David R. Montgomery teaches at the University of Washington where he studies the evolution of topography and how geological processes shape landscapes and influence ecological systems. He loved maps as a kid and now writes about the relationship of people to their environment, and regenerative agriculture. In 2008 he was named a MacArthur Fellow. He is the author of award-winning popular-science books (King of Fish, Dirt, and Growing a Revolution) and co-authored The Hidden Half of Nature, The Microbial Roots of Life and Health, and What Your Food Ate: How to Heal Our Land and Reclaim Our Health with his wife, biologist Anne Biklé.
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DAVID R. MONTGOMERY

When you dig into the medical literature, 7 out of 10 of the leading causes of death in the United States are diet-related chronic diseases. And so one of the hopeful messages that I think comes out of The Hidden Half of Nature, Growing a Revolution, and What Your Food Ate is that what we do to the land, essentially we do to us. And what's good for the land is good for us.

So if we think about farming differently, we can actually enjoy ripple effects that are not only beneficial to the farmers in terms of reduced costs for fertilizer, pesticides, and diesel - the three of the big costs in farming today. If we can farm and grow as much food using less of those kind of synthetic inputs, we'll all be better off. And farmers will be better off and more profitable, but it could also translate into better human health outcomes at a population level.

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Imbalance of Omega-3 and Omega-6 Fats in Our Diets Lead to Chronic Disease

Now we know that those two kinds of fats, omega-3 and omega-6, share many biochemical pathways in our bodies. So if our cell walls are full of omega-6 fats they swamp theomega-3s in terms of their availability because they share all these chemical pathways but they do different things.

And so the ancestral human diet had 1 to 1, to 1 to 4 to 1 ratio of omega-6s to omega-3s. It was very different than the modern Western diet, which is more like 10 to 20 to 30 to 1, in terms of omega-6s to omega-3s. In other words, relative to the amount of omega3s in our diets, the omega-6s have gone through the roof. And why is that? Because seeds are very rich in omega-6s, whereas vegetables, leafy greens, animals that have grazed off of living pastures, they're all rich in omega-3s. So if we're eating a lot of processed foods that are grain-derived, then we're getting a lot of omega-6s. And if our livestock from which we're getting our meat and dairy are raised on a diet of grains, we're getting a lot of omega-6s. So the human diet has changed a lot in the last a hundred years in terms of those two kinds of fats. And that's not the only thing that's affected our health or the only thing that agriculture has changed, but it's an underappreciated key piece of the puzzle, I think, in terms of why inflammation-rooted diseases, chronic diseases have gone through the roof in the last 50 years. Well, up until the recent and ongoing pandemic, modern medicine has gotten very good at treating infectious diseases. What really affects our health today are these chronic diseases. And seven out of 10 of the leading killers in the U.S. are chronic diseases rooted in diet.

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Soil Infertility & Global Food Production Capacity

We're losing about 0.3% of our global food production capacity each and every year to ongoing soil loss and degradation. On an individual year, that's hard to notice 0.3%, but if you run it out over a hundred years, that becomes 30%.

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It looks like modern farming practices have reduced the amount of three key things in the human diet, mineral micronutrients, which are important - these things like copper and zinc that are important for our immune system, then also phytochemicals, plant-made compounds that we might know as more like antioxidants or anti-inflammatories, things that have medicinal effects in our bodies. And then also the way that we raise livestock influences the mix of fats in our meat and dairy products, particularly the amount of omega-3 fats that help to quell or reduce inflammation, and the amount of omega-6 fats that help to initiate or start inflammation.

And by feeding our livestock on a grain-based diet, grains are rich in omega-6 fats, our meat and dairy products have become very much enriched in these pro-inflammatory fats, whereas pasture-raised or animals that graze on living plants, the photosynthetic parts in particular, are rich in omega-3 fats.

The way that we farm matters to not just the health of our own societies over centuries to millennia, but to our individual health in terms of what's actually in what we eat.

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The last few decades have seen an explosion of information in terms of how our actions affect the natural world and, ranging from the climate to the soil, to water, there's an awful lot of things that we've been doing that are degrading the life support systems of a planet that our descendants are going to depend on.

We need to quite radically readdress many of those basic issues about how we live in the land, how we raise our food, and reframe the way we think about them in terms of how to pass on the world in better shape than we got it. We're at a point where we now have the knowledge to be able to try and think about doing that. In terms of the soil, we have the examples of regenerative farmers who've been very good at figuring out ways to farm in a way that uses less fossil fuel, that builds soil's organic matter back up that I think would actually produce healthier food for the human populace.

And yet, when you think about how the future gets shaped, it's through each one of our individual choices integrated over a lot of us. And so I would encourage people to think what are the things that one can do in your own life that can actually leave the world better off in terms of your own consuming choices, your own food choices, but also think about how you might spend your time and how you might advocate for a better future for those who will come to follow us because I think, frankly, we really are this century in a place where the shape of humanity for centuries to come is going to be influenced by the choices we make over the next few decades. We've got 20, 30, 40 years, probably, to get off fossil fuels and to reshape agriculture in ways that make the climate and our soil sustainable.

There's lots of things we can spend our time arguing about culturally and in terms of politics, let alone wars. It's crazy for humanity to be distracting ourselves with conflict between people at a time when the whole future of humanity is really at stake in terms of what we do this century. And we've got some big problems ahead of us in terms of the nature of the climate and how we will feed ourselves going forward, but we have solutions within our grasp if we employ them, if we think about them, if we support the politics that actually can implement them.

So I would suggest that people, looking forward, don't give into despair. It's far too easy to look at the state of the world today and be convinced that it's going to hell in a handbasket. I've become much more of an optimist in terms of some issues. There's a lot of work that needs to be done, and I may not live long enough to see it achieved, but in the big picture of things, none of us live all that long. Anyway, what really matters is the state of what we leave for those who will follow us and try and make the world a better place.

Photo credit: Cooper Reid

This interview was conducted by Mia Funk and Lyn Flores with the participation of collaborating universities and students. Associate Interviews Producer on this podcast was Lyn Flores. Digital Media Coordinators are Jacob A. Preisler and Megan Hegenbarth. 

Mia Funk is an artist, interviewer and founder of The Creative Process & One Planet Podcast (Conversations about Climate Change & Environmental Solutions).