Apocalypse Cow
BLOCK 06 (Apocalypse Cow, PreetiRang, Lawless Lands, Don't Stand for Injustice, Former Pig Farm Worker Tells All)
Runtime: 47m, 00s
Directed by: Peter Gauvain
Country of Origin: United Kingdom
Directed by: Peter Gauvain
Country of Origin: United Kingdom
‘This film is about revolutionary ideas that could do away with agriculture as we know it, but still feed ten billion people and bring the natural world back from the point of collapse, to create something extraordinary.’ George Monbiot In a topical and provocative Arrow Pictures documentary environmental campaigner, George Monbiot, looks at how food is driving us towards global disaster.
We’re told the cure to climate breakdown is to stop flying, or using plastic bags, or to have smaller families. The biggest single problem is how we feed ourselves, particularly on meat. This is a radical take-down of food farming, and how we may be on the cusp of an end to 12,000 years of farming as we have known it. Animal grazing is a disaster: we cut down trees that suck in atmospheric carbon and replace them with animals responsible for generating vast quantities of greenhouse gases. And we’re blind to the problem: some of what we think are Britain’s most beautiful landscapes, such as the Lake District, are treeless ‘sheep-wrecked deserts’.
Grazing uses twice as much land as all the world’s crops but produces just 1% of our food. Free range farming may be kinder to the animals but does even more damage to the planet because it uses so much land. Monbiot believes there is room for optimism. He looks at alternative food sources, including synthetic meat, and a process that produces protein seemingly out of thin air, just from bacteria, and air. The process could miniaturise food production and grow the protein in the Arctic, or space. Freeing grazing land will allow re-wilding – with forests that will dramatically change the Earth’s appearance, and recapture atmospheric carbon. In a powerful sequence vegan Monbiot shows that he is prepared to make a painful personal sacrifice, by killing a deer, to allow trees to re-grow in the Scottish Highlands.
We’re told the cure to climate breakdown is to stop flying, or using plastic bags, or to have smaller families. The biggest single problem is how we feed ourselves, particularly on meat. This is a radical take-down of food farming, and how we may be on the cusp of an end to 12,000 years of farming as we have known it. Animal grazing is a disaster: we cut down trees that suck in atmospheric carbon and replace them with animals responsible for generating vast quantities of greenhouse gases. And we’re blind to the problem: some of what we think are Britain’s most beautiful landscapes, such as the Lake District, are treeless ‘sheep-wrecked deserts’.
Grazing uses twice as much land as all the world’s crops but produces just 1% of our food. Free range farming may be kinder to the animals but does even more damage to the planet because it uses so much land. Monbiot believes there is room for optimism. He looks at alternative food sources, including synthetic meat, and a process that produces protein seemingly out of thin air, just from bacteria, and air. The process could miniaturise food production and grow the protein in the Arctic, or space. Freeing grazing land will allow re-wilding – with forests that will dramatically change the Earth’s appearance, and recapture atmospheric carbon. In a powerful sequence vegan Monbiot shows that he is prepared to make a painful personal sacrifice, by killing a deer, to allow trees to re-grow in the Scottish Highlands.