming, that destroyed small-scale family farms, required huge upscaling, monocultures, maximisation of yeilds, huge inputs of chemicals, enormous waste and pollution, and the emptying out of rural places, are ignored. Rather than neoliberalism, it is all the fault of the cows, pigs, and chickens. Elites are often positioned as a solution, such as his friends at Knepp Estate, showing the way to recover nature through animal grazing (he makes a point to say this doesn’t count as farming). Rather than democracy, experts (such as himself) and elites are positioned has having the knowledge, wealth and authority to reshape the whole countryside, expel farmers from their land. Interesting small-scale experiments are talked of as being major solutions, when it is obvious that scaling up these technologies to be major parts of the food system is full of huge unknonws. He talks of rewilding as a fix for a broken relationship to nature, without mentioning that it is not farming, but capitalism, that is at the root of our isolatation not just from each other, but also from other species.

It’s quite disconcering, and Monbiot really does need to bring these two analyses together to find genuine solutions.