Landscapes

An apparent "success story" of Amazonian forest conservation motivates a 6-years investigation of the land sparing hypothesis. Dr. Gregory Thaler's new book, Saving a Rainforest and Losing the World, reveals a tragic belief that agricultural intensification will solve our problems of enduring extraction of the world's biodiversity.

Episode Links

• Saving a Rainforest and Losing the World: Conservation and Displacement in the Global Tropics. Yale University Press
• Roser, Max. 2024. Why Is Improving Agricultural Productivity Crucial to Ending Global Hunger and Protecting the World’s Wildlife? Our World in Data.
• Phalan BT. 2018 What Have We Learned from the Land Sparing-sharing Model? Sustainability. 10(6):1760.
• Scientists calling the apparent Brazilian halting of deforestation "one of the great conservation successes of the twenty-first century," in Nature Food
• For an excellent review of the Land Sparing / Land Sharing debate see: Claire Kremen, Ilke Geladi (2024). Land-Sparing and Sharing: Identifying Areas of Consensus, Remaining Debate and Alternatives, Editor(s): Samuel M. Scheiner, Encyclopedia of Biodiversity (Third Edition), Academic Press, 435-451, ISBN 9780323984348. OR
• Land Spares Feel Their Oats, Land Food nexus
• Ritchie, Hannah. 2021. Palm Oil. Our World in Data.
• An example of the "active land sparing argument."
• The green revolution: Patel, R. (2013). The long green revolution. The Journal of Peasant Studies, 40(1), 1-63.
• An argument for the "forest transition model" as it applies to Brazilian forests.

Landscapes is produced by Adam Calo. A complete written transcript of the episode can be found on Adam’s newsletter: Land Food Nexus.

Send feedback or questions to [email protected] or https://bsky.app/profile/adamcalo.bsky.social

Music by Blue Dot Sessions: “Kilkerrin” by Blue Dot Sessions (www.sessions.blue).

A recent wave of sustainability claims confidently dictate how, for what, and where we ought to use land for climate mitigation and biodiversity conservation. Nikki Yoxall, a self proclaimed regenerative landscape manager walks through her thinking on land use decision making and responds to these critiques.

Episode Links

• Food without agriculture, Nature Sustainability
• Guthman on the problems with localism
• DeLind on the problems with localism
• Phil Loring – deeper meaning of regen ag
• Understanding Ag team in the US
• Paige Stanley’s rangelands research
• Pasture for Life
• Remembering David Stanley
• Carbon Cowboys Network
• Samantha Mosier article on evidence of benefits of Adaptive Multi-Paddock Grazing
• Soilmentor
• Highlands Rewilding
• Hannah Ritchie introducing her new book
• An environmentalist gets lunch – Hannah Ritchie
• The Cruel Fantasies of Well-Fed People, George Monbiot
• EU project on livestock futures

Landscapes is produced by Adam Calo. A complete written transcript of the episode can be found on Adam’s newsletter: Land Food Nexus.

Send feedback or questions to [email protected] or https://bsky.app/profile/adamcalo.bsky.social

Music by Blue Dot Sessions: “Kilkerrin” by Blue Dot Sessions (www.sessions.blue).

Brexit produced a once a generation chance to create a wholesale reform of agricultural subsidies. Kai Heron works through what the England's new farm subsidy plan reveals about the politics of food system transformation.

Episode Links

• Kai Heron on Twitter
• You can’t eat profits: A democratic vision for England’s tormented farmlands. The New Statesman. By Kai Heron, Alex Heffron and Rob Booth
• Climate Leninism and Revolutionary Transition. Spectre Journal. Kai Heron and Jodi Dean
• ELMS description from DEFRA
• Indonesian farm workers in the UK and debt bondage
• History of the World in Seven Cheap Things
• WWF FOI on UK’s climate targets
• Eric Ross, The Malthus Factor
• US food policy and Haitian rice
• Women: The Last Colony: Maria Mies, Veronika Bennholdt-Thomsen, Claudia von Werlhof
• The Classical Agrarian Question: Myth, Reality and Relevance Today: Sam Moyo
• On carbon markets and their overhype: The Value of a Whale, Buller
• Sustain on ELMs
• Climate apartheid
• Mark Fisher Capitalist Realism
• Rosa Luxemburg Reform or Revolution
• Nancy Fraser on Polanyi
• Maria Mies on subsistence
• Public Common Partnerships, Commonwealth
• Kai on the banana discourse
• Right to Roam campaign England

Landscapes is produced by Adam Calo. A complete written transcript of the episode can be found on Adam’s newsletter: Land Food Nexus

Send feedback or questions to [email protected]

Music by Blue Dot Sessions: “Kilkerrin” by Blue Dot Sessions (www.sessions.blue).

Episode Description

Rescinding the practice of human-exceptionalism may be required to treat animals and other non-human species with more grace. But it might also be required to re-orient how we understand how the non-human world operates and thus the decisions we make that may disrupt the order of the multi-species communities we are all part of. Dr. Emma Gardner proposes an "ecological permission structure", or a parallel planning process that takes into account the needs and desires of multi-species communities.

Episode Notes

Dr. Emma Gardner

The Animals of Farthing Wood

Watership Down

Raymond Williams, Problems in Materialism and Culture: Selected Essays

Safina, C. (2015). Beyond words: What animals think and feel.

Toad Patrol

Andrew Balmford's summary of land sparing

Land sparers feel their oats

Gardner, E., Sheppard, A., & Bullock, J. (2022). Why biodiversity net gain requires an ecological permission system. Town and Country Planning Association Journal, 391-402.

Freedom of Movement: how do animals get around in our modern world? [Online Event]

Landscapes is produced by Adam Calo. A complete written transcript of the episode can be found on Adam’s newsletter: Land Food Nexus. Send feedback or questions to [email protected]. Music by Blue Dot Sessions: “Kilkerrin” by Blue Dot Sessions (www.sessions.blue).

Too much expert-led decision making has long been shown to deliver perverse outcomes for the environment and society. What if a more earnest collaboration with artists and the arts is the secret ingredient to unlocking a more egalitarian science and society relationship? Independent sculptor, dry stone waller, and landscape partnership innovator Ewan Allinson, discusses the role of the arts in landscape decision making.

Episode Links

• The Hefted to Hill project, as part of the Northern Heartlands Landscape Partnership
• Hill-Farming, Knowledge and Power, Medium article by Ewan Allinson
• Community Empowerment and Landscape Report by Chris Dalglish
• Marcel Duchamp, Fountain 1917
• Valuing Arts and Arts Research
• Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire
• Agnes Denes, Wheatfield, 1982
• Alan Sonfist, Time Landscape, 1965
• John Glover landscape paintings
• Poetry by Wordsworth
• Guide to the Lakes by William Wordsworth
• AALERT 4DM (Arts and Artists and Environmental Research Today for Decision Making Network)
• Art is Not an Island Film, created for AALERT 4DM. Produced by Ewan Allinson and filmed and edited by Maria Rud with oversight by Eirini Saratsi.
• Taigh-Chearsabhagh Museum and Arts Centre North Uist
• Uplands Alliance
• Artist-Scholar David Haley