From the author of New York Times bestseller The New New Deal, a groundbreaking piece of reportage from the trenches of the next climate war: the fight to fix our food system.
Humanity has cleared a land mass the size of Asia plus Europe to grow food, and our food system generates a third of our carbon emissions. By 2050, we’re going to need a lot more calories to fill nearly 10 billion bellies, but we can’t feed the world without frying it if we keep tearing down an acre of rainforest every six seconds. We are eating the earth, and the greatest challenge facing our species will be to slow our relentless expansion of farmland into nature. Even if we quit fossil fuels, we’ll keep hurtling towards climate chaos if we don’t solve our food and land problems.
In this rollicking, shocking narrative, Grunwald shows how the world, after decades of ignoring the climate problem at the center of our plates, has pivoted to making it worse, embracing solutions that sound sustainable but could make it even harder to grow more food with less land. But he also tells the stories of the dynamic scientists and entrepreneurs pursuing real solutions, from a jungle-tough miracle crop called pongamia to genetically-edited cattle embryos, from Impossible Whoppers to a non-polluting pesticide that uses the technology behind the COVID vaccines to constipate beetles to death. It’s an often infuriating saga of lobbyists, politicians, and even the scientific establishment making terrible choices for humanity, but it’s also a hopeful account of the people figuring out what needs to be done—and trying to do it.
Michael Grunwald, bestselling author of The Swamp and The New New Deal, builds his narrative around a brilliant, relentless, unforgettable food and land expert named Tim Searchinger. He chronicles Searchinger’s uphill battles against bad science and bad politics, both driven by the overwhelming influence of agricultural interests. And he illuminates a path that could save our planetary home for ourselves and future generations—through better policy, technology, and behavior, as well as a new land ethic recognizing that every acre matters.
“A thrilling and provocative survey of inventions, innovations, and wild flights of imagination…a bracing, beautiful picture of what’s possible…This is a book about a looming catastrophe that contains a lot of laughs, refreshing honesty and the joy of learning.”
—David Von Drehle, The Washington Post
“We Are Eating the Earth is a savory, science-salted meal of provocative thinking about food. Grunwald investigates what we eat, how we grow it, and why getting better at it is key to addressing the climate crisis. It’s a wildly ambitious undertaking, but Grunwald pulls it off because he’s fearless and funny and knows his stuff. If you want to save the planet, read We Are Eating the Earth.”
—Jeff Goodell, New York Times bestselling author of The Heat Will Kill You First
“Michael Grunwald never follows the crowd. Instead, he digs deep and finds actual, uncomfortable, and, yes, correct answers. We Are Eating the Earth tackles the complexity of our food and climate problems with captivating storytelling, and no agenda but our survival. Knowledge is about to be dropped. Pay attention.”
—Brad Meltzer, bestselling author of The JFK Conspiracy
“The quest to feed humanity’s voracious appetites is consuming ever more land around the world. We Are Eating the Earth is an indispensable guide to the thorniest problem in global economics and environmental policy—an issue that most advocates ignore, but that we urgently need to face if we want to have any hope of solving it.”
—Matthew Yglesias, author of One Billion Americans
“Food is now as big a climate challenge as oil, and We Are Eating the Earth is the most vivid and inspiring reckoning with this wicked problem written in this age of climate crisis.”
—David Wallace-Wells, New York Times bestselling author of The Uninhabitable Earth
“Grunwald does the important work of translating the legal, scientific, and often esoteric aspects of the issue into immediate action. Ambitious in scope, the book provides a roadmap of environmental policy relating to agricultural land in the past few decades and the emergency we’re now facing. An accessible and alarming look at the planet’s land crisis.”
—Kirkus Review
“In this bracing report, journalist Grunwald…offers a myth-busting overview of current debates around how to improve the world’s agricultural systems. This provides much food for thought.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Engaging, informative, witty, convincing, and ultimately sobering offering… While the content is disturbing, Grunwald’s delivery helps gets his message across: the need for land-use reform, immediately.”
—Booklist
“Grunwald’s book is informative, highly readable, and often funny.”
—Bloomberg
“Grunwald is a giant of climate journalism.”
—Heatmap News
“Grunwald is an engaging story teller, and to his credit, he sticks with the terrible math as it gets terribler and terribler.”
—The New Yorker
“A brilliant book…My head is still spinning from everything he writes.”
—Green Queen
New York Times Bestseller
The New, New Deal is a riveting story about change in the Obama era—and an essential handbook for voters who want the truth about the president, his record, and his enemies.
In a riveting account based on new documents and interviews with more than 400 sources on both sides of the aisle, award-winning reporter Michael Grunwald reveals the vivid story behind President Obama’s $800 billion stimulus bill, one of the most important and least understood pieces of legislation in the history of the country. Grunwald’s meticulous reporting shows how the stimulus, though reviled on the right and the left, helped prevent a depression while jump-starting the president’s agenda for lasting change. As ambitious and far-reaching as FDR’s New Deal, the Recovery Act is a down payment on the nation’s economic and environmental future, the purest distillation of change in the Obama era.
The stimulus has launched a transition to a clean-energy economy, doubled our renewable power, and financed unprecedented investments in energy efficiency, a smarter grid, electric cars, advanced biofuels, and green manufacturing. It is computerizing America’s pen-and-paper medical system. Its Race to the Top is the boldest education reform in U.S. history. It has put in place the biggest middle-class tax cuts in a generation, the largest research investments ever, and the most extensive infrastructure investments since Eisenhower’s interstate highway system. It includes the largest expansion of antipoverty programs since the Great Society, lifting millions of Americans above the poverty line, reducing homelessness, and modernizing unemployment insurance. Like the first New Deal, Obama’s stimulus has created legacies that last: the world’s largest wind and solar projects, a new battery industry, a fledgling high-speed rail network, and the world’s highest-speed Internet network.
Michael Grunwald goes behind the scenes—sitting in on cabinet meetings, as well as recounting the secret strategy sessions where Republicans devised their resistance to Obama—to show how the stimulus was born, how it fueled a resurgence on the right, and how it is changing America. The New New Deal shatters the conventional Washington narrative and it will redefine the way Obama’s first term is perceived.
“The New New Deal is the most interesting book that has been published about the Obama administration. Even Republicans should read it.”
―The Economist
“Exceptional…The single best book on the inner workings of the Obama administration. … Grunwald points out how everything you think you know about the stimulus is wrong.”
–The Guardian
“The New New Deal is not only the best book about the administration and its challenges, but … one of the two best books ever written about government.”
–The National Memo
“Grunwald peppers this Washington drama with dialogue and characters in action, which makes it a rollicking good read.”
–US News
“Engrossing … It is a full detailed, careful argument, based on detailed, careful reporting.”
–The New York Review of Books
“Michael Grunwald is one of our generation’s most original and tireless journalists—a reporter who is allergic to received wisdom, a writer with an uncommon talent for illuminating hidden truths. So it is a delight, but not a surprise, that The New New Deal demolishes cliches and vividly reframes our thinking about President Obama and his stimulus package through a gripping narrative.”
–John Harris, Politico
The Everglades in southern Florida were once reviled as a liquid wasteland, and Americans dreamed of draining it. Now it is revered as a national treasure, and Americans have launched the largest environmental project in history to try to save it.
The Swamp is the stunning story of the destruction and possible resurrection of the Everglades, the saga of man’s abuse of nature in southern Florida and his unprecedented efforts to make amends. Michael Grunwald, a prize-winning national reporter for The Washington Post, takes readers on a riveting journey from the Ice Ages to the present, illuminating the natural, social and political history of one of America’s most beguiling but least understood patches of land.
The Everglades was America’s last frontier, a wild country long after the West was won. Grunwald chronicles how a series of visionaries tried to drain and “reclaim” it, and how Mother Nature refused to bend to their will; in the most harrowing tale, a 1928 hurricane drowned 2,500 people in the Everglades. But the Army Corps of Engineers finally tamed the beast with levees and canals, converting half the Everglades into sprawling suburbs and sugar plantations. And though the southern Everglades was preserved as a national park, it soon deteriorated into an ecological mess. The River of Grass stopped flowing, and 90 percent of its wading birds vanished.
Now America wants its swamp back. Grunwald shows how a new breed of visionaries transformed Everglades politics, producing the $8 billion rescue plan. That plan is already the blueprint for a new worldwide era of ecosystem restoration. And this book is a cautionary tale for that era. Through gripping narrative and dogged reporting, Grunwald shows how the Everglades is still threatened by the same hubris, greed and well-intentioned folly that led to its decline.
“A grand, violent, picaresque history…This book serves up 500 years of bloody, mostly foolish, rarely noble, but always entertaining human antics.”
―Guy Martin, The New York Times Book Review
“This is a wonderfully written, provocative, and important book. It combines history and investigative journalism to explore not only the Everglades but the larger tensions of a society’s relationship with the environment. It’s also a riveting story, the definitive account of south Florida’s incredible journey from marshland to man-made megalopolis.”
—John Barry, author of Rising Tide and The Great Influenza
“The Swamp is the best thing I’ve ever read about the Everglades. The story of what’s happened to this haunted and magical wilderness has the epic ingredients of a great novel—greed, betrayal, carnage, and valor—and Michael Grunwald has beautifully captured it all for history.”
—Carl Hiaasen
“Mr. Grunwald, a terrific writer, moves along at a cracking pace.”
—William Grimes, The New York Times
“A brilliant work of research and reportage.”
—John G. Mitchell, The Washington Post Book World
“Magnificent…This definitive history reads as quickly as a good magazine article.”
—Michael Browning, The Palm Beach Post
“A superb narrative…Grunwald writes with verve and wit.”
—David Fleshler, South Florida Sun-Sentinel
“The Swamp is a tremendous book — impressive in scope, well researched and well written, rich in history yet urgently relevant to current events.”
—Gregg Easterbrook, The New Republic
“Grunwald blends exhaustive research and superlative prose into a book as valuable as a week in Fort Lauderdale, at one-hundredth the price.”
—Andy Solomon, The Boston Globe
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