Challenge Books - Spring 2026 > Likes and Comments

I'll run a quarterly Challenge. We're now in Spring, or Autumn in the Southern Hemisphere, so you have three months to participate and hit your personal targets.

The new Challenge is to read a book this quarter, or more than one, which is non-fiction, and about the natural environment.

Sign up to the challenge on top of the Home Page.
You can say how many books you aim to read - one, five, ten.
You will be asked which shelf the books are on - if you choose challenge, or environment, and you do not have a shelf of that name, Goodreads will put one into your personal bookshelf.

Then come here to tell us your titles!
Authors may read their own books for the Challenge, so it's okay to mention them in this thread.

Shelve the book before or during the read, and when you mark it as read, Goodreads will see that and update your challenge score.

I am currently reading Regenesis: Feeding the World Without Devouring the Planet by George Monbiot.

I've finished Regenesis. The early chapters are good, full of detail about soil structure, invertebrates and fungi etc. in a clod.

We meet organic farmers on tough land (all they could afford) in England turning out hearty veg and grain crops, the strips left fallow for a couple of years per rotation. In one case, a couple bought a smallholding and worked it, living in a caravan. The banks took what they had during a downturn, they moved with the kids, bought worse land, started again. They could not afford help. I was thinking, decades of this is not good for the body, it's too hard on you. And sure enough, the lady had suddenly died one day.

Then we see that sheep farming or intensive animal farming equals a nature desert. Not really mentioned is that it is not an industry young people want to work in, being too hard, dirty and time-hungry and far from entertainment, hence a thriving immigrant population, mainly from Eastern Europe. We are told all right that rice farmers in Japan are now almost all elderly, as young people choose a better lifestyle.

Later the author goes off on a modernising tangent, dismissing thousands of years of human evolution, animal husbandry, crop selection and food culture. Nasty habits. He's a vegan, as it happens. He'd love us all to eat from a local veg farm and orchard, but since that won't be happening across the world, the rest of us should eat cereal from perennial ryegrass (does not require annual ploughing) and protein from vat-grown bacteria.

The last third of the book contains the references, so it isn't such a long read as one might imagine. Monbiot is a Guardian columnist.

I feel that readers should realise that throughout humanity's history, the world's population has spread to match the food available. Humans and their livestock now comprise 98% of all vertebrate life on Earth. The Green Revolution (combining plant breeding with new artificial fertilisers and pesticides) exploded the human population worldwide.

Adding vat-grown bacteria as a cheap easy way to provide protein won't stop anyone using all the other forms of food too, as Monbiot seems to assume it will. No, there will just be more cheap protein, and the population will add another billion, spreading until nature is wiped out totally. Nobody will stop extracting krill and all the fish from the ocean, nobody will stop intensive dairying and beef raising on former rainforests, nobody will stop moving housing further up mountains. Industries earning huge money are set up to take advantage. First address the population growth problem, is my view, and do it before the lack of freshwater from shrinking glaciers causes more mass famines and emigrations.

A good step would be to reduce the amount of protein people in more developed countries think they need to eat (everything is sold as protein-packed now) and reduce the amount of it they think they need from meat. A meatless day a week, and smaller meat portions, and meat no more than once a day, would greatly reduce pressure on the industry and allow for free range organic rearing which gave a proper return to farmers. If the population eats less meat, fish, chicken, this requires less of the extractive farming and fishing needed to feed the livestock. Some of that grain and soy can feed humans. We can also consider putting the insect protein Monbiot mentions in petfood, instead of slipping it to humans under misleading labelling.

Funny how all that would not occur to the vegan.

I've got a review copy of When the Forest Breathes: Renewal and Resilience in the Natural World by Suzanne Simard

Just finished a first read of Clearing the Air: A Hopeful Guide to Solving Climate Change — in 50 Questions and Answers by Hannah Ritchie. Very informative and refreshingly optimistic: we have a lot of work to do, but there are viable solutions, available right now, to get us to a much better place. I plan to re-read it, because it's quite information-rich, with a lot of nuance to absorb, but it already injects some much-needed hope into my vision of the future. Highly recommended!

Clare wrote: "I've got a review copy of When the Forest Breathes: Renewal and Resilience in the Natural World by Suzanne Simard
When the Forest Breathes: Renewal and..."

That sounds like a good option for me right now, I really liked her Finding the Mother Tree, and the title reminds me to feel grateful for all the trees in my neighborhood. (Rather than gripe about politics.)

Elizabeth Kolbert has a new(?) book out too: Life on a Little-Known Planet: Dispatches from a Changing World. It’s a collection of past essays, and some complain it’s not new.

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Clare, thanks for your review of Regenesis. I own it but I’ve been reluctant to start it. I agree farming is tough work, and a risky business for families (except in China maybe).

Other books have persuaded us to cut way back on meat in our house. We’re always looking for new things to try - but “Vat-grown bacteria” (!?) doesn’t even sound like food.

Apparently it’s not being used to feed starving people yet. Unless it’s called something different (which seems smart). But Solar Foods uses the technology to make a milk substitute soleil, and ice cream.

This looks great, adding it.

Thanks for the recommendations!

If you plan or hope to read your book this quarter, join the Challenge. This gives you incentive to start and finish the read. My copy of Regenesis was a library book, so I had to get on with it. A large non-fic hardback can be a bit daunting when we are busy.
You can increase your target during the quarter, so it's fine to start with one book.

If readers enjoy a book, the mods can add it to the Group Bookshelf.