Cows save the planet

I just finished listening to this book after a couple of days (I found a free audiobook on an app linked to my library). It was decent. Judith Schwartz’s thesis is basically that a large part of our environmental crises is humans wrecking the soil throwing the water cycle, carbon cycle, and biodiversity out of wack. The only solution is agriculture based on how nature evolved with herd animals (including often condemned cows), diverse plants, and lots of micro-organisms. There’s a lot of random slight anti-communism, but if you remember the book’s about science not politics it’s bearable. She often mentions her sources being out of the mainstream and hated by corporations and universities, but it made me happy in the second half when she started actually condemning the commodification of food, and capitalism as a whole. When she slams Monsanto it’s reminiscent of the stuff at r/fucknestle from my Reddit days. Near the end she criticizes money in general and financialized economy divorced from real consequences and production. I don’t think she has a feasible alternative to capitalism or a way to get there, but the book still has value. I think it’s weird that in most of her positive examples people got some inspiration from native peoples but they don’t actually get to work the land the way they have for millennia, but again, I guess it’s not this short book’s job to outline decolonization. Overall worth the read, as it only took me six and a half hours (11 at 1.7 speed).