We Are Eating the Earth - The Race to Fix Our Food System and Save Our Climate: Michael Grunwald with David Wallace-Wells

Michael Grunwald, author of the new book We Are Eating the Earth - The Race to Fix Our Food System and Save Our Climate, sits down with David Wallace-Wells of the New York Times to discuss his 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, an ingenious phrase coined by Michael Grunwald, 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.

Copies of We Are Eating the Earth will be available for purchase onsite at the event courtesy of the NYPL Shop.

Join Michael Grunwald and David Wallace-Wells for a live conversation, in-person or online, on Monday, June 30 at 7 PM.

To join in person | Please be sure to register for an In-Person Ticket. Doors will open 30 minutes before the program begins. For free events, we generally overbook to ensure a full house. Priority will be given to those who have registered in advance, but registration does not guarantee admission. If you register for multiple tickets, please provide the name of each person who will be attending the event or arrive with your entire party present. Seats cannot be saved for late arrivals. Only registered patrons will be granted initial entry into the event space. All registered seats are released shortly before start time, and seats may become available at that time. A standby line will form 30 minutes before the program for any seats that may become available prior to showtime.

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• Purchase: Books will be available onsite at the event courtesy of the NYPL shop.

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ACCESSIBILITY

In-Person | Assistive listening devices and/or hearing loops are available at the venue. You can request a free ASL (American Sign Language) interpretation or CART (Communication Access Real-Time Translation) captioning service by emailing your request at least two weeks in advance of the event: email accessibility@nypl.org or use this Gmail template. This venue is fully accessible to wheelchairs.

Livestream | Captions and a transcript will be provided. You can request a free ASL (American Sign Language) interpretation by emailing your request at least two weeks in advance of the event: email accessibility@nypl.org or use this Gmail template.

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ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

Michael Grunwald is the bestselling author of two widely acclaimed books, The Swamp and The New New Deal. He’s a former staff writer for The Washington Post, Time, and POLITICO and winner of the George Polk Award for national reporting, the Worth Bingham Award for investigative reporting, and many other journalism prizes. He lives in Miami.

David Wallace-Wells is an American journalist known for his extensive writings on climate change. As Deputy Editor of New York Magazine in 2017 he published the long-form essay, "The Uninhabitable Earth", which became the most-read article in the history of the magazine and was later expanded into a 2019 book of the same title. He is currently a staff writer for the New York Times exploring climate change, technology, the future of the planet and how we live on it. 

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