COWS SAVE THE PLANET

In Cows Save the Planet, journalist Judith D. Schwartz looks at soil as a crucible for our many overlapping environmental, economic, and social crises.

Schwartz reveals that for many of these problems—climate change, desertification, biodiversity loss, droughts, floods, wildfires, rural poverty, malnutrition, and obesity—there are positive, alternative scenarios to the degradation and devastation we face. In each case, our ability to turn these crises into opportunities depends on how we treat the soil. In the tradition of Michael Pollan, Schwartz draws on the work of thinkers and doers. She speaks with renegade scientists and institutional whistleblowers from around the world, and challenges much of the conventional thinking about global warming and other problems. For example, land can suffer from undergrazing as well as overgrazing, as certain landscapes, such as grasslands, require the disturbance from livestock to thrive. While we focus on CO2’s potential impact on our climate, we neglect the central role of water in soil--“green water”--in temperature regulation. Schwartz’s book is filled with such surprising insights. Cows Save the Planet is a primer on soil’s pivotal role in our ecology and economy as well as a call to action. Most of all it is an antidote to the despair that environmental news so often leaves us with.
JUDITH D. SCHWARTZ is a longtime freelance writer whose work has appeared in venues from Glamour and Redbook to the Christian Science Monitor and New York Times. The author of several books, she has an MA in Counseling Psychology and an MS from the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism. Schwartz lives with her family in Southern Vermont.