mean, to be environmentally aware, to have an environmental education is, as the great writer aldo leopold put it, to live in a world of wounds. you're surrounded by grief, you're surrounded by the pain of what you're seeing, and surrounded by fear, also. i mean, it's not easy to see how we're going to get through this century, let alone those that follow. your latest book, regenesis, essentially describes the way we produce food around the world as perhaps the single most damaging thing we are doing to the natural world. and yet we all need to eat. mm—hm. and thanks to farming, almost all of us can sustain ourselves with decent amounts of food. why do you see this as such a problem? well, this is the great dilemma we face. i mean, it's notjust a question of seeing it as a problem, there is a huge weight of empirical evidence showing that farming is by far the greatest cause of habitat destruction, of wildlife loss, of extinction, of land use, which is perhaps the most important environmental metric of all, of soil degradation, of freshwater use, and one of the greatest causes of climate b