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 Sa…

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 Mietshäuse…

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 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, …

Normally, land owners get a powerful say in the direction of land use. But what if we could design policies such that public values of land use directed who gets to own the land? PhD student and farmer Roz Corbett travels to France to find out. Episode Links Public consultation on the Proposed Land Ownership and Public Interest (Scotland) Bill (clo…

Reforming property for sustainability requires both innovation in the law as well as in how we relate to land. Legal geography is a conceptual project that describes how law and space interact. Frankie McCarthy (lawyer) and Nicholas Blomley (geographer) discuss property through the legal geography lens. Episode Links Frankie McCarthy Nicholas Bloml…

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 Statesm…

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.…

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)…

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 rura…

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, …

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 Ew…

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 on…

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 …

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 wor…

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, la…