About this Event
Michael Grunwald has spent three decades making comfortable people uncomfortable—as a George Polk Award–winning reporter for The Washington Post, Time, and Politico, and as the bestselling author of The Swamp and The New New Deal. His new book opens with a confession: after twenty years on the climate beat, he had scarcely thought about food. Almost nobody has. The food system generates roughly a third of global emissions; farms and pastures already claim two of every five acres of land on Earth, while our much-lamented cities and suburbs take up one in a hundred; and a soccer field of tropical forest vanishes into farmland every six seconds. A world that quit fossil fuels tomorrow would still eat its way into catastrophe.
Grunwald follows the land-use math wherever it leads, which is how he has managed to quarrel with nearly everyone: with the right over climate denial and Big Ag boosterism, and with the left over its own enthusiasms — biofuels, farm-to-table romance, the hope that the climate can be grazed back to health. Environmentalists, agribusiness lobbyists, and animal advocates have all taken their shots; he keeps answering with numbers, and with an unfashionable optimism about human ingenuity. His prescription is unglamorous and radical at once: grow more food on less land, and spare what remains of the wild. Come for Grunwald’s keynote and stay for lively debate and discussion afterwards.
Consponsored by Department of Environmental and Ocean Sciences, The Humanities Center, The Good Food Club, Engineering Exchange for Social Justice, and The Better Food Foundation
Event venue & nearby stays
Joan B. Kroc School of Peace Studies | University of San Diego (KIPJ Theater), 5555 Marian Way, San Diego, United States
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