Landscapes – Détails, épisodes et analyse

Michael Grunwald is an environmental journalist who sees maximizing efficient production as the most important sustianbility strategy. His book, "We Are Eating the Earth," brings fresh attention to an old debate.

Episode Links

• We Are Eating the Earth
• Grunwald, M. (2024, December 13). Opinion | Sorry, but This Is the Future of Food. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/13/opinion/food-agriculture-factory-farms-climate-change.html
• The Useful Idiot, Land Food Nexus rebuttal to Grunwald's NYT piece
• The Enduring Fantasy of Feeding the World, Spectre Journal
• Historians rethink the Green Revolution
• The Globalization of Wheat: A Critical History of the Green Revolution
• Max Ajl's A People's Green New Deal
• On the contribution of yields to hunger abatement:  Smith, L. C., & Haddad, L. (2015). Reducing Child Undernutrition: Past Drivers and Priorities for the Post-MDG Era. World Development, 68, 180–204. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.worlddev.2014.11.014
• On the role of intensive agriculture in failing to reduce deforestation:
  • Ceddia, M. G., Bardsley, N. O., Gomez-y-Paloma, S., & Sedlacek, S. (2014). Governance, agricultural intensification, and land sparing in tropical South America. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 111(20), 7242–7247. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1317967111
  • Pratzer, M., Fernández-Llamazares, Á., Meyfroidt, P., Krueger, T., Baumann, M., Garnett, S. T., & Kuemmerle, T. (2023). Agricultural intensification, Indigenous stewardship and land sparing in tropical dry forests. Nature Sustainability, 1–12. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-023-01073-0
  • Thaler, G. M. (2017). The Land Sparing Complex: Environmental Governance, Agricultural Intensification, and State Building in the Brazilian Amazon. Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 107(6), 1424–1443. https://doi.org/10.1080/24694452.2017.1309966
  • Land sparers feel thier oats
  • Thaler, G. M. (2024). Saving a Rainforest and Losing the World: Conservation and displacement in the global tropics. Yale University Press.  
• The IEA on competing theories of Indirect Land Use Change and biofuels: Towards an improved assessment of indirect land-use change – Evaluating common narratives, approaches, and tools  
• More Work for Mother: The Ironies Of Household Technology From The Open Hearth To The Microwave | Ruth Cowan
• Munro, K. (2025). Reconsidering the relationship between home appliance ownership and married women's labor supply: Evidence from Brazil (No. 2509).
• The Global Alliance for the Future of Food call for investment in food systems transition
• The World Resources Institute report on Denmark's Green Tripartite Agreement
• Behind the Danish Green Tripartite – Democracy, Smallholders and the Rights of Rural People
• Grunwald debates an agroecologist

• At COP30, Brazilian Meat Giant JBS Recommends Climate Policy 

   

About Landscapes

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 adamcalo@substack.com or Bluesky

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

Even as efforts to transition Appalachia out of coal receive broad policy support, the fate of the landscape is ultimately driven by incumbent actors used to getting what they want. Dr Lindsay Shade and Dr Karen Rignall discuss their research about how legacies of land ownership frustrate equitable and effective transition strategies. While an "Abundance"  argument suggests that  "the Democratic fetish for legalistic procedure has in so many places, made it impossible to get stuff done," the afterlives of coal provides a stark reminder of the deeper powers that control what happens on the land. Confronting the legacies of landownership may be the only path to meaningful landscape transformation. 

Episode Links

• Dr Lindsay Shade
• Dr Karen Rignall
• Shade, L., Schwartzman, G., Rignall, K., Slovinsky, K., & Johnson, J. (2025). Afterlives of coal: land and transition dynamics in Central Appalachia. Environmental Research: Energy, 2(1), 015015.
• Also see: Shade, L., Rignall, K., Tarus, L., & Starr, C. (2025). The role of land in a just transition: the Appalachian Land Study collective. Environmental Research: Energy, 2(2), 025010.
• The ongoing Appalachian Land Study and the historic Appalachian Land Ownership Study
• Martin County solar project on the former Martiki mine
• The Cumberland Forest Project (The Nature Conservancy)
• Congressman Hal Rogers and prison development
• Carbon sequestration court case: Pocahontas Surface Interests and Forestland Group
• The Alliance for Appalachia
• The Appalachian Rekindling Project 
• The Abundance critique of process
• The Heavens, by Sandra Newman

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 adamcalo@substack.com or Bluesky

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

Podcast Guest Correction: "At minute 26.41 - 27.55 it is implied that The Nature Conservancy (TNC) acquired all 253,000 acres as a single parcel and that it all passed through Pocahontas Land Company and Heartwood Forestland Fund, and also that The Forestland Group "sold" land to the former. Heartwood Forestland Fund is managed by The Forestland Group and holds land under various subsidiaries. In the three states where TNC brokered land deals for the Cumberland Forest Project, the land is held by various LLC's that TNC controls, all of which purchased land from subsidiaries of either The Forestland Group or Molpus-Woodlands, two different timber investment management organizations (TIMO's). These TIMO's previously bought land and/or timber rights from various coal and natural resource landholding companies in the region, including Pocahontas. As we describe in our paper on p. 8, the trajectory of the land in our case study in East TN is as follows: the land was first consolidated by the 19th century British coal company and land speculation firm "The American Association Ltd," later sold to JM Huber Coal, and then to Molpus-Woodlands, before being acquired by Cumberland Forest LLC, which The Nature Conservancy has a controlling share and manages."

A question of how to advance upon the ecosystem services concept leads to lessons learned about how to work collaboratively across disciplines.

Episode Links

• Lesson's Learned Writing (a blog by Beth Cole
• Is interdisciplinarity a mashup?
• Beth Cole social media
• The Landscapes Decisions Program

Music: Kilkerrin by Blue Dot Sessions (www.sessions.blue), Creative Commons license Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)

An article in Scientific American bringing a science and technology studies lens to Genetically Modified Organisms, provoked louder than normal responses from the pro biotech crowd. What can we learn from the exchange? Dr Andrew Flachs, Associate Professor of Anthropology at Purdue University, studied the role of seeds on farmer livelihoods in rural India as part of his book, Cultivating Knowledge. We discuss the arguments of the article and its malcontents to try and reach a broader understanding of what this debate is really about.

Episode Links

• Andrew Flachs personal website. On Twitter
• Cultivating Knowledge: Biotechnology, Sustainability, and the Human Cost of Cotton Capitalism in India, By Andrew Flachs.
• How Biotech Crops Can Crash and Still Never Fail, by Aniket Aga and Maywa Montenegro de Wit, Scientific American.
• Is Biotechnology Just New Colonialism? Talking Biotech Podcast, Dr. Kevin Folta.
• 'Woke' Scientific American Goes Anti-GMO, American Council on Science and Health, Cameron English.
• Whose Science? Whose Knowledge? Sandra Harding.
• A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things, Jason Moore and Raj Patel.
• Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital, Jason Moore
• Works of Sidney Mintz.
• R. Vasavi's work on the Green Revolution: Harbingers of Rain: Land and life in South Asia. Shadow Space: Suicides and the Predicament of Rural India.
• Paul Robbins' contributions to the Intended Consequences
• Rock, J. (2019). "We are not starving:" challenging genetically modified seeds and development in Ghana. Culture, Agriculture, Food and Environment, 41(1), 15-23.
• Dowd-Uribe, B. (2014). Engineering yields and inequality? How institutions and agro-ecology shape Bt cotton outcomes in Burkina Faso. Geoforum, 53, 161-171.
• Andrew Flachs and Paul Richards on the role of performance on agricultural systems.
• Indian millet hunger reduction program.
• Learning to Love G.M.O.s, by Jennifer Kahn, The New York Times
• Montenegro de Wit, M., Kapuscinski, A. R., & Fitting, E. (2020). Democratizing CRISPR? Stories, practices, and politics of science and governance on the agricultural gene editing frontier. Elementa: Science of the Anthropocene, 8.
• Genetically Modified Democracy, by Aniket Aga.
• Freedom Farmers: Agricultural Resilience and the Black Freedom Movement
• Researchers can restore the American chestnut through genetic engineering. But at what cost? The Counter

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 adamcalo@substack.com. Music by Blue Dot Sessions: "Kilkerrin" by Blue Dot Sessions (www.sessions.blue).

Jyoti Fernandes, farmer of Five Penny Farms and Policy Coordinator with the UK based Landworkers' Alliance, discusses what agroecology means to her and the efforts to shape food policy in the United Kingdom. We also discuss the risk of agroecology being co-opted and the current boycott of the UN Food Systems Summit.

Episode Links

• Five Penny Farms, Dorset
• Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa
• Scientists Boycott the 2021 UN Food Systems Summit
• Jyoti testifying at the EU Parliament in 2015
• Raj Patel on Normal Borlaug | Interview in PBS American Experience
• Is Agroecology Being Co-opted by Big Ag? | Civil Eats Article
• Farm Protests in India Are Writing the Green Revolution's Obituary | Scientific American Article
• The Land Workers' Alliance
• The Dimbleby Report | Part One of the National Food Strategy
• European Coordination Via Campesina
• Reframing the land-sparing/land-sharing debate for biodiversity conservation | Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences
• Nature Friendly Farming Network
• Pasture Fed Livestock Association
• SUSTAIN Alliance for better food and farming
• Agriculture Act 2020

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 adamcalo@substack.com. 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

The past decades have seen the rise to dominance of the ecosystem services framework, a worldview and scientific practice that sees the processes of the biosphere through a lens of how they prop up human activities. Within academic circles, the concept is hotly contested. Some see valuing nature with the language of neoclassical economics as the only way to motivate governments and corporate actors into doing responsible environmental action. Others see concepts of ecosystem services and natural capital as the inevitable deepening of predatory capitalist relations extending into new environmental domains.  Dr Janet Fisher, an environmental social scientist at the University of Edinburgh, joins the podcast to discuss the newly published Dasgupta Report, an independent review of the relationship between the economy and biodiversity commissioned by the UK Treasury. The report made headlines when it asserted that we should treat nature like an asset and manage it like any other financial portfolio. We discuss how the report is evidence of a rise to dominance of applying economic thinking into the domain of ecology and environmental conservation and what that means for scholars working on landscape science.

• The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment

• Dempsey, J., & Suarez, D. C. (2016). Arrested development? The promises and paradoxes of "selling nature to save it". Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 106(3), 653-671.

• The Future of Conservation Project

• Westman, W. E. (1977). How much are nature's services worth?. Science, 197(4307), 960-964.

• Ehrlich, P. R. (1968). The population bomb. New York, 72-80.

• Mark Carney, UN special envoy for climate's plan for a $100 billion carbon market

• The Natural Capital Project's InVEST software

• Kareiva, P., & Marvier, M. (2012). What is conservation science?. BioScience, 62(11), 962-969.

• Final Report - The Economics of Biodiversity: The Dasgupta Review

• The relationship between ecosystem services and human-wellbeing from the MEA.

• Norgaard, R. B. (2010). Ecosystem services: From eye-opening metaphor to complexity blinder. Ecological economics, 69(6), 1219-1227.

• Fletcher, R., & Büscher, B. (2017). The PES conceit: revisiting the relationship between payments for environmental services and neoliberal conservation. Ecological Economics, 132, 224-231.

  and response:

• Van Hecken, G., Kolinjivadi, V., Windey, C., McElwee, P., Shapiro-Garza, E., Huybrechs, F., & Bastiaensen, J. (2018). Silencing agency in payments for ecosystem services (PES) by essentializing a neoliberal 'monster'into being: a response to Fletcher & Büscher's 'PES conceit'. Ecological Economics, 144, 314-318.

  And rejoinder!

• Fletcher, R., & Büscher, B. (2019). Neoliberalism in Denial in Actor-oriented PES Research? A Rejoinder to Van Hecken et al.(2018) and a Call for Justice. Ecological Economics, 156, 420-423.

• The UK's Environmental land management schemes: overview

• Assetization :Turning Things into Assets in Technoscientific Capitalism

• Fletcher R., (2021) "Review of Partha Dasgupta. 2021. The economics of biodiversity: the Dasgupta review.", Journal of Political Ecology 28(1). doi: https://doi.org/10.2458/jpe.2289

Additional research provided by Scott Herrett for this episode. 

The second episode of Landscapes features an interview with Dr Kirsteen Shields, Lecturer in International Law and Food Security at the Global Academy of Agriculture and Food Security at the University of Edinburgh.

Kirsteen was the first person to introduce me to the Land Reform debate happening in Scotland and has played a role in informing high level thinking on the Acts themselves. Particularly, we talk about the fundamental balancing act between rights to property and rights to pretty much everything else.

• Human Rights and the Work of the Scottish Land Commission, a discussion paper by Dr Kirsteen Shields

• An article from the Guardian in 2020 about the House of Commons debates on free school meals over holiday periods

Notions of Land Reform, especially when looking historically, bring forth images of mass upheaval and unrest associated with nationalization and redistribution of resources—as it should. Yet, as the favored option to shift land use, where property entitlements are left unchallenged, continues to deliver watered down results, it seems to me it's worth willing to experiment with reshaping the concept of property, while still respecting deeply entrenched social and legal norms of property.

There may be no better case to critically think this through than by looking at what's happening in Scotland, where a set of fairly recent Land Reform Acts have come into force. And I can't think of a better person to discuss this with in detail than Malcolm Combe, a senior lecturer in Scots private law at the University of Strathclyde. Malcolm has long been writing on Scottish Land reform, including a new book, "Land Reform in Scotland" edited with Jayne Glass and Annie Tindley. In this episode, we`ll talk about the Scottish Land Reform Acts, but also why they may have been started, and how they operate in the law.

We end up focusing on a really interesting case of these new legal entitlements in action—when a local church was put up for sale in a place called Portobello, just outside Edinburgh, the local community attempted to use the new powers available to try and bring the asset into their control.

Lovett, J. A., & Combe, M. M. (2019). The Parable of Portobello: Lessons and Questions from the First Urban Acquisition Under the Scottish Community Right-to-Buy Regime. Mont. L. Rev., 80, 211.

BBC Documentary Series on the potential for a community buy out at the Bays of Harris

Land Reform in Scotland: History, Law and Policy

The Morven Woods buyout story

*Since recording of interview, Andy Wightman no longer serves as MSP for the Scottish Green Party

This episode of Landscapes is supported by the UKRI Landscapes Decisions Programme

Get in touch at https://adamcalo.substack.com/about

As part of the work I'm doing with the Landscape Decisions Programme (https://landscapedecisions.org/), I'm producing a series of interview style podcasts about land.

The motivation of the Landscapes podcast is a trend I have been observing where scientific explorations of root causes of social and environmental problems end up focusing on land, landscapes, and land governance. This occurs in a variety of domains … those concerned with affordable housing end up looking at land taxation policy, food system scholars point out the crucial role of farmland tenure, and climate scientists target property rights as a key "lock-in" that prevents deep mitigation or adaptation. This type of thinking, the scaling up of research questions to landscape level, is what the Landscapes podcast will explore.  

The first "season" of episodes will focus on learning from researchers from the humanities, law, social and biophysical sciences about how their thinking on how to study and intervene on landscapes. This might be considered the "theory" season, where I'll try to tease out key logics underpinning land use and land use change.

The second season will concern the stories from differing forms of contested landscapes in flux, in threat, and in reform.

Landscapes aims to share stories about how re-imagining land is a precursor to delivering the types of social and ecological change required to address the most pressing problems of our time.

Full show notes, relevant links and transcripts can be found on the podcast website or at https://adamcalo.substack.com

I hope you enjoy listening to the podcast, I'd love to hear your feedback.