Landscapes – Details, episodes & analysis

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 adamcalo@substack.com or https://bsky.app/profile/adamcalo.bsky.social 

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

The Netherlands is a world leader in the industrial model of agriculture with speculation-driven land prices to match. Dido van Oosten of Stitchting Kapitaloceen presents a strategy for unravelling entrenched land relations from within a place where property is sacred.

Episode Links

• Nicholas Blomley: Performing Property: Making the World
• Mietshäuser Syndikat
• De Warmonderhof training program
• Land van Ons
• Vrijcoop collective housing project

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 https://bsky.app/profile/adamcalo.bsky.social 

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.

Recognizing how systems of private property control new visions of land use is one thing. Working on a political process of land reform is another. Bonnie VandeSteeg of the People's Land Policy discusses the recent program outlined in: Towards a Manifesto for Land Justice.

Episode Links

• Land for What? Land for Whom? by Dr Bonnie VandeSteeg
• Towards a Manifesto for Land Justice
• A People's food policy from the Land Worker's Alliance
• Scottish Land Commission
• Liverpool Land Commission
• Southwark Land Commission
• Land for the Many, 2019, UK Labour
• Right to Roam Campaign
• Dartmoor Wild Camping court case
• Climate Litigation Example
• Access and Property: A Question of Power and Authority. Sikor and Lund 2009
• Three Acres and a Cow
• The Diggers

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 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 adamcalo@substack.com or https://bsky.app/profile/adamcalo.bsky.social 

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