An Alibi for Ecocide
Interview with the author of Saving a Rainforest and Losing the World (Landscapes Podcast)
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. Send feedback or questions to adamcalo@substack.com
Music by Blue Dot Sessions: “Kilkerrin” by Blue Dot Sessions (www.sessions.blue).
Introduction
An article titled, Why is improving agricultural productivity crucial to ending global hunger and protecting the world’s wildlife, makes a seductive claim that two birds can be killed with one stone. That is, the twin crises of global hunger and rampant biodiversity loss can be solved with a single intervention: drastically increasing agricultural productivity. The article, written by Max Roser, Program Director of the Oxford Martin Programme on Global Development, writes:
Humanity has just entered a new era: after millennia in which increases in food production were only possible by turning the planet’s wilderness into agricultural land, today, we can increase food production while making more space for other species.
The logic behind this argument revolves around the relationship between increasing production and making “space” for other species. It is an argument that conveniently suggests the solution to the mess we’ve got ourselves in is to make order from chaos. To put human use in one zone, biodiversity in the other.
Such is the dogma of land sparing, a sort of socio technical imaginary that, argues intensifying agricultural production is the most sustainable way forward, because it frees up land for “real nature.” And, in my opinion this idea is having a resurgence.
In the 2010s there was a cloistered technical debate about the merits of the land sparing hypothesis that dominated conservation biology and land use science journals for about a decade. Academic combatants argued to a stalemate, neither accepting each other’s ontological or methodological assumptions. But now, something important is happening: the theory has seeped into the real world.
It’s one thing for ecologists to search for optimality and recommend policy to take up their proscriptions. But what happens when powerful interests that govern some of the world’s most important areas for tropical biodiversity actually adopt the land sparing approach?
At the tail end of the debate, one of the leading land sparing proponents, Ben Phalan wrote:
Critics of land sparing worry that the model could provide ammunition to boosters of industrialised, corporate agriculture, but there is scant (if any) evidence for this.
Times have changed. There is now a ubiquitous din of agribusiness claims that they, once vilified for environmental destruction are actually the heroes of the green transition.
So is land-sparing an evidenced-based recommendation for sustainable food production or a handmaiden to development interests probing for fresh justifications for extraction?
Enter Dr. Gregory Thaler’s new book, Saving a Rainforest and Losing the World, a six-years investigation into the fate of forests at the agrarian frontier of Indonesia, Brazil and Bolivia.
In September Thaler will start as an Associate Professor of Environmental Geography and Latin American Studies in the Oxford School of Global and Area Studies and the School of Geography and the Environment at the University of Oxford. He co-directs the Brazil Natural Resource Governance Initiative with colleagues at the University of Georgia—where he was an Assistant Professor of International Relations—and Federal University of Pará (Brazil).
And what does Thaler conclude about the land sparing hypothesis, being promoted today as the key to solving both hunger and biodiversity loss? Thaler says it is “an alibi for ecocide.”
Here is Dr Gregory Thaler.
Interview
[Full transcript coming soon]