Landscapes

Michael Grunwald is an environmental journalist who sees maximizing efficient production as the most important sustainability 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 [email protected] 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 [email protected] 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."

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).

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 [email protected] or https://bsky.app/profile/adamcalo.bsky.social 
Music by Blue Dot Sessions: "Kilkerrin" by Blue Dot Sessions (www.sessions.blue).

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 [email protected] or https://bsky.app/profile/adamcalo.bsky.social 

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