Weekend reads

Broken food systems are responsible for one in 10 of the global population going hungry and one-third of all greenhouse gas emissions.

In her book Diet for a Hot Planet, author and leading expert on global food systems, Anna Lappé warns that without radical change to food systems run away climate change is inevitable.

“If we miss the food systems opportunities to reduce greenhouse gas emissions; if we just let our industrial food system continue on the course it is on, which is deepening the emissions related to it. If we do nothing about food; if we don’t shift and transform how we grow food, what we’re growing and where we’re growing it – even if we got everything right in every other sector, even if every one of us had solar panels on our homes, and we stop fracking and we stop drilling for new oil; even if we got everything else right, we would still blow our carbon emissions.”

She added: “Zooming out, we know that the crises we face crosses borders. Greenhouse gas emissions that we emit here in the US affect the world and unfortunately the people who have had the least impact on climate, who have emitted the least greenhouse gas emissions are now being affected the most. So the onus of responsibility should be disproportionately on the shoulders of countries like the United States that have had such a big impact.”

In Diet for a Hot Planet Lappé takes the reader on a journey from food systems being the problem to food as a solution.

Catch up with the full podcast for more from the pages of Diet for a Hot Planet.

The Regenerative Life/The Regenerative Business

Carol Sanford is the author of five best-selling books. Her titles are required business school reading at Stanford and Harvard, and she is Senior Fellow of Social Innovation at Babson College. Sanford was also my guest this week on Inside Ideas.

Regeneration is a word that runs through her work and has appeared in two of her titles: The Regenerative Business, and The Regenerative Life. It is a word enjoying a bit of a renaissance but Sanford insists something is being lost in translation.

“My grandfather taught me about the word regeneration, and he knew a version of it in Mohawk, but he taught me to understand that regeneration was more about revelation. I mean that in two ways. One is that you can reveal something that can’t be seen, kind of like a detective using their mind in a different way. But you also can reveal something in you that you didn’t know. The word reveal is closer but people have translated regeneration now in the popular press and their word means restore, renew – they’re taking everything that was already popular – biomimicry, circular, sustainability and they are renaming it that.”

She added: “Most people still use an old mind to talk about regeneration. It is one of the reasons I took the seven first principles of living systems that my grandfather offered and said, judge yourself whether or not you are actually working from a living systems view. 

“You can interview various people, everyone from the Dalai Lama to indigenous peoples and even Jane Goodall, for example, who has lived in the wild with amazing creatures, but if you don’t have a mind that knows how to work from those seven first principles of living systems you usually end up with a fragmented view.”

Catch up with the full podcast for more on the seven first principles, and from the pages of The Regenerative Business and The Regenerative Life.