Regenesis: George Monbiot and Franny Armstrong

Join 5x15 online for a special event with George Monbiot, the bestselling author of Feral, as he discusses a new future for food and for humanity in conversation with award winning documentary maker and activist Franny Armstrong. The event will also feature the premiere of a new short film made by Franny Armstrong to accompany the book.

Farming is the world's greatest cause of environmental destruction - and the one we are least prepared to talk about. We criticise urban sprawl, but farming sprawls across thirty times as much land. We have ploughed, fenced and grazed great tracts of the planet, felling forests, killing wildlife, and poisoning rivers and oceans to feed ourselves. Yet millions still go hungry.

Now the food system itself is beginning to falter. But, as George Monbiot shows us we can resolve the biggest of our dilemmas and feed the world without devouring the planet.

Regenesis is a breathtaking vision of a new future for food and for humanity. Drawing on astonishing advances in soil ecology, Monbiot reveals how our changing understanding of the world beneath our feet could allow us to grow more food with less farming. He meets the people who are unlocking these methods, from the fruit and vegetable grower revolutionising our understanding of fertility; through breeders of perennial grains, liberating the land from ploughs and poisons; to the scientists pioneering new ways to grow protein and fat. Together, they show how the tiniest life forms could help us make peace with the planet, restore its living systems, and replace the age of extinction with an age of regenesis.

Here, for the first time, is a profoundly hopeful, appetising and exciting vision of food: of revolutionary cultivation and cuisine that could nourish us all and restore our world of wonders.

'This book calls for nothing less than a revolution in the future of food' Kate Raworth

George Monbiot is an author, Guardian columnist and environmental campaigner. His best-selling books include Feral: Rewilding the Land, Sea and Human Life and Heat: How We Can Stop the Planet Burning; and Out of the Wreckage: A New Politics for an Age of Crisis. George cowrote the concept album Breaking the Spell of Loneliness with musician Ewan McLennan, and has made a number of viral videos. One of them, adapted from his 2013 TED talk, How Wolves Change Rivers, has been viewed on YouTube over 40 million times. Another, on Natural Climate Solutions, which he co-presented with Greta Thunberg, has been watched over 60 million times.

Franny Armstrong is a former pop drummer and the inspirational filmmaker behind The Age of Stupid, McLibel and Drowned Out - which have together been seen by 70 million people on TV, cinema, the internet and DVD worldwide. She is also an environmental activist and founder of the 10:10 Campaign - which has persuaded Adidas, Microsoft, Spurs FC, the Royal Mail, 75,000 people, 1,500 schools, a third of local councils, the entire UK Government, hundreds of businesses and the Prime Minister to cut their emissions. The campaign is now active in more than 40 countries. Her production company is Spanner Films.Franny has been called a "21st Century Heroine" by Harper's Bizarre, an "Eco Hero of the Decade" by The Guardian, one of "London's 1,000 most influential people" by The Evening Standard, one of the world's "Top 100 Women" by the Guardian and "Green Personality of the Year" by Edie. She is a Londoner born and bred.