Landscapes - SoundSage

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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 adamcalo@substack.com or Bluesky

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

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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."

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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).

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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).

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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).

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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).

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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 (closes 12th September 2023)
Scotland’s Rural Land Market insights (Scottish Land Commission)
Tim Lang, Feeding Britain
Terre des Liens
How the authorisation system works and it’s impact on land market competition
Summary article on the development of the new Land law in France
Amelia Veitch
Speculation in French agricultural land markets and the impact on SAFER decisions on land allocations
Article exploring the impact on proactive local authority support for agroecological installations
Resistance to mega basins 1
Resistance to mega basins 2
Agroecological Transitions for Territorial Food Systems Project

Landscapes is produced by Adam Calo. A complete written transcript of the episode and extended shownotes can be found on Adam’s newsletter: Land Food Nexus. Send feedback or questions to adamcalo@substack.com.

This podcast was a team effort of Tanguy Martin from Terre de Liens, Amelia Veitch from the Laboratoire d’Anthropologie Politique (LAP-EHESS) and the University of Lausanne, Hélène Bechet and Alice Martin-Prevel from Terre de Liens, and Claire Lamine from INRAE for her involvement and support through the ATTER project. Georgie Styles provided production and audio mastering support.

With thanks to the ATTER project for funding this podcast.

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

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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 Blomley
Remember property? Progress in Human Geography
A Statement of Progressive Property
State v Shack case
Performing Property: Making The World. Canadian Journal of Law & Jurisprudence
The Mystery of Capital. Hernando de Soto
Why Are We Allowing the Private Sector to Take Over Our Public Works? The New York Times. Brett Christophers
Blomley on housing justice

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).

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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 Statesman. By Kai Heron, Alex Heffron and Rob Booth
Climate Leninism and Revolutionary Transition. Spectre Journal. Kai Heron and Jodi Dean
ELMS description from DEFRA
Indonesian farm workers in the UK and debt bondage
History of the World in Seven Cheap Things
WWF FOI on UK’s climate targets
Eric Ross, The Malthus Factor
US food policy and Haitian rice
Women: The Last Colony: Maria Mies, Veronika Bennholdt-Thomsen, Claudia von Werlhof
The Classical Agrarian Question: Myth, Reality and Relevance Today: Sam Moyo
On carbon markets and their overhype: The Value of a Whale, Buller
Sustain on ELMs
Climate apartheid
Mark Fisher Capitalist Realism
Rosa Luxemburg Reform or Revolution
Nancy Fraser on Polanyi
Maria Mies on subsistence
Public Common Partnerships, Commonwealth
Kai on the banana discourse
Right to Roam campaign England

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).

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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. Dr. Emma Gardner proposes an "ecological permission structure", or a parallel planning process that takes into account the needs and desires of multi-species communities.

Episode Notes

Dr. Emma Gardner

The Animals of Farthing Wood

Watership Down

Raymond Williams, Problems in Materialism and Culture: Selected Essays

Safina, C. (2015). Beyond words: What animals think and feel.

Toad Patrol

Andrew Balmford's summary of land sparing

Land sparers feel their oats

Gardner, E., Sheppard, A., & Bullock, J. (2022). Why biodiversity net gain requires an ecological permission system. Town and Country Planning Association Journal, 391-402.

Freedom of Movement: how do animals get around in our modern world? [Online Event]

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Interview Transcript: Landscapes and Interdisciplinarity (Beth Cole) Listen here The transcript has been edited lightly for comprehension and read-ability

INTRO

[00:00:38] Adam Calo: In an earlier episode of the podcast, I talked with Dr. Janet Fisher, where we discussed the rise to dominance of the ecosystem services framework and its limitations for resolving problems in landscape decision-making.

Around that same time, a group of researchers made up of ecosystem modelers artists, ecologists and social scientists were getting together to ask: If the ecosystem service concept has run its course, how might we think of more holistic strategies for deciding how to use or how to treat land?

Part of this episode summarizes and academic paper that was produced through these collaborations. In this episode, I speak with the lead author of that paper, Dr. Beth Cole, who is senior advisor in earth observation at Natural England.

Beyond the content of the article, what this episode really offers is a deep look into how the concept of landscapes forces interdisciplinary work. The lessons about processes for negotiating embedded, disciplinary worldviews, and ingrained forms of knowledge production are valuable for how to do research in their own right.

But these learnings bear striking resemblance to the group's conclusions about how to make more convivial decisions on the land.

Here's Beth Cole.

INTERVIEW

[00:01:52] Beth Cole: So the paper really looks at the ecosystem service concept -- or framework as a concept-- and identifies some of the challenges with it as a concept and comes to the idea that actually for landscape decision making, which is a complex kind of process, we need to enhance that concept, which has been fairly well established now and add in, a set of sort of complimentary approaches.

We've called them lenses. They're more viewpoints of things that should be considered to go alongside that concept to make sort of more holistic decisions. So we identified the lenses as we called them as, power or market gain, ecosystem services – that's the existing one that we're enhancing—cultural landscapes and ecocentric, and the idea was by bringing in different viewpoints and perspectives, we can make better, more holistic decisions. We've also propose a framework as a way of kind of trying to align these lenses. We don't give an exact one size fits all answer as the way to do it, but we kind of propose how they might sit alongside each other.

[00:03:06] Adam Calo: So isn't the ecosystem service framework already attempting to do this in some way? Isn't some of its core argumentation that it is able to provide a more holistic view of values and relationships on the landscape. So why, why does it need this modification?

[00:03:20] Beth Cole: It's good at what it does. It's good at what it's good at, but it's not good at everything. It's got some failings or, well shortcomings, I should say more. We basically say, let it do the stuff it can do well and think from completely different viewpoints to try and do the extra stuff. The things that it's not so good at are identifying values or, cultural perspectives that are things that can't really be identified as services because the whole sort of framework concept is based around the fact of what nature provides for humans, what the benefits or services to human wellbeing.

There are some things that it’s just inadequate at valuing. So we're saying let's not scrap it, then throw the baby out with the bath water, but equally let's try and add to it and really try and incorporate some of the elements of the complex sort of decision-making.

[00:04:19] Adam Calo: One of the key narrative structures in the paper is the discussion of this flower petal diagram, because it does seem that the ecosystem services framework does have a trend in research to try and take on these more complicated and complex and contested valuation processes by doing research on them, just understand and translate them into the kind of service language. In the flower pedal diagram, the paper talks about how the ecosystem service framework attempts to add more pedals at different types of values and relations into the framework. But the paper suggest that at some point that type of logic is flawed, correct?

[00:05:02] Beth Cole: Yeah, I think we argue that we should stop adding petals and add different viewpoints to sit alongside the concept, because I think you can keep adding petals forever, but it will start to just get over complicated. What the concept is struggling with is, not always giving equal weight to some of the harder to achieve and value services.

[00:05:28] Adam Calo: So the paper writes “we argue that we cannot simply keep adding petals or expanding the ES concept further. We need a more holistic way of approaching landscape decisions one which includes the valuable insights afforded by the ES concept, but which acknowledges how ES represents a particular worldview. That must be supplemented by a suite of other perspectives and approaches.”

I wonder, in this quote, you kind of get the core argument of the paper, but in one sense, it also seems to embrace a certain epistemology. One more from a social constructionist perspective. Do you think for the more biophysical scientists who are participating in this … It seems like a hard pill to swallow for someone who deals more in empirical research aimed at identifying objective truths.

[00:06:13] Beth Cole: The biophysical scientists who were involved, who were actually mainly focused on ecosystem service modeling and enhancing that modeling and working out how to combine models in a better way t make the concept more complete… actually really did accept this as a viewpoint because they were saying –I think I was actually pleasantly surprised how it wasn't such a hard thing for them to accept because they are aware they're fully aware of the challenges and that you can't quantify everything. And the ecosystem service model is very good at quantifiable factors, but it's not so good at the unquantifiable and the taking into account the subtle differences and the more local based knowledge that you really can't feed into a generic wide viewpoint.

[00:07:06] Adam Calo: So perhaps there's an important opening there by a reflective attitude amongst people who work with this framework, you know, day in and day out. Otherwise there's no space for this kind of collaboration.

[00:07:18] Beth Cole: Yeah. And I think the people who we were working with on this were quite open-minded and quite keen to include some of the other ideas from the other disciplines, because ultimately that is enhancing the whole process of for decision-making. By being open to addressing ideas from different viewpoints, They are ultimately progressing the area know it's just very complex. And if they can add tools to that complexity, that's the benefit, but they're not trying to have a one size fits all, I can do everything type of attitude.

[00:07:56] Adam Calo: And I wonder, if the umbrella concept of landscapes and landscape decisions helps facilitate that as well? If it was, you know, an environmental sciences project, or something looking at biodiversity decline, then maybe it's not as open to reflection as something as broad as landscapes.

[00:08:17] Beth Cole: Landscapes in themselves are a very broad, complicated inter-relational thing there's so much that comes under that landscape umbrella and what people consider landscapes are and what they do and what they provide and what they mean to people is in itself a very wide, broad concept.

And I think what this program has really done is to try and take some of the issues that are being developed within disciplines, which fall under that and trying to widen them out and say, put things against each other and say, we can't just keep working within our own disciplines on this topic, because ultimately it is a net is a massive complex topic that interweaves with each other. And I think being part of the network setup that it is trying to achieve, researchers are now working across disciplines on a much wider, broader scale than they would be answering smaller, specific questions.

[00:09:18] Adam Calo: So in your mind, is that the real promise of interdisciplinarity? It's something that appears almost mandatory in a lot of new funding calls. And I think there's a lot of recognition that interdisciplinarity does something good, but, quite what it does is unclear or how to do it is also unclear.

[00:09:37] Beth Cole: Yeah, I think most people accept the interdisciplinarity is a positive thing. I think ultimately complex problems are never going to be solved by one viewpoint by one discipline. I mean, in general, in research, big complex problems need to be viewed from multiple angles. And I think the interdisciplinary approach really allows people to think outside the box.

I think within the interdisciplinary sort of wider escape, you still do need the focused research in one topic to answer elements of problems. But I think the promise of interdisciplinary is by linking those up and joining them, being able to answer much bigger, much more complex questions, because you are sort of viewing things from lots of angles.

[00:10:28] Adam Calo: It's almost kind of a parallel to the conclusions of the paper, right? To recognize these multiple approaches, but then somehow bring them to the table at the same time. Can you tell me about why these writing groups were formed and what, what their goal was?

[00:10:44] Beth Cole: They came directly out of a big, workshop which was a program wide workshop. So it included all the researchers and principal investigators, and everybody involved on the projects under the landscape decision program. And at the end of it, we proposed some writing groups for people to self-select. They volunteered. You could sign up for them if you, if you wanted to. I went through all of the outputs from the workshop –the notes and the report at the end of the workshop to sort of pick out some themes of things that have been talked about quite a lot, or that were hot topics, or that were discussed that people engaged with in the workshops and the discussions afterwards.

We had initially a long list and then we've got it down to a short list of questions and themes of things that came up as outcomes of the workshop. We talked through refining those initial themes into some specific questions or working titles, but we did make sure that we had a range of disciplines in each of them and that everybody who wanted to be involved could be.

And that's how they were formed.

[00:11:50] Adam Calo: So there's already some interesting process elements here because you have a larger program with an unusually large group of disciplines. Because this is a program that includes, you know, biophysical scientists, social scientists, and then the arts and humanities are actually strongly represented. The deciding of the themes you were already kind of instrumental here in trying to translate what everyone was talking about into a couple of clear buckets.

[00:12:16] Beth Cole: So to do that, I went through the notes and the recordings of all of the sessions, because it was quite a big workshop. It went over multiple days. And it was picking out things that were talked about more than once or that got people's attention or that were talked about from different viewpoints.

[00:12:35] Adam Calo: But this sounds like a really important step because if you had come back to the broader group and presented four themes that have a whole three-day workshop of contentious and pressing issues in the environment and society, and the themes you presented were not well received, then you wouldn't have the buy-in to actually embark on the next step, which is some kind of collaborative project.

[00:12:58] Beth Cole: So I came up with a long list initially myself, which I think I had about 10 or 12, maybe? And I took that to the rest of the program coordination team, who were like a smaller working group and we slightly refined the wording of them. I think we kept all 10 in there, but maybe we just slightly shuffled them. And then they were presented to the people who were interested in participating.

[00:13:25] Adam Calo: And were you comfortable with this prioritization? Did you feel it was kind of an ad hoc democratic process, but at some points there was kind of more directive decision making being used? At any point, did you think, “Ooh, I wonder if we're kind of silencing some of these voices? Or did you think that this was going above and beyond what is usually done in terms of prioritization of a research project?

[00:13:46] Beth Cole: I think I was happy with it because it became quite clear in the discussions, which the favorites were. I don't think there was any that just got pushed to one side or cut out because there wasn't a take-up often it was more that they were actually maybe a bit overlapping or a bit similar or had slightly different focuses, but were on the same theme.

So they were maybe combined or we discussed, which one of the two would work better in, in reality when written up. So I think it was a quite organic process just in making sure we were including lots of views. I don't think any topics just got shoved under the carpet.

[00:14:28] Adam Calo: You have this theme for a paper, which is the role of the ecosystem services framework on landscape decision-making, which you kind of pulled out of a couple of days of interdisciplinary workshopping, and then a number of writers from different disciplines show upon a zoom call, essentially.

Can you describe how those first meetings go? How did it move from this broad theme into this critique of ecosystem services and the idea of multiple lenses or, or worldviews, and suggesting that that's the way forward in into bringing about landscape decision making?

[00:15:03] Beth Cole: The whole process has taken quite a long time. At the time I was thinking this is going on forever, this is taking ages. But in reflection, looking back, I don't actually think that's a bad thing because it allowed a lot of time for discussions and each meeting wasn't necessarily just about the focus of what's going into which paragraph of the paper.

It was more about discussing the concept and the ideas and how to bring in how to combine these ideas and viewpoints, and actually really spending time to listen and appreciate each other's ideas from the different disciplines. So the first meetings were quite, if I remember back that far, they were quite formal. As the chair, I had to go in quite structured with what I wanted to talk about addressed in that meeting. But at the time we were a third of the way through say there were much more organic and much more self-leading and much more people got to know each other and what people were prepared to talk and chat.

And the, the conversation just sort of led itself slightly more. You then went into the next phase of, “we actually do need to write something to get some of this structured and down.” And how are we going to turn these interesting thoughts into a paper? And I think the process it's interesting how the meetings themselves changed as the process was going through, the different stages.

So the first meetings I would say were a bit more formal. People were a bit more shy. It took awhile to get to know each other and bring out confidence to be able to speak. And then once the ball was rolling, the group really did just gel and it was quite easy to get discussions.

[00:16:45] Adam Calo: You could write about this topic in so many ways. So what were some of the key insights or boundaries that were created through either those formal or informal sessions that brought about even a sense of, at least performed consensus, if not, true consensus around what the writers thought was important to contribute in this?

[00:17:06] Beth Cole: I don't know if we had any boundaries. I really actually looking back, can't think at which moment we came up with the like, penny dropping to have the lenses. I think we'd been talking about different viewpoints for quite a while. And that we, I think very quickly, we came to the idea that we needed to be holistic and consider everyone's views.

And we were quite conscious that we needed to bring in all the decisions. But the idea of formalizing them into what we could then have now subsequently called lenses … I think it was literally somebody was talking and somebody else chipped up and said, I think what you're saying is that we need to view this through different lenses and we all stopped and suddenly went, yes, that's it that's exactly it.

There was not a formal process in that that was what was going to happen and that we were going to try and work out lenses and what fitting our viewpoints into them. It was more that they came out of the discussions that we were having.

[00:18:04] Adam Calo: So I wonder if this kind of informal unstructured time is one of the secret ingredients to create this process? As you're describing it, that seems a really poor match for the majority of how academia is structured, don't you think?

[00:18:19] Beth Cole: Yeah, and I think you can only be informal for a certain amount of time. There was a point at which we then needed to work out how that was going to make a paper and how that was going to fit on the page and structure it. And that sort of was at the net the next phase, so to speak. So once we had decided that we were going to do this lens approach and we'd kind of talked about what they would be, we then really had to sort of get ourselves into line and start to work out how it would form as a paper.

And to do that, we actually spent at least one, if not, two sessions, really working out a structure for the paper and what bits would go where and how the story would unfold on the page.

So I think yes, the formality at the beginning was good because it meant that we really got into the depths of the discussions and what came out was good. But I think you can't do that for too long.

[00:19:18] Adam Calo: You've written a blog that is summarizing some of the lessons learned from this process. And in it, you write nuances can be ingrained in language , subtleties in an argument need to be explored and not just lost in translation. It is helpful to have a person in the group who pays attention to the translation aspect, who takes time to listen and interjects if meaning is being lost or confusion sets in.

I wonder if you can give an example of this when this happened in the context of the paper? It sounds like this is this kind of key role of taking advantage of the informal discussions and giving an even playing field of conversation and translating it into something.

[00:19:53] Beth Cole: I think there's no doubt about it. One of the biggest challenges that interdisciplinary working brings with it is a different use of language by different disciplines. Sometimes, people can be using language or phrases or terminologies that quite clear to them, but might be not as clear to somebody from a different discipline. And actually sometimes we worked out that people were talking from two different viewpoints about an issue and sounded like, not argumentative, that's too strong, but you know, it might be disagreement when actually somebody could chip in and say, but I think you're agreeing, I think you're saying the same thing, but you're just saying it very differently.

And actually just having the dynamics within the group, that somebody could listen to the two arguments and actually, I think often that came from an external third party who might not be in one of the two disciplines, you know, might not be in one of the two camps or the two disciplines who could say, you know, from an external point of view, “I think what you're saying is very aligned. You're just saying it slightly differently” Or, “you might be putting emphasis on a slightly different point.” And sometimes just happened where somebody would just chirp up and just say it, and then the penny would drop and everyone would say, yes. Yeah, we get it.

Or other times I think you did just need to be a bit more aware that people might be disagreeing that using quite conflicting language to do that. And actually then you'd just have to I think mainly as a chair, especially you'd have to just be aware of that and really be taking the time to listen to everyone's viewpoints and work out what the style of language they were using.

[00:21:35] Adam Calo: I think I was probably guilty of this a couple of times in the meeting, because we're so trained in the jargon around disciplines. I remember going on some diatribe about epistemological commitments and one of the senior members of on in the writing group said, you know, Adam, you, you can't use that language because we don't know what you're talking about.

And I was like, really? This is actually core to what I do every day, but maybe not only having a translator there, but also kind of being a little bit more humble in trying to understand where our own language is generated and how that can be exclusive.

[00:22:07] Beth Cole: It's a bit about assumed knowledge, isn't it? It's something that's very common everyday usage to you, or that you might think is quite basic because you use it so frequently. You don't know that it is actually, or you've forgotten over time that it is actually a more technical or ingrained or quite a depth of knowledge in the language that you're using because you don't it's become so familiar to you.

So I think, yeah, it's a bit about taking the time to think about your own language, but also developing the relationships in the group. So somebody could say to you, oh Adam, we don't quite get that. Can you say it again in a different way? And not being nervous, not sitting there thinking, oh, I'm not as clever ,I can't do it, I can't understand what he's saying. He's saying something that's above my head. It's probably not. It's just probably that it's a different use of language that you're not used to hearing. And you could probably quite easily grasp the concept if different words were used. So I think building up the relationships within the group, so people feel that they can speak up and say, can you just reword that?

Can you just say it again and not feeling like they need to sit there in silence because they don't think they understand.

[00:23:21] Adam Calo: One of the areas of tension that I noticed, if you want to call it tension in the group, was around the notion of power relations.

So the, the paper tries to suggest that there are other viewpoints that are valid and understanding landscapes and landscape decisions that should help inform these decisions beyond the ecosystem services concept, which is fairly dominant in terms of, you know, a lot of research and policy-making circles.

But then the question for me, and I noticed a lot of debate about this in the group is how, how do you negotiate which of these are more powerful and where they derive their power? And then if we do want them to be held equally or more equally, what needs to be changed so that, that can actually be achieved instead of just saying we should listen to these other viewpoints?

[00:24:06] Beth Cole: So in the latter section of the paper, we talk about how to actually try to align these viewpoints, how to include them. And it is acknowledged that ultimately the people who are making the decisions, even though they can listen to all the viewpoints from all the different lenses and take into account all of the sources of knowledge, which is what we're advocating in the paper, they have to make a decision.

And that decision will probably be biased upon where their views, which of the lenses their own viewpoint sits closest to. So how to balance that the power between the different viewpoints is tricky, and we've tried to set out a couple of ways to make sure all the viewpoints are on the table but I think ultimately no matter how you say it and how you put them together, people are going to feel more aligned to one viewpoint than another facilitating, being able to weight those viewpoints in an equal way is something that is very, very hard to do.

[00:25:23] Adam Calo: When I think about it just now, it almost seems as a more fundamental challenge to the ecosystem services framework, than I was thinking about it when we were writing the paper, because one of the whole ideas of the ecosystem service framework is to flatten these power dimensions by bringing people together around a common framework.

But then if we're saying that in that it might seem like you have a common framework, but you actually end up silencing a number of viewpoints that are actually really useful into making decisions.

[00:25:52] Beth Cole: I mean, I think what we try to do is give a couple of ways to align the lenses and make sure all the information is heard, but I don't think we've hit the nail on the head completely. I think there is, there's still going to be power battles between how much the lenses are taken into account. We just have to try to present ways that minimize that as much as we possibly can at this stage.

[00:26:24] Adam Calo: So the paper in its current form gives this example of a decision of a local authority or being required to allocate land for new homes, but also needing to keep other ecosystem values in check, like reducing flooding and, and increasing carbon capture. Could you describe how these different lenses might view this issue?

[00:26:46] Beth Cole: If we go through the lenses in turn, without considering them all together, each one in on its own would probably come out with quite a different outcome to that decision that needs to be made. So we we've put it in context for saying the power of market gain lens would probably look at evidence existing on land ownership structures, the cost of different options and how they might benefit the communities, and the wider financial benefits of in different schemes. And they might favor developing sort of premium high cost housing that might therefore produce more income for that for the area or for the land, the landowners, or build upon what the greatest gains are for the community, which might end up with probably more higher density housing in that situation. The ecosystem service lens would probably put more of an emphasis on the way which natural land provides benefits to the site to provides the benefits and values to the society. So it would look at the flood management and the carbon sequestration and might favor some more nature-based solutions. So things like natural flood management, where it will plant trees in within the catchment, they look at the nonfinancial benefits as well as the just the financial gain really.

So they'll probably think about the wider benefits. So things like air quality, noise, recreation, crop, pollination, biodiversity, as well as just the amount of where the maximum gain financial gain from the housing location. It focuses on the position of the new houses, but it would recognize that we need, we need the houses, so we would need to build some, but it might be the positioning of them will be informed by other decisions as well. So they might include green spaces within the housing or planting trees upstream to prevent some of the flooding above the catchment.

The cultural landscape lens would use the housing allocation to sort of re-people the landscape, maybe providing cheaper, rural affordable houses in the communities, regenerating the rural economies and connecting the people in the landscape with people to the landscape, people that live there or to the lands. And maybe focus on sort of promoting population growth within the existing population, preserving the characteristics and the sort of shared local knowledge of the landscapes. They look at very place specific solutions and look into the past or the cultural and the current cultural connections with the landscape. And finally, the ecocentric lens, which would probably question more about whether the land needs to be really used for housing or dedicated to human housing and how much has already used for that purpose, whether the existing housing could be improved, whether that would be sufficient.

And also whether there's a balance of habitats taking into account the other species in the area. It might focus on looking at the connectivity of the habitats and the heterogeneity of different types of biodiversity at different scales. So each of them would probably have a different focus in the way that they approached the same landscape decision.

[00:30:25] Adam Calo: Yeah. And I think what's really interesting about that is you could imagine some kind of decision-making body that is wholly made up of one of these worldviews. And then the result is a drastically different outcome on the landscape.

[00:30:37] Beth Cole: Yeah. I think where the houses were built, the amount of houses, the type of density, whether the flooding reduction had an equal weight to the houses, or whether it was a secondary thing that, you know, was just a tick box exercise or whether they really did want to achieve that could be very, very different depending on the people or the group of people making the decision.

[00:31:00] Adam Calo: And then let's say that using the same example of the hypothetical one that's given, How do you then bring these lenses together? What would it actually look like in terms of a space where these different forms of knowledge, where they are heard are presented and then that leads up to some kind of decision about how to build houses and where to build them and what shape it should take

[00:31:20] Beth Cole: What we propose is really that with the aim is that you're giving equal weight to each lens. That you integrate all the information from each of the lenses. So the information that's provided by each lens could be quite different in its form. It could be, quite narrative in one sense, or it could be quite quantitative from another lens.

And the, with the aim to get a convivial consensus, the process of doing that is tricky. And I think we, we basically say that to do that, you need to really ensure that you get the representation of all lenses brought to the table. You talk about multiple solutions and you talk through the impacts of different multiple solutions in a transparent conversation, which can then go through a cyclical cycle.

So you can go round it multiple times until agreement is made. Well, all of the sort of multiple dimensions of a solution are really taken into account in the decision. You'd need to look at the different scales of information and knowledge that could be brought to the table from the different lenses, the types of knowledge and voices that are heard from the different lenses, because they will provide different types of information and make sure that then some of the voices aren't overlooked

[00:32:46] Adam Calo: So listening to this process, obviously I agree with something like this that could be tried but one of the key critiques of the ecosystem services framework is the transaction costs of doing all these types of analyses for all of these decisions.

But now we're almost suggesting to add even more transaction costs of some kind of multi-layered iterative, decision-making framework. Isn't this too slow or, how would you respond to a critique that says we actually need more authoritarian decision making because of the pressing environmental problems that we face?

[00:33:17] Beth Cole: I don't think it has to be that much slower. I think all we’re saying is don't ignore people's views. Don't ignore sections of viewpoints or sections of knowledge.

I think it's a fairly simple message ultimately, and setting up the process to be able to do that might be a bit tricky, but I think the main message is don't just model. Don't just consider the numbers. Make sure you do do that and you are aware of what the implications on nature are for your decisions. Don’t be blinkered basically.

[00:33:50] Adam Calo: I'm wondering if going through this process, you know, you've written this blog about some thoughts about interdisciplinarity. One of the key papers that I have always gone back to is about this is a paper titled. Is Interdisciplinary research a mashup? And the kind of question they asked there is if we are looking at a problem and this problem is landscape decision-making and we just look at it from one discipline and then in the same paper, kind of look at it from another, have we achieved interdisciplinarity or do we need to do some creative translation, in order to actually come out with a new emergent property of some kind?

What do you think about this concept? And do you think that we achieved that? Or did we just, do the lower hanging fruit of just putting the different disciplines next to one another.

[00:34:36] Beth Cole: I think the idea of a mashup is that to integrate different ideas and you put them together in a new way. I'd say it's a creative undertaking that produces something in a way that is new. I don't think true interdisciplinarity—good interdisciplinarity doesn't just put two ideas next to each other. There is some kind of translation involved in it to mesh them. What we've done here in this paper, I think, we need, you need to consider things from different viewpoints.

But we're, I think have tried to integrate them in a way where, when we were defining the lens, we looked at lots of elements from different viewpoints. I don't think we just said, you looked at it from A, then you go to B, then you go to C and then you go to D. I think we really, in those definition of those lenses, we really did start to break down and integrate some of the viewpoints from many disciplines and mesh them together.

I would say we've not just gone for the low hanging fruit of putting different disciplines or views next to each other on the page and saying, you need to consider them all. But I think we, what we, we haven't done, which I think would be a bad thing, would be to really rip apart each individual viewpoint and say, that's not valid on its own because we're saying they are all valid.

[00:36:02] Adam Calo: And I guess that's the kind of hopeful aspiration that the paper argues is that decision-makers those with the hand on the levers to make these big changes in the landscape would do the same.

[00:36:13] Beth Cole: I think it is quite an idealistic viewpoint. But I think , this is a good place to be fairly idealistic and put those things forward. If you can't do it in a paper where you're proposing a new way of looking at things, then I think it's a -- I think it's a good thing to be positive and idealistic in this.

[00:36:31] Adam Calo: I will say something very interesting, that kind of gives insight into this process into the actual gears is that we had these conversations as a whole group. And then there was delegation of tasks. And at some point, I was in charge of writing a certain lens or at least a few paragraphs about a lens, for example, you could tell, one could tell that where I was writing those because of that ownership.

I was writing in a little bit more of my home discipline. Reviewing the paper, you could tell where that was coming out from others. That meant that you, as the lead author, would have to then renegotiate some of the collective agreements after these, individual delegations were assigned.

[00:37:13] Beth Cole: Yeah, so I would say that was part of the editing process took quite a while. I mean, it was iterative as we went along and I think we had a system where people were given an allocation of a chunk of writing to take charge of. And when we put them all together, there was a process where other authors from the group could comment or edit or make, make remarks.

They helped clarify points often, helped identify areas where it needed more explanation. Or also at some points did temper or bring down some of disciplined language, from particular authors. .And I would say it was quite a slow process because it did take quite a few goings over to make sure that we edited it so it flowed. And so it wasn't very disjointed piece of work with lots of different styles of writing in it, but equally keeping true to some of those voices that, initially wrote the sections because they were allocated based on people's expertise and their knowledge of where they had, input into the discussion.

[00:38:24] Adam Calo: So you gave us all a bone to chew on … I wonder, I did feel like there was a lot of trust in you as the lead author and the convener of these chair groups. How did you build that trust? And what's your research background? How did you come to the point where you embrace interdisciplinary collaboration as opposed to kind of working at the forefront of some kind of disciplinary field?

[00:38:44] Beth Cole: I think that trust well was very kindly granted to me really, through building up relationships with working with the working with the group for quite a long time. And that goes back to the same point about saying, don't try to rush the process.

I think an element was that this paper did fall within my field. So I felt I had quite a bit of confidence in being able to edit the text and lead the discussions because I understood the discussions. And I knew from my background that I knew the viewpoint.

I hadn't however, worked and done anything like this sort of leading an interdisciplinary group before. So a bit of it was learning on the job and just being able to apply skills I'd gained throughout my previous experiences, trying to take time to really consider and think about other disciplines and be aware myself that I needed, just learn how to do that and have a go. And I think my background, which where I have worked in ecosystem service modeling, and I have a remote sensing background, but I've always been very applied and with a terrestrial sort of ecosystem service side of that stuff.

I did feel that having the subject knowledge allowed me to have some confidence. On some of the other groups, the writing groups, where I felt less ownership of the topic or less confident in the content, I think the editing process is harder and slower and I've handed over a lead authorship on one in particular to somebody else. Because it's just really not in my comfort zone to be editing at that level.

[00:40:29] Adam Calo: Was this the same one, that there was a little bit more conflict around where the paper was going?

[00:40:33] Beth Cole: Yeah. It's the group we call “scales” and the actual final working title of the paper is being defined fully at the moment, but that one has ended up being a much more heavily social science driven paper, which is where I don't have the skills I would say in, lead authoring a social science paper in its own right. It takes into account the views of some of the physical scientists, but the main conflict really has been around very different viewpoints of what scales are –the really real fundamentals about how to align social science and arts and humanities viewpoints with the more biophysical or physical scientists on what just really the basics of the notion of what scale is.

So the conceptual theory, with cultural constructions or social production of scale versus the empirical measurements of distance, from sort of mathematical point of view has been a more of a contentious issue in that paper.

[00:41:40] Adam Calo: That's really fascinating. I feel like you have the ability to write a paper about comparing these two processes, because I feel like I could probably have raised a number of conceptual roadblocks to thinking about ecosystem services and landscape decisions, but presenting those roadblocks wasn't necessarily going to affect reaching a new consensus. So why bring them up? And maybe that's a failure because then it's leaving out a more deeper in reconcilable critique?

[00:42:07] Beth Cole: Yeah, but I think maybe by putting up roadblocks, it maybe makes the discussions slightly richer, should we say? Or more really challenges people's views, and makes them think about what their views are to a greater extent, I would say, but it makes the aligning those views and trying to come to some sort of consensus of what the focus of what is going into the paper a much trickier issue.

In those discussions, we maybe have had more meetings where we feel like we've gone round and round in circles. I think the circles are moving and they are changing, but you do feel like you're discussing similar points for a longer period of time.

[00:42:53] Adam Calo: So maybe even more time and more trust-building and informal relationship is required. If you want to get to that richer level of a deeper engagement.

[00:43:03] Beth Cole: Ultimately there is only a certain amount of time while we're all still employed on the projects and I've still got funding. Out of the two, that one is not yet in review and this paper is, so I think the two processes have pros and cons both ways.

[00:43:20] Adam Calo: A boycott of the knowledge production process over the disagreements … This is raises a lot of more interesting questions, but in your blog about lessons learned from this process, you highlight four elements that you think has made this process work, as it were, in terms of reaching a knowledge output that you feel happy about and is engaging in this field in a productive way. And you talk about language, time,

flexibility and leadership. Do you think you could just give a brief summary of these different dimensions and how they applied?

[00:43:54] Beth Cole: ,I think they broadly all come under the sort of title of working in an interdisciplinary way. That was how I was thinking about the blog because these groups have all been interdisciplinary. So the language one, it's how each subject brings its own language. How we talk about things in different ways, but also, the assumed knowledge and the ways of representing things within different disciplines and how to overcome that in terms of translating between the disciplines and really giving voice to everybody and listening to what everybody's saying. The language one also, it's the discussions, it's the vocal language, but it's also, I think, translates into the written work of different disciplines.

What a social science paper looks like compared to a physical modeling paper or a mathematics paper where they talk about equations is very, very different in terms of writing style and out and the structure and the way the paper looks in the end. The time I think there's just no getting away from building very good interdisciplinary teams that trust each other and are able to have very good discussions takes time. And I don't think you can underestimate the amount of time it takes to build those relationships. Flexibility and the leadership, probably a more focused around the sort of process of getting the paper written more of the logistics of get of it, getting it done.

The flexibility relates, in this instance, was based around the fact that we had to work around COVID restrictions and what was going to be in-person writing retreats quickly changed to being long, slower writing online, with lots of zoom meetings and offline working and coming together to discuss a shared document, but also flexibility in that the way that you approach the writing task at different stages through the process and with different people, there's definitely no one size fits all writing process online, I would say.

And then the leadership, I think, just, it does take somebody to coordinate and I don't think you can write by committee without, somebody steering the ship.

I think the ones that are furthest through the process and that have been submitted or that have been published, have had the strongest leadership hand. And I think that is about chivvying people along. It's about making sure the work is done and also about enabling the discussions, and making sure that we're sort of talking about the right thing at some points in the discussion.

[00:46:48] Adam Calo: One of my mentors has always said that universities and academia are really good at producing first chair violinists, but they're terrible at producing conductors of orchestras. And the point there was that we probably need more conductors of orchestras than we need more first chair violinists when it comes in terms of how experts are engaging with problems of the environment.

Having gone through this experience, if you were a funding agency, or you could tell a funding agency how to replicate this experience, but make it as most productive as possible to bring the benefits of interdisciplinary work to the fore, how would you structure these types of processes?

[00:47:28] Beth Cole: I really liked that analogy with the orchestra and the violinist and the conductors. You do need to conduct. But I think you probably need conductors who know about the topic. They, you couldn't put a, just some generic project manager in who is just there to facilitate the meetings and make sure people work on time.

You need somebody who is engaged in the discussions who understands the subject area from at least one perspective or from at least at least got a base knowledge, in the topic from one viewpoint or another.

I would say to the funding agencies, don't rush these things. Don't always expect outputs -- don't fund lots of six month short projects. Give a bit more time and waiting to some bigger bits of research, because you can't rush interdisciplinarity. I think I would probably say don't try and make them too big. Don't try and have 20 or 30 co-authors because it's too hard to listen to that many voices and for that many people to contribute.

Fund them well. Give people time and employee people whose role is to oversee, but who are not so removed from the process themselves.

[00:48:53] Adam Calo: I think that's a great place to end. Beth Cole, thank you for coming on the podcast.

[00:48:58] Beth Cole: Thank you for having me.

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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)

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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

Full interview transcript available at adam.calo.substack.com Music: Kilkerrin by Blue Dot Sessions (www.sessions.blue), Creative Commons license Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)

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Transcript for the Landscapes Podcast Episode 6. Published May 2022

*The transcript has been edited lightly for clarity and comprehension

Intro [00:00:00] Adam Calo: In December of 2021, an article in Scientific American titled How Biotech Crops Can Crash—and Still Never Fail, laid out an argument critiquing the promotion of genetically modified seeds and associated crop biotechnologies. I would characterize the general contours of the GM debate as fairly siloed.

Biotechnological solutions to problems in the agricultural and food sector, enjoy what scholar Maywa Montenegro de Wit calls a “thick legitimacy” evidenced by their share of research funding, deployment in fields across the world, corporate backing, and entrepreneurial activity. Sceptics on the other hand, warn of how these tecno-fix approaches to problems in the landscape may entrench unequal power relations, evoke the hubris of human control over nature, and entrench a form of industrial agriculture that locks out much needed alternatives, like agroecology.

And while the debate may appear deadlocked and siloed at times the diffusion of crop biotechnology and mobilizations against their use are rapidly restructuring the ecological and social dimensions of landscapes.

It surprised me, then when the article provoked somewhat of a backlash amongst some notable biotechnology proponents. While actors in this debate frequently make their case for how GM technologies could, should and actually play out in the world, direct engagement with each other’s arguments is more rare.

What were the claims presented in the article that respondents found worth contesting? Amidst decades of GM critique, why did this article provoke a targeted response? I thought I’d seize on this opportunity … to look at this brief overlap of claims and counter claims to try and understand the deeper drivers of contested worldviews around this issue.

Dr. Andrew Flachs, the guest of this episode, is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at Purdue University. His book, Cultivating Knowledge: Biotechnology, Sustainability, and the Human Cost of Cotton Capitalism in India, explores how farmers come to plant GM cotton from an ethnographic perspective.

His work, stemming from multiple years of field work in Southern India, has been regarded as uniquely balanced, avoiding the pitfalls of demagoguing GM technologies for their own sake nor grasping at a utopian promise of a greener, smarter, more profitable farming through technological diffusion alone.

I asked him to help sift through the relevant claims as a starting point for bringing forth a deeper understanding of what foundations really drives the GM debate, and the associated impacts for landscapes worldwide. Here’s Andrew Flachs.

Interview [00:02:10] Adam Calo: What are genetically modified organisms and how have they appeared in your scholarly work?

[00:02:16] Andrew Flachs: There is healthy debate on what constitutes a genetically modified organism, because there's a lot of politics and money around how we define some of these terms. In the way that we might casually throw out these words like genetically modified and looking at the dictionary definitions of some of those words, we could reasonably talk about any form of evolutionary process as being one of genetic modification. And this is something that is done at times by people who are promoting certain kinds of laboratory-based genetic modification, ag technologies. To say that all life is genetically modified all life changes as a function of the evolutionary process. That we've been doing this for a long time as human beings. I take some issue with that, because less important to me is that biological kinds of mechanism is the sociopolitical context under which plants and animals and human beings modify one another. For me, a genetically modified organism refers to a specific kind of context, that emerges through this combination of legal infrastructure and new laboratory tools and new kinds of markets in and around the 1980s,

[00:03:41] Adam Calo: So right away, , in a sense, it sounds like rejecting this argument from non distinction. So if the technology is not distinct from another technology that we say is good, then there is nothing to talk about.

[00:03:54] Andrew Flachs: Yeah, I think that's the right way to think about it because a lot of the initial resistance to GMOs of various kind came through fears around their novelty. A lot of which were overblown or inaccurate in some way, fears that these new technologies would be in some way harmful to human health. Fears that they would be more ecologically devastating simply because they're genetically modified. Fears that they would be in some way harmful or freakish or weird or unnatural in some way. And that's where a lot of this framing around we've always been modifying crops comes.

The issues are not those health or biological issues for me so much. Because far more important, there are issues of power and sociopolitical questions. The first major shift comes in the 1820s, thirties, forties, fifties, with the advent of new kinds of institutional crop breeding and a new way of controlling who does that evolutionary process ... no longer on farms by thousands, millions of small holder agriculture communities.

Now something controlled by state projects enmeshed with empire, through institutional crop breeding. And then in the 1930s, the reassessment of Gregor, Mendel's work idea of hybrid vigor and hybrid breeding and crops that would respond particularly well to particular sets of conditions. That's the biggest shift. GMO's, are really to my thinking, just another piece of that major shift that comes with crop breeding in its institutional way. And that story, by the way, isn't totally complete because of course there were all manner of community-based and non-profit seeking and in the public interest with democratic public, input and ownership in the crop breeding space.

But that's not really true with, with genetically modified organisms because of this legal infrastructure. They're incredibly expensive to develop. That means that a lot of private capital has to be invested or tax money and the main crops that we get out of them, and the main traits that we get out of genetic modification are things that accelerate monoculture agriculture around the world.

That's not to say that other models don't exist, that other crops don't exist, but far and away, there are essentially globally speaking for genetically modified crops that the world plants, and they are planted, almost exclusively in monocultures that are heavily propped up by labor practices by chemical inputs and by state subsidies for water and electricity around the world.

That would be corn maze, soya, cotton, and canola.

[00:06:33] Adam Calo: Perhaps folks who are more, skeptical of crop biotechnology associate these technologies with the form of agriculture that they appear to be always popping up with. If one of the technologies is present in this form of monoculture is also present, then we try to look at these together as a system, rather than just as a technology, as an individual seed or a patent for example.

[00:06:56] Andrew Flachs: Yeah, that would be my hope. I wish that we would spend more time thinking about that because it would move us toward what I see as the real thing we should be worried about, which is plantations and the kinds of organization of life and death that they entail. And the kinds of things that we're modifying for, which are traits that allow monocultures to persist in spite of their ecological absurdity and in many ways their economic instability. Because they can only exist within a market that would not reward the kinds of diversification that promotes stability, but would reward the kind of single minded export driven moves that, only exist if capital and yields are the main things that must be pursued at all costs. So we're looking at herbicide tolerance and pest resistance in the form of BT genes being the main things that crops are modified for, which are really main problems of industrial agriculture.

[00:07:54] Adam Calo: So this wish of focusing beyond the technology, it doesn't seem to be coming true. I feel like the focus has been overly on the technologies themselves and in the debate. But in your own work, you seem to have been trying to make this wish come true by looking at the role of some of these technologies, but more looking at it from a holistic perspective. Learning about how farmers engage with these technologies and how their knowledge is shaped by these technologies or co-constructed by these technologies. .

[00:08:25] Andrew Flachs: That for me was the biggest thrust there, was to use seeds as a kind of a metaphor or synecdoche, for the larger social and ecological systems in which farmers live. That was something that I took up in work from 2012 to 2018 in South India, looking at certified organic farming and farmers who were planting genetically modified cotton seeds, which is the only approved genetically modified crop in India. I was working in Telangana in South India.

And a lot of what I ended up finding were the ways in which ... it wasn't so much a big difference between these seeds, but the larger context of how farmers were asked to grow and what kinds of things were rewarded within that and what that daily act and practice and performance of agriculture look like in both spaces. Thinking about agriculture, not simply as an economic decision, not simply as an agricultural decision, but as this larger element of social life connected to all kinds of things, whether that be global markets or just the quest to a good life as a member of a small town.

[00:09:37] Adam Calo: Yeah. So there's, so many different priorities that we could consider. And you use a frame of wellbeing. But often the conversation in these debates is around yields, you know, or performance. And I really appreciate that about your writing, where you try and draw that balance.

At some points you talk about how GM cotton, particularly around the bullworm resistance, appears to be leading to increased incomes and less pesticide use, a tapering of the trend of farmer suicides in the region.

So more general wellbeing and economic prosperity, but then you also suggest that there's a downside, writing:

"yet these benefits are complicated by the unintended consequences of a complex rural world. That biotechnology has never been equipped to fix. Suicides persist, hitting hardest the poorest farmers and those least connected to regular irrigation or electricity. While farmers spray for bollworms that only a fraction of pre GM levels, spraying for other kinds of insects has climbed since 2008. In fact, farmers now spray greater quantities of pesticides and cotton than they did before the introduction of pesticide reducing GM seeds."

So what is it that biotechnology fixes, and what is it that you argue cannot be fixed by biotechnology?

[00:10:47] Andrew Flachs: Yeah, it's a great question. Because I think it forces us to look historically. Biotechnology, because of the traits that are commercialized and because of the traits that farmers actually grow, they fix very particular problems within the larger flawed system of commercial monocropping, plantation-based in some ways industrial agriculture. The issue that I would take is if we think of that fix, which is a good thing for that particular problem ... you know, Bollworm sprays are very toxic. Reducing them is a good thing. Farmers income should be higher, increasing them as a good thing. The reduction of sprays on this land and in this landscape, especially toxic bollworm sprays, which are more persistent and are deadlier to humans and other living things, that's a good thing. But it doesn't fix a larger issue of precarity in a rural landscape. And so I think the focus on this kind of particular technical fix of this one element ignores everything else.

Part of this is in how GM crops and then as well one of their alternatives, which is certified organic agriculture, come to India in the first place. You have liberalization in India in the 1990s, liberalization of the economy, which exposes farmers to markets in new ways, allows for new kinds of chemical inputs on the farm hadn't been around in the same way as previously. And so some people do well as often happens in liberalization, inequality increases as often happens in liberalization. And at the end of the nineties, there's this of wave of farmer suicides before organic ag is introduced in 2002 before GM crops are introduced in 2002 to a larger public. So unrelated. This larger symptom or precarity for farmer suicides and rising rural inequality . Because of that narrative of agrarian crisis, pegged to farm issues, which was itself in the cotton sector -- which sprayed a lot of pesticides in the 1990s.

Almost half of all the pesticides spread and India were sprayed in the cotton sector.-- This idea of crisis becomes really fixated on this one particular hinge of pest attacks. Organic's solution is we're going to diversify the farms and have a different kind of production and we're not going to spray.

That's how we deal with this issue of pesticide overuse. The genetically modified solution is to make cotton less pesticide intensive. Both of them well-meaning solutions in this case to a key problem, both of them seeing the problem as technical. Pests are bad. Pesticides are persistent, which causes all kinds of other environmental and health consequences.

So let's fix the pesticide problem, without thinking about the larger impacts of legacy Green Revolution land reform policies, land consolidation, new modes of aspiration, and thinking about wellbeing rural and urban India. So the whole problem became one of pest attacks and biotech was able to fix that for a particular time, through this reduction of bullworm sprays, which is terrific, but ending the conversation there and thinking that that is the end of all precarity or all of the problems that we would want to solve in agriculture generally leaves us open to what happens next, which is an over-reliance on these seeds and expansion of monocultural technologies. A new niche for sucking pests, which doesn't really have very much to do with BT cotton so much as simply an acceleration of the evolutionary pressures that were there. I mean, everyone who worked on GM technology warned that this would happen. This is something we've seen time and time again with any new pest control technology. Certainly it's not the product of GM crops in and of themselves. This is a larger symptom of how these crops are grown. Until we look at that, you're not going to solve these larger issues. If we think about poverty as being one of these main issues and precarity, especially having to do with suicides, which persists, which hit the poorest farmers, which hit rain fed farmers who don't have this kind of connection, that's not an issue that's really going to be solved by any kind of seed per se. We need debt relief. We need some kind of socialized medical system, so that farmers in India, as with farmers where I live in the United States, are not sent into catastrophic debt spirals by a medical emergency. Fixing those kinds of things would go way further than thinking about the problem of rural inequality or rural wellbeing as simply something that could be fixed by a new seed.

[00:15:36] Adam Calo: I guess it might have to immediately jump into putting on the hat of maybe one of the counter-arguments that we'll we'll get into later. And this is something you write about, about this pursuit of good yields, but if you're worried about inequality, why not introduce technologies that increase yields. Don't these technologies increase yields and therefore have the ability to generate these other benefits?

[00:15:56] Andrew Flachs: No technology increases yields in and of themselves. Some of these technologies might increase yields under the right kinds of conditions with the right kinds of care. If we focus purely on this on this issue of yield, we lose some sight of the macroeconomic problem, which is that, in the cotton sector in particular, with this larger production of cotton, the world has had a global cotton glut for a number of years now. The world does not need more cotton.

Cotton prices can get you a great windfall, but they don't always. In one economic study, out of the university of Hyderabad, in Telangana where I I've done a lot of this work, found that farmers get a great and a bumper yield that really works out of cotton really only one out of every four years, for a given household. Which means that in the other three years, you can be in a lot of trouble. If we see everything as tied to this question of producing more, if that's the only way that we can imagine, you know, getting out of this, we're leaving out three out of four households in a given year.

What I'm saying is that doesn't really solve this underlying problem of debt relief of diversified agriculture of different ways to live well. If this is the only thing that we can do to live well, that is awfully convenient for people who make a living, selling seeds and inputs. The main thing that GM crops, at least in this Indian context where I work ,have been so successful at is not in necessarily reducing suicide, per se, because they weren't tied to suicide in the first place. It's not been in keeping young people engaged in farming and making farming a valuable thing to do. It's been in circling all of these efforts into promoting the vertical integration of yields, fertilizers and pesticides. So these crops are really really great at getting farmers to invest more in their agriculture.

And there's sometimes terrific at getting great yields, but that doesn't solve all of these other problems. And there are lots of other great solutions that we could think through.

[00:18:09] Adam Calo: This seems to be exemplified from one of the characters, early in your book. You talk about one of the farmers who just appears unlucky. It's kind of like a slot machine, whether or not, when you take on these seeds, you fall into further precarity or you get a bumper crop.

It seems like you're making a stronger argument. That these GM crops are embedded in a certain agricultural form that leads to pesticide applications, the involvement of certain forms of labor, further technological investment, which also brings on other risks.

[00:18:39] Andrew Flachs: For me, it goes around this question of what are the problems that we're trying to solve? What is the point of the farming system? If the point of agriculture is to invest more and to double down on capital growth and to try to buy more products and make farmers into integrated

consumers that can hopefully, and sometimes do, manifest this into greater yields, then terrific.

We don't need to change anything. If the purpose of agriculture is to sustain vibrant rural communities or to attract young people or to sequester carbon or to do any of these other things that we're now starting to talk about and think about, then this is not the solution there.

And that's a question of these larger social systems in which these seeds live. Really, the main way to be successful, in what is the normal cotton landscape, 95% of, the cotton landscape across India, is to be this petty commodity producer. Is to be this minor capitalist and to invest and to try to get that really great yield. And that is certainly something that works well for some people, it's one particular vision of success, and most people do not achieve that. And the main benefit of that is in propping up the agrochemical industry in promoting more fertilizer production, more chemical production, and of course, the further production of these genetically modified seeds.

[00:20:11] Adam Calo: I feel like this is one of the key underlying drivers of this debate, is about who gets to define the terms of their development ... agricultural development. Perhaps some of these technologies haven't been embedded rationale of what form of development should occur.

[00:20:27] Andrew Flachs: I think that's quite accurate. The vision for success, both existentially within how farmers talk about this and-- both positively and negatively-- as well as within the larger mission of India and the agricultural plan that comes from the federal government and through state governments, is in many cases to get people out of agriculture. To consolidate farms, to grow more yields, to gain more capital. And that I think is something that has profound negative consequences in certain cases, as we've seen here in the United States, where there is a dramatic reduction of farmers over the last century, to the point that there are now dramatic rural inequalities over land ownership and dramatic externalized costs to the rest of the American public, through things like water pollution and land degradation.

[00:21:25] Adam Calo: One of the reasons I really wanted to have you on for this episode is you really bring in anthropological and a deep well-researched perspective to the GM debate. And the motivation for this episode comes when a piece published in scientific American by Aniket Aga and Maywa Montenegro de Wit titled, How Biotech Crops Can Crash and Still Never Fail in December of 2021, really provoked a lot of rebuttal and it provided a unique chance to see, what normally are kind of independent silos of thinking on crop biotechnology come together for a brief moment.

In the Scientific American piece, the authors are really arguing in the backdrop of this contested United Nations Food Systems Summit, in which they analyze how the promotion of biotechnology appears problematic to them based on the evidence of its spotty success. They write:

"As governments now debate the way forward from the summit, it is critical to recognize that a narrow focus on technology to address the complex structural problems of farming and food, has an astonishingly poor track record."

This is the first major argument... is that if you look at the evidence of GM crops, that they're not delivering on their own promises., so why do we see a promotion of them as a solution to the problems in the agricultural sector?

[00:22:49] Andrew Flachs: I mean, they're delivering on certain aspects of their promises, which are to move people out of rural areas and into urban areas where hopefully there is higher wage work, which doesn't always happen. Which is not the way that development necessarily proceeded in India, for example, to get back to some of my work, although it is a lot of the way that development proceeded in Europe and in the United States. And they are succeeding in promoting further capitalization and consolidation of land, which again is one kind of success. It's just not the benchmark that I, or Aniket and Maywa are really looking at here.

We see this kind of pattern a lot in agriculture and food. Part of it is that most of the GM crops that we grow are not functionally edible by themselves. The corn that is grown, that is genetically modified, is by and large used for food processing, starches and sugars, or as animal feed, the soya that's grown is by and large use for oils or for hog feed. Canola that is grown is of course in an oil and the cotton that is grown is fiber and then seed oil and seed cake as well. So these aren't typically speaking the crops that are going out there and feeding the world. A lot of that other work is done by so-called specialty or orphan crops in the agricultural community. The problems that are being solved by these genetic modifications are ones of capitalization or ones of keeping the monoculture going without changing other aspects of agriculture, like labor, like the way that crops are diversified.

That we might be invested in. Things that might have a more effective record if the point of agriculture was to feed people directly. We don't really eat that many GM crops even here in the United States, where we have comparatively lax regulation and openness to eating genetically modified organisms. We eat these crops through highly processed foods, as oils, starches, and sugars, or through the meats that we eat perhaps somewhat indirectly. Those probably are not the crops or the food products that we want to be feeding the world for it to be nourished and thrived. We want to think about other kinds of diversification. So that is, to me, the main disjuncture between this hope that this new technology could be really effective in feeding the world and the actuality of what we eat and how we grow and where we get that food.

Same is true in the US. We see crops ... yields of maize, really take off in this period from, this 20 year period from 95 to 2015. Steady linear increase of corn yields, which is good if you're making your money by selling corn on the global marketplace. Food insecurity in the United States, during that entire period is consistent in and around 10%. And so another clear signal here in the comparatively wealthy United States, overall food production is not really solving a problem that is fundamentally one of inequality and access and security.

[00:26:07] Adam Calo: But do you think that the proponents of these crop technologies have that vision of development in which we're going to increase yields to reduce the cost of food overall? And so that you can have a highly sustainably intensified rural sector, in order to feed a more productive cohort of urban wage earners. Is that part of the argumentation there that's just unsaid? Or is that something that only environmental social scientists really think about?

[00:26:36] Andrew Flachs: I think there's kind of an unquestioned assumption from a particular brand of liberal economics in the 20th century that says that all increases in all yields are good for everyone full stop. And what's left out of that discussion, are these larger questions around inequality and the damages that inequality does to a larger social system. And what's left out of that is some of the reality of agricultural markets domestically and globally. If the main argument and the main thrust was to grow more food that more people would eat, then we wouldn't grow what we grow.

[00:27:15] Adam Calo: So that seems to lead into one of the other core arguments of the Scientific American piece in which they attempt to equate GM crops to the type of Green Revolution technologies, linking that to a form of what they call colonial capitalist agriculture. And that's in itself fairly divisive because you hear a sense that the Green Revolution was a triumph of science and technology. But from this critique, it's clearly a driver of global inequity, colonialism and a lot of the social and environmental decline that we see as a part of the agricultural system.

[00:27:53] Andrew Flachs: I think that that particular thrust is drawn from probably people that development economists that are promoting this particular vision of agricultural development, are not really reading and engaging with so much, which is probably a lot the work of, Jason Moore, and a lot the work of people like, the late Sidney Mintz, the anthropologist. The reason that I began this discussion talking about crop breeding and domestication is because I like, Aniket and Maywa, these as embedded within these larger trajectories. I can see why people who are promoting biotech crops as a kind of development would take issue with this because of course, lots of aspects are different now than they were through that historical trajectory.

And that's the part that they want to focus on. They want to look at the ways in which, for example, in India, biotech companies, are largely domestic. This is not necessarily an imposition of multinational corporations from the outside. A lot of these are aggressive domestic partnerships that have much better access to the kinds of local germplasm that will be necessary to breed effective crops with or without genetically modified elements to them. And a lot of the landscape around consolidation is different than it would have been under the colonial plantation regime.

That being said, it is part of that larger trajectory. We have plantations that emerge as this particular kind of imperial agricultural landscape during the colonial era. Jason Moore does a great job explaining this process in his book, Capitalism and the Web of Life, where we get what he calls it, a kind of a 'cheapening' of land and life and food and energy. He later he goes on to write a book with Raj Patel called The History of the World in Seven Cheap Things where he lays out more of this argument.

And for him, cheapness is this kind of violent quality where we are devaluing and externalizing costs to a future generation. And the plantation is an exemplar of that in an agricultural space, because we're cheapening the labor that is required to harvest and process and make this food in the interest of making it cheap for a larger public. And we're cheapening the environment itself, seeing it as a resource be consumed and leveraged in the mode of financial capitalism, rather than something, to be stable and a continuing kind of resource . Sidney Mintz adds to this kind of discussion, the ways in which industrial capitalism comes out of that plantation model. A particular model of the diversification of labor and the division of tasks, because that labor is undervalued. In Mintz's plantation cases around the world, this combination of enslavement and sharecropping and migrant labor in the current world, as a way of devaluing labor by under paying it and by making that livelihood precarity.

In the Green Revolution form, we see all kinds of investment that goes to strengthen that particular model of agriculture, where we've got monocultures, where we've got expert driven modes, where we've got overproduction of key crops that can then be sold on a global market. For lots of different kinds of reasons. Less Imperial than before, according to some histories. Certainly something that helps to produce more grain in India and to ship that around and sell it to more and different kinds of people, which raised incomes in important ways.

A lot of the legacy of the Green Revolution becomes complicated when we look at who benefited most from these qualities. And this is something taken up, I think most eloquently by people like A.R. Vasavi in her analysis of Green Revolution infrastructure, and the ways that that lays the groundwork for, effectively new kinds of landlords, or to continue a certain mode of landlordism, move to the city, be wealthy, and then set up a kind of anxiety of influence, for a newer generation in the nineties when Indian economy liberalizes . So, people hoping for the same kinds of agricultural gains as they saw, formerly wealthy people in rural areas get during the Green Revolution, but then lacking the economic protections that allowed those gains to go forward in most contexts.

[00:32:24] Adam Calo: So if you have this plantation model and you want to keep the general logic of it going, the only way as a race to the bottom in terms of devaluing labor and increasing the efficiency of your technologies. But that gets to one of the other core arguments in the Scientific American piece.

If the evidence is on their side, that the ability for GM crops to alleviate poverty and malnutrition is spotty at best, but that then funding and policies continue to support them anyway, especially over alternatives, they appear to argue that the reason these technologies get preferenced is because they align with this colonial capitalist agricultural model rather than they're, you know, a good idea to pursue.

I wonder if I was a crop biotechnologists hearing this, I say, you know, I don't want to pursue a colonial capitalist agriculture. I'm not benefiting from this, you know, I'm just developing these technologies and they're going out there into the world where people want them.

[00:33:19] Andrew Flachs: I'm sympathetic to the crop biotechnologists who are working on these things, because it's a valuable thing to understand the mechanisms of life and to identify problems and think of your way to solve them. This kind of engineering mindset can be extraordinarily valuable in seeing a problem, fixing it and moving forward. The problems for me are when that stops. If that's the full extent of our imagination, that this particular solution to a particular problem like bollworm attacks is the only reform we could ever imagine in Indian agriculture, for example, or if these solutions are really commitments to not changing anything, not changing power as it stands in any way as might be the case, say with, herbicide resistant technologies in the GM world. Herbicide resistant technology in particular, the purpose of it is that you can spray indiscriminately. And that is really only valuable if labor is incredibly expensive and difficult or undervalued, that drudgerous difficult work of weeding is something that is either, not supported by a larger community or is made to be so expensive that a landowner wouldn't be able to actually do that work. The work of herbicides are really valuable only if we're really invested in monocultures, like only growing one kind of thing and selling that out. And so I would just encourage those who are hoping for these kinds of great solutions and trying to work on their pieces of the problem to work on that particular solution, but not to lose sight of the larger issues of what problems you're trying to solve.

[00:35:06] Adam Calo: And I think then I'll touch on one of the closing arguments, and then we'll move on to some of the rebuttals that we were able to read about, or at least a sample of them. The authors of the Scientific American piece seemed to argue that when you preference biotechnology, this locks out other alternatives, like agroecology for example, which is, definitely their preferred alternative. But I feel like many GM proponents would suggest that that's not true, that we're just doing a 'both and' type of approach. You know, you can have some crop biotechnology here and you could have some crop diversification. How do you feel about this argument that when you implement this type of intervention, you're locking out some of the other alternatives that we know about in the agrarian reform ideologies.

[00:35:52] Andrew Flachs: There are certain particular instances where it's over strong and Aniket and Maywa are overstating the case there. And the one that comes to mind most strongly for me is this example of integrated pest management which pairs really really well with BT technology. If the goal of that kind of farming is to reduce pesticide exposure and spray, which is a noble good thing that we should all be invested in as people who eat stuff and live on earth. That's a pretty niche example where this kind of thing works. Some of this regulatory, blame can be laid on the green movement with organic agriculture, if we want to call it blame. If we're big proponents of genetically modified crops in less input intensive environments. Because to be certified organic first in United States, and then globally, it's mutually exclusive with genetically modified crops.

So some of that is a regulatory issue. There is no point really in growing a GMO under organic conditions, if you want it to sell it that way, because you would never be allowed to do so. And that's a regulatory, that's a legal issue, not an agronomic issue. But to the larger sense of these things can and should be integrated with agroecology ... I'm an anthropologist, I'm an ethnographer. I talk to people who were doing stuff kind of as they are. So, I am waiting to see that happen on any kind of scale in any way that these crops are actually planted and managed by the various stakeholders who live there. Yes, it might work well in a test plot or in a greenhouse. In actual fields people don't really grow these crops in the kinds of agroecological conditions that the authors of the Scientific American article are promoting there. So, okay, they can be, let's do the both and ... but we're not. And we haven't been on a global scale. So, I'm just kind of waiting to see there's nothing to look at. There's nothing to evaluate.

[00:37:50] Adam Calo: I wonder if this just reveals, how you come down on this debate is just a matter of your epistemological training? You write in your book how you take a decidedly political ecological view of GM. So trying to denature this question and think about issues of power and land tenure, deep history.

And I'm wondering if you just are trained in these methods and you take that view of any technology, you're going to be generally a little bit more skeptical. Or am I wrong? Where's the political ecologists out there who are really excited about the transformative potential of these technologies.

[00:38:24] Andrew Flachs: There are certain modes where this particular technology could be a great means of democracy and radical potential. They just, aren't just now. For most of the crops that we grow, especially in agriculture, because agriculture globally speaking is particularly consolidated and unequal with respect to the power of who owns what and who gets to make decisions and who is invited to model that particular vision of what development means that we've been talking about this whole time. Someone who might be at least vaguely optimistic about GM in general, if not necessarily GM in agriculture, because of these discussions around democratizing it, or even socializing the technology and using it as a tool for sovereignty, might be Paul Robbins, at the university of Wisconsin at the Nelson center,

[00:39:17] Adam Calo: No small fry in terms of political ecology.

[00:39:19] Andrew Flachs: No small fry. Yeah, who is decidedly focused on this issue of what are the problems that we're trying to solve? And let's look at that political issue of who's got power where and when? I think he makes a number of good points with the work that he's doing there. But there again, for me as the political ecologists, as someone who is grounded in ethnography, which puts a lot of emphasis around what people's daily experiences are and that's a good way to understand a sense of reality, versus say the idealized conditions of a field trial, where we can control variables. I think the devil there is in these kinds of details. These aren't things to say the technology would work if only these people would do it correctly. The technology is moving in different directions because of how people are using it in everyday life. That for me is by far the most relevant factor in which to analyze it.

[00:40:12] Adam Calo: Let's segue into, what you might call a rebuttal to the Scientific American piece and for this drawing on a relatively small sample. But I think it'd be interesting to try and pull out some of the core arguments. I'm drawing on a podcast from Kevin Folta, who's at the University of Florida has long been working in the horticultural sciences and his guest, Cameron English, who is of the American Council of Science and Health. And I'm drawing on their conversation and a blog that Cameron English wrote in response to the Scientific American piece.

The first kind of rebuttal argument that they pose is that this argument from what they call post-colonialism, they suggest that when you argue from this position, a type of GM intervention is under this umbrella of Western ways of knowing and therefore it's wrong. In that, the kind of evidence that they work with, Folta and English, which is hypothesis testing, claims about yields improvements, biophysical measurements of plant stress.

They suggest that there is an unfair hyper-skepticism of objective reality. That since they own the objective truth of their evidence of how these interventions do, that the critics of GM have to resort to this post-clinical critique, which rejects Western science. How do you feel about English's primer on post-colonial thinking and do you think that is a fair way of characterizing the GM debate?

[00:41:39] Andrew Flachs: No. I would take a very kind of nerdy anthropological disagreement with his characterization of post-colonialism. Because what he describes to me sounds a lot more like these discussions of postmodernism. Which is a debate well had in graduate school, social theory classes. But we can take on his definition here. And so what I think that he's talking about are some of these ... a bad faith reading of a particular level of critique, which would not accept anything coming out of I guess he used the term Western ways of knowing, I suppose, and call all of that bad.

For me, and my response thinking through that, it's far more simple, which is that the crop scientists have got a great way of knowing in the world through field trials, through greenhouse trials, through controlled hypothesis testing. And that is quite valuable under certain conditions. As an ethnographer, my conditions are oftentimes quite different because they embrace confounds. If you're an ethnographer confounds in a hypothesis testing and an experiment that's real life, that is what you're there to study. You are there to understand how things don't always go to plan.

That for me is the far more relevant issue. So we've got a technology that can work well under certain conditions, which is really great if we can make those conditions possible. If where and when we can't, other stuff happens. And so that's the main thing that I want to be of curious about and looking at. I don't think that these are necessarily geographically tied in the ways that English and Folta, seem to have been phrasing it. And maybe that's not really what they meant there.

For me, this is a question of, well, how do things actually work within a local context? That's by far the most relevant question here. It gets back to something I was saying before, you know, this reaction of if the technology doesn't work, blame the people. I don't see that as a very productive way of thinking about development because it ignores daily practice, which is presumably the thing that we're most interested in.

[00:43:59] Adam Calo: So we have this problem of these totally different languages in worldviews looking at the same issue. But perhaps a more simple rebuttal that comes out, which stems from this ... English says:

"I think my biggest problem with this argument such as it is, is that producing more food means you can feed more people. That's just objectively true. I don't know how else to say it."

I feel like that quote ... it reveals the main theory of change of development. That could be their underlying these technologies. That increased yields addresses hunger. But as we were talking before, how do you feel the weight of evidence is regarding that claim?

Because shouldn't we be choosing the technologies, either the material or the social or political ones, that feed more people?

[00:44:42] Andrew Flachs: Yes. We should be producing technologies, material, or sociopolitical that feed more people. That is an excellent point upon which hopefully everyone thinking about these things can agree. That framing there, that producing more food means you can feed more people. That's just objectively true, reads very Malthusian. Thomas Robert Malthus the colonial preacher turned demographer and then professor at the Imperial college for the British empire, who would go on to train managers of the British Imperial project that would have influence with Ireland and India. Malthus' big theory of change was that of course, population grows exponentially and food production grows linearly.

And the way that you produce more food is that, you have more land under the plow and that eventually there'll be this inescapable trap. There there's nothing we can do about it and the poorest or in his view, laziest and most morally decrepit amongst us will then starve. So it's a kind of a naturalizing of social inequality as inevitable. As something that we shouldn't do very much about. And its linked to this idea of producing more food to feed more people.

'Producing more food means we can feed more people' falls I think flat, when we look at what we're producing, especially with GM crops. We don't globally grow GM food. So I don't understand that argument. Now we can produce crops that we sell for food, obviously, which is great. But that is a system change and a theory of development that does not want to consider a more diversified and more cooperative kind of economy that would lean more heavily into different modes of production and different ownership over those production. And I think that's where, that a lot of these breaks are going to come between those who are invested in a particular kind of agricultural economics or a particular kind of knowing through field trials and those who are invested in these more social theories of change.

[00:46:47] Adam Calo: Yeah. This really reveals why the contested science over who feeds who is such an important issue, because if there was ever a consensus then it would outline some types of technologies or strategies in the agricultural sector we should continue and those that we shouldn't.

If you believe that increased production is the key way of reducing food insecurity, then you really hear this argument coming through. In the podcast Folta says:

"Governments creating food solutions for people because we care for them and we want to have food security. It's the anti GMO folks, the anti-technology folks that disrespect indigenous people's desire for food security. The women that want to feed their children that don't want to walk 10 kilometers to go to get water or food or whatever."

So you can see a really emotional tug there about ... Folta really wanting to address the terrible perils of precarity and food insecurity. And he feels like he has a tool, an idea that can work, but it's not being allowed by these critiques.

[00:47:50] Andrew Flachs: Work to produce what though this context? And, and under what conditions? Wouldn't, you know, a better bus system or socialized medicine solve a lot of these issues as well? It's a desire for food security. Another alternative could be—a far less expensive one—could be to produce more and different kinds of diversified food. In fact have government buying programs that work in that. Something that actually was successful in the Philippines in anti- hunger campaigns around more diversified diets, including buying from farmer co-ops. And in India with these new millet programs based around encouraging farmers and providing a new market for farmers to grow a diversified set of millet crops that would then be integrated the midday meal program. An incredibly effective social program in India, to provide a lot of kids with great nutritious nourishing food.

My concern with this framing is always that if these are the problems that we're trying to solve, why is this the most expedient way to get there? It's less, you know, this inherent critique of GM crops themselves, than of this, determined commitment to a certain vision of inequality and a certain vision of only growing things in this particular way that frankly produces things that are quite detrimental to a lot of people's long-term health. Genetically modified corn soybean and canola ... none of these are health superfoods that are making eaters stomachs better. Most of these technologies are then fed to animals in industrialized confined, settings that are extremely damaging to local waterways and earth ways and perpetuate these abuses of labor. And then produce a food product that is by and large, quite unhealthy for a lot of the people that eat it in that particular form of confined animal feeding operations. The hinges that I would push back on that kind of argument is to think about what it is we're really growing and why and where those things go in reality? And if we are trying to solve these real problems that they identify, which are great things to look at and think through. What are the best kinds of solutions, let alone, I think the implicit element there of who gets to be in the room to make these kinds of decisions. And this is something that Maywa Montenegro de Wit has talked about a fair amount in thinking about the democratizing potential of newer GM technologies like CRISPR CAS-9.

[00:50:34] Adam Calo: You see Folta and English, bring up examples of some of these niche technologies, you know, reducing banana wilts or the papaya that they talk about. Holding up these as, you know, not all of these technologies are the same thing. And I, I tend to agree with that.

[00:50:48] Andrew Flachs: It's a great point. And, they are absolutely correct in making that point. Yep.

[00:50:52] Adam Calo: ,But I think the broader, more tricky question that I had when kind of looking at the back and forth was, what's really a question as you talked about is representation. So who has the authority of representing interests of small holder farmers, for example. For Folta and English, this argument came up again and again, in the podcast and in the blog, which is , farmers from the global south want these technologies. They're willing to break the law to get them.

There are scientists from the global south who are studying this technologies and to promote their use. So when a Western scientists talks about decolonization and is challenging the utilization of these technologies, that's actually an imposition of, you know, colonialism on, on small holder farmers, even though they, hold that position that, you know, GM tech is doing that. Regardless of who's right, how do you deal with this question of trying to represent the interests of others? And in this case, it's small holder farmers who, especially from your work reveals, have been historically marginalized.

[00:51:53] Andrew Flachs: Yeah, can the sub-altern speak? Is a key question in, what anthropologists would call post-colonial literature. In thinking about these narratives and the power relations of who gets to speak for whom? And to my thinking, the best answer is that farmers can and should speak for themselves.

They are diverse heterogeneous, they face different kinds of issues as a function of their geography, ecological conditions, sociodemographic questions like ethnicity, race, caste gender, class. With such a diverse set of interests and needs, farmers should speak for themselves. I can, you know, relay stories that I have heard. But I am speaking from my own kind of position as a particular kind of analyst as are any of these other scientists.

I think probably, Aniket Aga would, have some disagreements with being called, um, you know, purely a Western scientists.

I also, shouldn't be speaking on behalf of any of those people . And there are groups that are talking about these things. Whether it is interest groups, mostly from an economic growth and development angle that are lobbying for new GM crops and moratoriums to be lifted, for commercial planting in, in places like India. And there are also lots of farmer groups who are mobilizing against this through India's, in particular, vibrant NGO sector. But also across lots of other contexts. And I'm thinking here of the work of Joeva Rock, looking at mobilization against certain kinds of GMOs, in various contexts in Africa. As well as Brian Dowd-Uribe.

This issue of what are the colonial implications there? If the decolonization is something that is not a metaphor and that different folks are invested in. Than that begins with democratic inclusion in all stages of any kind of research and development. And it also frankly, begins with discussions around land sovereignty and land reform. So, if and when groups are mobilizing for these kinds of technologies, then one of the big questions, if we're interested in colonial reparations of various kinds, or of decolonizing more broadly, one of those initial questions seemed to be how does this particular technology enforce or erode the sovereignty of the group in question that is speaking and claim to choose it. And that's not something that we see often because of the levels of expertise that are required, both for the technical side of the engineering of these organisms and laboratories, and also in the kinds policy spaces where people are at.

And the one final reaction I guess I have to this, is framing all this around choices for me a misleading kind of discussion, because choice implies a full spectrum of beautiful rainbow of options. Which is very much not the case in a lot of these questions of consumer commodification. In the context of BT cotton seeds in India, for example, in 2002, there were three approved seeds and farmers chose between them and could do relatively small scale sorts of trials and make, what an economist would call an informed choice. They could look through these kinds of things. Now there's over 1400 different seed brands-- an impossible array from which to choose and to make any kind of informed decision about that. And so farmers choose in practice, in the spaces where I work-- Telangana-- farmers ultimately often end up choosing these seeds based on the same kinds of logic that I use when I'm choosing mustard at the grocery store. I heard that this brand was good from somebody else. I like the picture on it. The person there in the aisle recommended it to me. None of which are this kind of depth of agroecological knowledge that we might be used to seeing in farmer seed decisions, the seed being path dependent decision that you can't really take back and it sets in motion the whole rest of the season. That for me, is less of a informed consumer choice more of a hopeful consumer decision where all of that power and information symmetry is taken off the farm and put into these places where farmers are and other stakeholders not having direct input.

So I don't see it as a choice. I see it as this kind of drawing on the work of the anthropologist, Paul Richards, this kind of agricultural performance. Say I'm a good consumer. I am trying to do, what's been framed as the right thing to do here, which is the maximize these yields. I'm choosing the seed that everybody else is choosing this year. And that's a really great logic to, again, intensify the capitalization of agriculture in these spaces. It's not a great logic for agroecological security.

[00:57:00] Adam Calo: This is just such another key epistemological chasm between these two sides as it were. Because when I guess someone like you or me hears " they want this" or "choice", that's just such a red flag. Because we think in the terms of constrained choices and structural forces. On the other hand, looking at choice in a world of rational actors is kind of the key way to design economies.

If you're more of like, um, you know, macro economics ...

[00:57:25] Andrew Flachs: absolutely.

[00:57:26] Adam Calo: I wonder if going back to that question of who speaks for who, you see a little bit more willingness, a positionality from, Aga and Montenegro de Wit, where since they are taking this post-colonial stance, they therefore have these certain values. Where I feel like those values are a little bit more implicit in some of the purely technological views, from the, you know, horticultural scientists or at least from Fulta and English.

[00:57:54] Andrew Flachs: Yeah, I think that's probably reasonable in the ways that all of our trainings, influence how we then go out and see the world and the kinds of solutions that we then look at. With whatever fairness is due to these particular speakers, but also to the larger field of laboratory-based science or trial-based science, those are often valuable ways of knowing and they can tell us really important helpful things. From my vantage point here, all that I would be asking for to continue to look and see how these technologies perform under the conditions that you're most interested in looking at and what really happens there. And again, and again, we come back to this question of we need these crops to feed the world. Why is it that they're not budging food security? Why is it these crops aren't by and large main food crops. If that's the thing that we're really trying to solve? That for me should be a flag that we're not focusing on the right problems here.

[00:58:55] Adam Calo: I felt like the worldview that is embedded with maybe, perhaps being a proponent of these technologies did come out at one point where English says in the podcast:

" What they described as colonialism, I think, is more properly described as trade. Everyone in the United States, there are probably hundreds, maybe thousands of products that you use and consume every day that were engineered in other countries that were physically put together in other countries. And that's just what our global economy is. And it enables a standard of living that was unheard of 200 years ago."

[00:59:26] Andrew Flachs: A standard of living for some, right? Who is the who's the we that we're talking about there? And this is the main point that Jason Moore brings up in this whole idea of cheapness. My cheap stuff because of the global accident of where I was born, rests on the cheapening of someone else's labor and natural resources in that environment, whether it's the lithium in my electronics here that we're using to talk. Or the electricity that's coming from me in Indiana, largely from coal, within my own rural periphery in this case, Southern Indiana, Kentucky, Ohio, Pennsylvania.

[01:00:07] Adam Calo: So I may agree with your critique, but it does seem like this logic of how a global unregulated market economy brings prosperity to all eventually. That a market for a thing justifies the thing has to be driving the underwriting of kind of a global diffusion of technology in general, where it doesn't matter where it's developed and where it goes, but if there is a market for a thing that means is there is a desire for it to improve someone's lives. One of the things that you write in your book is that it's not about the GM seeds themselves, but rather the market in which these seeds are distributed, that causes the most egregious problems for the farmer knowledge. I guess if we don't have a debate about political economy, it almost makes the argue debate about GM rather a minor one.

[01:00:52] Andrew Flachs: For me, I'm never going to be able to disentangle these two questions, because all agriculture is social and economic and embedded within this larger system. I'm getting flashbacks to, macro economics, where I think basically every day, my instructor would say this line of everybody benefits from trade. That's the inherent assumption of trade. The magical thinking that goes around a statement like "everybody always benefits from trade" is this question of externalities or confounds in the hypothesis or the model, that we just don't talk about or don't think about whether they're environmental, or social, or longterm in some other way and difficult to quantify. If you are an ethnographer, again and that's, that epistemological question, but that's the stuff that I study. All of these other things that are daily life that is left out of these broad brush assumptions around everybody say benefits from trade or this idea that, a market for thing would justify the thing. Whose perspective is privileged here is very important , but also the larger landscape of what are the costs that we're really accounting for in our model? Become incredibly important when we talk about the justification for what's happening or the standards of living that we might be able to enjoy.

[01:02:18] Adam Calo: The point of the stakes of the rebuttal argument was highest just to touch on it and then maybe we'll move on to, you know, where to go from here, was when Folta and English link a kind of a science and technology studies approach ...a critique of science as a driver of erosion and trust in science.

And of course their grab on a key example, which is, you know, in all of our lives today, which is "you don't see these kind of post-colonial scholars or these critical science and technology studies scholars, lamenting about diffusion of vaccines across the world." Do you ever find yourselves uncomfortably, critical of science and do you think there is a link between kind of critiquing expertise, critiquing power relations of scientists, and then the ability for science to be an organizing force of good?

[01:03:11] Andrew Flachs: Yeah, I absolutely hope so because I do hope that science as a lowercase "s" science, I suppose, to the STS listeners, would be a force for good in the world, in the normative sense of a way of knowing and thinking about how to solve problems that are important to people based in local kinds of conditions. For me, I don't see a huge conflict here. I think it is possible be critical of institutions and ways of knowing, that point us to particular solutions. Clearly, that's the main thing that we've been talking about, while still also believing that there are helpful ways to put these things into conversation. And in my perspective is very much informed by the work of people like Sandra Harding, the feminist scholar of science and technology, and this idea of standpoint theory, where the basic concept is that within a social system, there are people who have power and there are people who have more and less of it. And your position as being marginalized and that social system gives you a very particular perspective. And that perspective can be enormously helpful towards things like solving problems. And yet that perspective is not often brought in the spaces where power is mobilized to create different kinds of scientific solutions or ask questions. And so there's a fundamental disjuncture there between people who are having problems that ought to be solved and people who are designing those kinds of solutions. So this is a kind of an argument for democratizing various aspects of the scientific process. And then being open within that scientific process to lots of different kinds of inputs and lots of different kinds perspectives who would take it on.

If to take, you know, an absurd hypothetical, that would have been true, let's say maybe 150 years ago. In most spaces of development and scientific inquiry, everyone working there would have been male in most of the Imperial projects anyway. And they would have been of European descent, through the North American and European Imperial projects. All of those spaces were done by by men and by men of European descent.

So what is lost there? What kinds of problems do we get? And we see one version of solution, and one version of world otherwise in the outstanding history of people, like Monica white in her book, Freedom Farmers, discussing the exemplary science of what came to be the historically black college and university system. Working from this perspective of marginalization, of solving problems of marginalized people in a United States context and having this incredible flourishing of outstanding scientific discovery. People like Booker T. Washington, people like WEB Du Bois, people like Washington Carver, and the outstanding work that they were able to do in these spaces. For me, democratizing science and being open these critiques of science and questioning who sets the agenda. This should not be in conflict and need not be in conflict with doing inquiry well. For me, that is doing inquiry well.

[01:06:37] Adam Calo: So it was this debate, just really a debate about philosophy of science dressed up as a contest over the utility of crop biotechnology? Mark Lynas, who has long been a voice of, well used to be an-anti GMO voice. And then became proponent of especially with these niche uses, he wrote in a tweet after the article was published:

"anti-science Luddism, isn't always a right wing phenomenon. This is what it looks like on the far left, lots of woke rhetoric and empty phrases, which add up to the same stop science message and published in scientific American too."

Why do you think that the arguments that Montenegro and Aga wrote in the Scientific American piece broke through to this pro GM side this time around?

Was it publication in Scientific American, which kind of touched a nerve of who gets to claim authoritative science and through what methods?

[01:07:26] Andrew Flachs: Yeah. I think that must've been a big piece of this because of course Aga and Montenegro de wit have been writing this stuff for years. And they've been talking about these issues a lot in nuanced and productive ways. So I must imagine that the venue of Scientific American, was especially egregious to those who claim that science was one thing and it was what they say it is. To me that speaks to a kind of fragility that is counter to a lot of the mission of what I think of as science, which is inquiry about the world around us and how it works. To do that right, you kind of have to always be integrating new perspectives and checking your assumptions and making sure that your initial implicit parameters were correct in the first place. Otherwise you don't get to arrive at the system of adaptive and useful knowledge.

[01:08:19] Adam Calo: I'm wondering what, to do about this though? What's the way forward into bringing a more useful middle ground? Because people like Sandra Harding don't really leave a lot of room for the more positivist view to continue being at the top of the funding heap.

[01:08:35] Andrew Flachs: What I like about Harding is that she claims it as her own. I mean, she claims that she is doing the best science. So I really liked that framing. In my understanding of that concept is thay it's not particularly confrontational. It's saying let's get everybody in here and think about what the problems are that we're looking at? What are we missing in our models and in our conditions that allow us to test the hypothesis when we get out into the real world, if that's of interest to us and to, you know, for me, I'm quite empirical and positivist in some ways.

A lot of my knowledge comes from people's direct experiences. Isn't that relevant data? I certainly think it is. All of these parts are different lenses and different opportunities to ask whose voices, whose designing the work, and whose interest, where the benefits of these work go? What are the implicit assumptions that undergird the kinds of work that we're doing here? For me, it's inclusive. And I would hope that we could get to that point.

[01:09:37] Adam Calo: I'd like to end by returning some insights from your work. I found it compelling that in some of your writing you discuss the ways different social structures shape how the use of GM seeds play out in the lives of farmers. What you wrote about is this is

"a burgeoning farming, farming cooperative can blunt some of the predator elements of the commercial GMC seed industry."

I've spoken to many GM critics, throughout my career and they say of course GM seeds could be a more emancipatory process, but they would need to be embedded in a radically different socio-economic system. And Mark Lynas, who we just brought up, who appeared as a major character in this New York Times piece, Learning to Love GMO's by Jennifer Kahn,

He said,

"In people's minds, it's genetic engineering equals monoculture equals the broken food system, but it doesn't have to be that way."

And I feel like we may have fallen into that trope a little bit that he says, cause we've, we've kind of equated it-

[01:10:27] Andrew Flachs: Only because that's the empirical record the moment.

[01:10:31] Adam Calo: in order for it not to be that way as Lynas says, what needs to happen?

[01:10:35] Andrew Flachs: There are some models of this. In situations where early on i in the Indian context and in contexts like Australia and in the US, some ... a significant minority of GM crops, GM cotton, BT resistant, bollworm resistant cotton is grown as part of an integrated pest management system. Then you see much greater sustained benefits and different kinds of biodiversity. So there even keeping genetically modified cotton within that agroecology, we've got something quite different and variable as a function of the kinds of farming that we're doing there. So an agroecological, or at least a more diversified agricultural setting integrated pest management that demands certain elements of agrobiodiversity. That's one model.

Another model is one scene that I talk about in the book of these agricultural co-ops that take out the most difficult element of agricultural decision-making around seeds, which is that choice overload, that brand confusion, that consumerist mindset. They do a lot of research and they're a trusted institution that local farmers can work with. Another element of that would probably be forms of sovereignty and direct democratic engagement of the sorts that we were talking about with respect to who gets to make decisions and speak and and create solutions as regards to GMOs.

One that I am often quite supportive of as a GM solution or at least hopeful about, has to do with the resurrection of the American Chestnut. This beautiful tree in Eastern north America and the use of genetically modified technologies to make this tree and this technology publicly available as a public good as something that could be effectively planted. A big question in there is, am I land grant, or land theft university, representative the best person to speak on these issues? What other stakeholders might not always be in the room? And the counter took this up, speaking to BJ Mac manana, who was an organizer for the Indigenous Environmental Health Network, which is a nonprofit focused on environmental justice for indigenous people. That's a stakeholder that absolutely should be in the room and should have a say in how this technology is used. Far more important than me as, as you know, an anthropological interested party, but someone who certainly should be at the table in discussions of this with the forest service, with contemporary landowners, with geneticists who are working on this project, with people who live in this area as well. That for me, is a more democratized vision of where and how GM crops might extend and how they might support sovereignty. The use of this developed by an indigenous or non-indigenous local community to then advance their goals of sovereignty is for me quite different than the use of it in a vertically integrated global agribusiness context, where the point of this technology to double down on capitalizing farms.

[01:13:53] Adam Calo: So something I've come across, is that after Brexit, the UK has a little bit more freedom in designing its agricultural policy. And one of the questions is to look again at whether or not to liberalize the use of GM. If you could design this type of democratizing process to lead to the outcomes you might suggest, what should they consider or how they design and prioritize goals for liberalizing, the new use of GM crops.

[01:14:23] Andrew Flachs: If the goal is to make it truly democratic, than who are implementing and designing and thinking about these technologies and policies must all be at the table. So it cannot be only farmers' groups. It must also be environmental groups-- and hopefully those two groups aren't always opposed. It must be people with consumer perspectives, urban consumer perspectives, as well as rural consumer perspectives. It must be people across class, gender and racial backgrounds. It must be people who have all kinds of investments within these areas. And there are mechanisms in place within that decision-making to flatten out the power differentials that have led to development, such as we see it today, where so much of that decision-making is being driven by one particular ideology or one particular group at the expense of the concerns of others.

And even to the demonization the concerns of others. That's the kinds of democracy that we should be invested in if we're invested in a more democratic and equal world.

[01:15:39] Adam Calo: You write:

"What is a farm, if not a public stage. "

My take on what you're getting at is that, why people decide to do things and thus why farmers decide to do things, is an inherently social endeavor that clearly defies simple explanations, like if it benefits me personally, I do it. And thus, when an overly simple technological fix appears it inherently is only designed to consider one slice of the world of a farmer, guaranteeing some latent dangers. In your words, why is a farm, a public stage? And why is that framing towards decision-making in the agricultural sector useful for how to negotiate this GM debate?

[01:16:16] Andrew Flachs: I like that metaphor a lot because I think it speaks to ... It centers that social aspect of decision-making. We were talking about the epistemological weight of this rational actor kind of question. In a lot of these decisions that this ... this fundamental assumption that we're all making great choices all the time. And those choices benefit us in these particular ways, which are not complicated. And for an anthropologist that is ill supported by the weight of data that we have. We are making decisions constantly for all kinds of reasons. Some of which might be great. Some which might not be some of which seem rational to us in the moment, but not might not seem rational to other people the other side of some kind of question. A lot of them are embroiled in this question around, that Jason Moore question, of what is cheap when, where, and to whom? Because something that is cheap to me might be rational to get it. Even if that rationality, causes some discomfort or misery or exploitation for somebody else for whom that decision seems a whole lot less rational. Taking out that language of choice and embracing this language of performance allows us to see all of that social stuff that is so important to me, that holistic picture of why it is that we do the things that we do and what sorts of opportunities and difficulties that presents to us. That really allows us to get beyond that choice issue, in really productive ways.

And for us to focus indeed on that empirical question, what is it that people are actually doing here? And if that explanation is not particularly simple, or if it's confoundingly connected to all kinds of other things, then good. That's life.

[01:18:09] Adam Calo: I think that's a great place to end. Professor Andrew Flachs. Thank you so much for your time and an incredibly well-researched and charitable, facilitation of this important issue.

[01:18:21] Andrew Flachs: Hey, thanks for having me on. Great to talk with you.

END

View Details

Landscapes Podcast Episode 5. May 2021

*The transcript has been lightly edited for clarity and comprehension

INTRO

Adam Calo: [00:00:17] The largest contemporary social movement in the world is arguably La Via Campesina, a global organization of peasant and smallholders that represents over 200 million constituent farmers across 81 countries and through 182 local chapters and national organizations.

For academics and decision makers interested in designing landscape policy that meets the needs of food producers across many different contexts, it seems like La Via Campesina is an important organization to engage with and in particular, to understand what vision such a diverse coalition might put forth as the best way to organize the food system.

It turns out that one of the main goals of La Via Campesina is to articulate a vision for the food system born out of lengthy democratic engagement with its massive network of global farmers. And throughout the many position statements and declarations, agroecology emerges as the preferred social, agronomic and political approach to achieving a food system that represents the aspirations of the entire transnational organization

In this episode of Landscapes, Jyoti Fernandes, a farmer at Five Penny farms in Dorset in Southwest England helps explore a vision of agroecological expansion in the UK. Jyoti is also the Policy Director at the Land Workers Alliance, a UK based union of farmers and a member organization of the European Coordination of La Via Campesina.

Agroecology is oft considered somewhat of a radical approach in the breadth options to adjust the world’s food system in order to confront the triple threat of climate change, biodiversity loss and growing food insecurity. But the fascinating thing that came out of our conversation is that in recent debates about the future of the United Kingdom’s agricultural policy, agroecology showed promise as a compromise position –splitting the difference between more traditional farmer groups that wanted to ensure that the countryside would still support the goal of food production and the increasingly powerful environmental NGOS whose preference is that the land be spared from farming to allow biodiversity to regenerate.

Sometimes the promise agroecology, despite much evidence for its prioritization, is marginalized as something that might work in the Global South, but can’t really succeed in an industrial economy where farmers need to achieve productivity to “feed the world.” But talking to Jyoti, I wondered, is it possible that agroecology could gain political legitimacy in the unlikeliest of agricultural geographies like the UK?

Jyoti certainly does.

Interview

I was wondering if we could just start with, what kind of agriculture activities go on at Five Penny Farms?

Jyoti Fernandes: [00:02:51] Five penny farm is a 43-acre, small holding in West Dorset and we're on a beautiful hillside overlooking sea. There are two families living here. We call ourselves a low impact small holding because we've built our own houses on the land, using eco-friendly materials and we've got windmill solar panel, for our electricity.

So we're off grid. And we've got a set of processing rooms on our farm that is shared by a cooperative of small holders in the area. So we've got this kind of teaming, small holder community in the area with loads of little farms, producing different things on their mixed agroecological farms. The processing facilities is a place where people in the community can come and make apple juice, or cheese, or cider, jams cut their meat into like bacon ham sausages, that kind of thing.

Our farm feeds into all of that with the cooperative, because we're a mixed farm ourselves. I've got, some dairy cows, which I hand milk and make cheese. And we have fresh milk for our family. We've got sheep that we can use for meat. We make sheepskins and we, recently just sent a bunch of our wool to be spun, to make blankets and all sorts of, beautiful handmade cloth with.

And we make preserves with all the fruit. There's a market garden on the farm. We have a couple that comes here and grows so many varieties of fresh fruit and veg for the local market. And we've been running that market stall for the last 17 years in our local town, selling all the fresh fruit and veg and preserves and apple juice and cider and things.

We've got orchards and the sheep go underneath the orchards. All sorts of different products that come out of the hedge rows and herbs. All sorts of things. Yeah, it's a proper mix farm.

Adam Calo: [00:04:33] That sounds really diverse. It seems like not just diverse in terms of the varieties of crops, but also diverse in terms of the types of value-added products and economic activities that's going on.

Jyoti Fernandes: [00:04:44] Oh yeah. Diversity is the key to what we do.

Adam Calo: [00:04:47] So you mentioned agroecology. Do you consider that what happens on your farm is employs a practice of agroecology? And as part of that, maybe you could explain agroecology, how it may work, with your production, but also in other agricultural contexts?

Jyoti Fernandes: [00:05:01] Yeah, so agroecology is about agriculture that works with nature. So working with ecology. So basically it's looking at the environment that's around you, the landscapes around you and thinking about how to produce food and fiber and fuel and all the things that we need for our livelihoods using the resources sustainably on the land around you.

And that's what we do with our farm. You know, we looked at what resources we had here and thought what kind of a farming system can we have that has different products that can be available all different times of the year, but all the different things are being produced at a small scale, but as part of a wider system where there's kind of symbiosis between the different products of the farm.

And so one part feeds into another part. In our orchards we have all these apples and then we press them in our processing facility. And we get all the apple pulp leftover from pressing. And that goes to my cows and it goes into their cow feed mixture.

So, they're recycling and using that waste and it's making it into milk. And when you make cheese, you've got that leftover whey and that can go to pigs to produce meat, or it can go to chickens, for producing eggs. So, it's taking all those different parts of the farm and one part feeds the other.

And the great thing about that is you look all along the operations of the farms. So, where you get your seed from or your livestock breeds. We look at trying to use diverse, livestock and crop varieties, ones that are naturally reproducible, so, not hybrids or genetically modified ones and ones that we can save ourselves or breed ourselves rather than having to pay companies for the use of these inputs, into the farming system.

And then we think about what are we doing with the land that the animals are grazing or the soil that we're cultivating in and think about how we build that up and the fertility going into that soil coming from natural sources. So we use rich mixtures of grasses on the soil that fixes carbon from the atmosphere. Our grazing livestock, they're eating this grass that's full of clover that's fixing nitrogen from the atmosphere. And then they produce loads of manure which we can compost and put back onto the farm. And that's how we get our fertility instead of using artificial nitrate fertilizers, which can have a really bad impact on water and on the climate, you know, nitrous oxide evaporates when you spread artificial nitrate fertilizers on the land.

And then it's also thinking about what happens after you've produced that product, who does it get sold to and how does it go to our local community? Or are you selling into a supermarket chain that improves corporate profits. And for us, it's really important that what we're producing is producing good quality, nutritious food at an affordable price because we really try and make sure it's not just a niche high-end thing that nobody can afford.

And, having it going through channels where it doesn't create loads of transport. If you sell the supermarkets, it can often have an impact of traveling all over the place before it gets to where it's actually sold. That consolidates corporate power, because agriculture is also about the social side of things all along the chain, you want to respect the land and the animals and insects and biodiversity, but you also want to respect the people involved in that process.

Making sure everybody that's working is getting fair wages are being treated well. And that way you're selling to actually has an impact in improving people's nutrition rather than corporate profits. All of that's embedded in agroecology. So yeah, what we try and do on our farm is agroecology.

Adam Calo: [00:08:33] Listening to you talk just now, what makes that process possible for you? It seems like you need really knowledge intensive system, but it's a knowledge that can't be delivered from somewhere else. It has to be uniquely attached to your local environment. And also you need control. Agency to make decisions about where to sell who to sell to and what to produce.

Jyoti Fernandes: [00:08:56] Agroecology has been practiced all over the world for ages. You know, it's the way that food has been produced in every locality. Indigenous people for thousands of years have fed themselves using the resources that are of the local environment and built up a tremendous amount of knowledge, learning from their ancestors and applying those skills to where they happen to live and constantly seeing what's happening and learning from it and gaining more knowledge and you build a symbiotic relationship with the natural environment around you to gather those agroecology skills.

Now, fewer people nowadays, in the UK, have grown up in a farming background, a lot of that indigenous knowledge of the landscape and how to manage it has been lost. And it's happened all over the world really. And there's also been so much pressure for people to lose this connection with the land and the understanding of how to produce what we need from that landscape.

The industrialized food system has come in and lots of farmers have been taught, “Oh, well actually you need to use all these chemicals and herbicides and pesticides and things to produce your food and you need to sell the supermarkets.” And there's all this economic pressure to transition your model of farming to something different. All that's happened, but, that knowledge has been there and we can look back at it and we can learn, and we can also apply a modern understanding of science – a modern understanding of the social impact of all the changes to what we're doing to the environment and to society through more corporate control.

We can apply them differently and we can actually learn how to farm differently. You know, my family on both sides were farmers, one generation before my parents. My father was from India and his family, did farming and my mother's family was farming in Iowa.

In so many people's history will have an element of parts of their family being engaged in agriculture. Cause more of the world was engaged in agriculture before, but a lot of the next generation has been removed from that knowledge of the landscape. So to gain that back, my husband and I, when we started our farm, we had to go around and visit a lot of places that were doing this kind of agroecological farming.

We did volunteering, we did small courses. We read lots of books. We talked to loads of people and trying to pick up the knowledge and skills. And we realized that there's a lot of other people doing this as well. And that knowledge sharing between people trying to recreate what was traditional knowledge and put it in a modern context to be able to farm in a modern way that works with nature is something that we're learning together and developing together.

In order to be able to do that you do need access to land. You need water. Good quality soil. Financial resources to be able to get the tools and equipment that you need to get started properly. All of that is incredibly important, but I think as more people gain access to these things, to be able to start farms, then we'll be able to recreate these systems and hopefully pass them on so it's easier for the next generation of people going back to the land to recreate these kinds of farms.

Adam Calo: [00:11:59] I think agroecology is growing in terms of legitimacy, especially in academic circles, some policy circles. Something I've noticed though, is it kind of gets “othered” in a way in that, “Okay, well agroecology is fine for the tropics or the Global South, but you know, here in the UK or here in America, farmers are embedded in market economics. It has to be competitive. They have to have economic viability and surpluses and that can't really work here.” Could you respond to that critique?

Jyoti Fernandes: [00:12:27] I mean, agroecology is a system of thinking how you design your agroecological farming system that can be applied in any landscape. And it's particularly relevant to what we need to do to try and regenerate farming in this country. I mean, farming is actually facing a really difficult crossroads at the moment.

The agricultural bill has been passed and that means that, the basic payments, the subsidy that's been there to support quite an economically viable farms, is going and farms are going to have to figure out how they transition to something that is financially viable. And also, it looks after the natural environment because, it's been well documented, the impacts of the more industrialized, monoculture based farming. It's been well-documented that that's had destructive impacts on the soil, on biodiversity, on insect counts. And it's also had spiraling down impact on farmer incomes.

It's also made food not as nutritious as it used to be. And really consolidated the power of supermarkets for the distribution of food as well. So, all those impacts are things that people are going: “Actually, this isn't okay. It's actually not working.” And so agriculture is actually a way forward and how we create a better farming model. There was what was there in the past. And then we've had this whole push towards industrialization and intensification and many, many people moving out of the farming sector in the UK. But actually we need to move forward with agroecology, thinking of it as a really modern paradigm.

What agroecology does is one, lower your input costs. So a lot of farmers that are paying out loads of money for buying in loads of imported feed. For example, if they transitioned to agroecology, they would have native breed livestock, that might be more compatible with the conservation grazed meadow, for example.

And they'd be able to graze on that and have a lower output of milk, but they could transition it so that when they were looking after that soil, they had really good yields on the soil, through agroecology. And then if you're selling to a direct supply chain, you get a higher price per kilo, say for your milk or for your meat or whatever it is.

And that actually becomes something that's much more economically viable. And if you kind of change all those aspects of the whole farming model, you can actually come up with something that's much stronger and less impacted by stresses, by volatility, changes in weather, changes in market, all of those things.

And that's what actually government is saying we need to aim for. So agroecology, one hundred percent has a place in this country.

Adam Calo: [00:15:01] You're presenting agroecology as a complete alternative to the dominant food system, the industrial model. And you've levied some critiques of that model. For example, its failure to conserve the environment, its contribution to poor health outcomes, and its contribution to this cheap food model.

In an American education context, if you go to university and you study agriculture, you learn about Norman Borlaug, American ingenuity, and the kind of technological superiority that “fed the world's poor” via the green revolution. But then if you could go to graduate school and you continue to study this in more detail you start to learn all of the counter critiques that the green revolution was directly responsible for the entrenchment of this industrial food system that drives a lot of the environmental crisis and human suffering today.

I'm wondering, how did you arrive to this kind of ecological and political stance that you're at now?

Jyoti Fernandes: [00:15:56] It's interesting that you've mentioned the kind of glorification of Norman Borlaug. Interestingly, here in the UK, we've just released a national food strategy. Or it was a national food strategy part one anyway, which was developed by Henry Dimbleby and a panel of experts to try and look at where our food system was going.

And all these critiques that we’re saying about what's wrong with our food system were in there, but it was also really glorifying what Norman Borlaug had been trying to do. That he was a scientist that went to Mexico to try and improve the seed there to try and improve yields, saying, well, he was doing a really really good thing, et cetera.

And actually it's quite a difficult thing the way it was all framed. I found it actually quite offensive because it was talking about these poor starving peasants in Mexico. You know, he'd gone down there and seeing how poor they are and how unknowledgeable they were and wanted to try and do something to really change this situation.

What I've been learning –and I went down to Mexico to actually visit and work with peasant farmers there –is that they are some of the most knowledgeable farmers and seed breeders and agricultural scientists really, and agricultural innovators. Because they’ve been working for such a long time through their indigenous cultures, with the land with very diverse knowledge intensive systems and breeding seed that is compatible with their natural environment.

And to kind of say, “Oh, well, all that progress,” it was really very much based on this idea that one knowledge system of science is better than another knowledge of science. For myself, when we started also hear about the way that cultures are being removed from the land, losing the connections to those traditional knowledge systems, that destruction of the natural environment, all of it, it makes you realize that that that paradigm of what we're being taught is actually part of the problem.

And you know, in a lot of it's really based on racism. And actually we need to move forward and think that, you know, that kind of knowledge where you work with the natural environment is the most sustainable.

Adam Calo: [00:17:58] I mean, at the same time though, that kind of techno optimism is still alive today. You know, that the Gates foundation Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa is making the case that the first green revolution essentially skipped over some of these locations and just need to kind of bring that same kind of hybrid seed techno-fix to those places.

So there's still kind of a very lively debate about what strategies “feed the world.” It's very contested and with high stakes.

Jyoti Fernandes: [00:18:29] So in the food system summit and in all of the international platforms there's a battle basically for the future of the food system going on. There are contested ideas of what kind of vision for agriculture should go forward.

Our farmers organization called the Land Workers’ Alliance is a part of La Via Campesina, which represents indigenous people and peasant farmers around the world. And actually the amount of the food supply that's being supplied by the peasant indigenous farmers and agricultural farming systems around the world is about 70% of global food security.

In terms of numbers, small farms. There are huge, huge numbers of people employed in farming in places where they're distributing food to local communities, through short supply chains and farming agroecologically using their own resources and diverse cropping systems to feed themselves.

So these groups, our organization, La Via Campesina, plus a lot of other organizations representing civil society, have really critiqued what's going on with the narrative around food, on the international level and which filters down through every national government, through all of our food strategies, et cetera Where they're saying, well, these big farms and industrial farming is what's feeding the world and going, wait, hang on a minute.

Who's actually saying this and why are they saying that? We've got statistics that actually show, the small farms and the localized food economies are providing 70% of global food security. The industrialized food chain is providing 30% of global food security yet their voice is quite strong.

And a lot of that is the politics of the food system. There's a UN food systems summit that's coming up. The person chairing it is heavily involved in a project called the Alliance for the Green Revolution in Africa. And lots of the sponsorship for the food systems summit is from the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation.

And they're really looking at that technological solution. But the civil society mechanism that's been promoting this alternative has actually been excluded from involvement in that UN food systems summit. And so loads of organizations are boycotting turning up as delegates because they'd been excluded from actually having a place at the table to put forward what they think the solutions are.

And this is because there's a lot of money at stake. A lot of big companies are making a lot of money out of trying to gain control of the food system. And we're quite worried that at the climate change talks the narrative that gene edited seed, all these different technological things that are owned by corporations can “save land” so that we can restore nature.

We're worried that that narrative will go forward and loads of the commitments from governments, where they put money into what happens with the future of our food system, what happens with the agricultural research and development budgets, and things actually goes to solutions that just prop up these corporations, trying to sell products all the time to farmers and make money accumulate land for their own profit. It's a big problem and it really drowns out the narrative of other people saying we need to be doing things differently.

Adam Calo: [00:21:30] When I started asking you questions, I might've fallen into a trope where I was focusing on kind of the agronomic practices of your farm, but a lot of your work is focusing on the political dimensions of food system transformation. Why do this on top of all of your farming work?

I mean, I must say, that from the academic perspective, if you look at plant sciences or ecology, these kinds of problems of agriculture they're framed in terms of farmer decision-making, identifying best practices, getting farmers to learn or to be aware of these problems. Why do you think focus on politics is, is needed here?

Jyoti Fernandes: [00:22:03] The politics of the food system is just as important as the practice of the food system, because it's all embedded in the whole system that we've got really. What happens on the farm level in terms of your practices is actually dictated by the wider political context.

What you're trying to produce by being a farmer is food. Food is a basic human right for everyone. Everybody should have enough good quality, nutritious food that's culturally appropriate to be able to feed themselves and their communities. A human rights framework means that governments actually intervene in what happens, politically, to make sure that everybody's guaranteed this basic human rights.

The food system is different. It's not something that can be treated as pure market economics. It's not something that, you know, whatever corporations do for buying, selling, and trading, shouldn't be interfered with. It's something where governments should actually be thinking about, okay, what strategically do we want out of our food system?

And it's so joined with what happens with our landscapes, which happens with biodiversity, fresh water, clean air, climate change, all of these things that everybody, absolutely every person on this planet has a stake in as well as like food security for themselves on future generations.

These are things that impact everybody. And so that wider political context that it fits in is incredibly important. For a long time, the companies that have been trying to profit from our food system and very neoliberal thinking politicians and saying, “Oh no, we just leave food to the market. Farmers have to make it a really viable enterprise. We'll have to deregulate everything, because the regulations that were there in agriculture and are in some places, but being dismantled, because it was originally recognized that the food system has such an impact on the natural environment and on people's right to food.

So, they thought, okay, well, we actually intervene in that we set fixed prices. We set rules and regulations. We make sure that we stop cheap imports coming in to undercut farmers, et cetera. Farmers were given that dignity and respect as a job that is really important to society and the leeway to be able to do things well, but that was all dismantled as this kind of ideology that it should all just be left to the market and the market's going to deliver all these things went into place.

Tackling that fundamental problem, it is a part of what actually dictates the practice on the farm, because if you leave it off to the market and buying all those inputs comes into the picture or where you sell it to get it comes into the picture.

Adam Calo: [00:24:30] When you've testified at the European Parliament, and you said that, “agroecological farmers are trying to provide food security to Europe with straight jackets on.” So, it's not just that policy enables certain types of food production, but it can also disincentivize other types of food production?

Jyoti Fernandes: [00:24:47] Yeah, absolutely. I mean, the politics of the food system now, mean that the rules of regulations that are out there are completely stacked against small, independent farms. You know, they drive farmers into developing these high input systems. When you drive small farms out of business that are much more independent selling to their local community, it kind of forces the land to get consolidated and start selling into vertically integrated supply chains that needs supermarkets or global markets, or to corporations.

There is a degree of force here that's happening. All the laws backing that up are. Making it very, very difficult for agroecological farmers to make a living. And, you know, a lot of the times I'll get critiqued by other people within our movement because there's lots of activists going, you know, why are you dealing with politics?

We just actually need to get on and do this ourselves from the ground up, as a grassroots kind of thing. But the thing is, all those initiatives are taking place. Even if you go and you start your own community supported farm or your urban project, or you managed to get some funds together, like through a loan to start an organic farm, you're still operating within a context of a very unhelpful, larger framework that are slowly, leaving less and less space for the alternatives to flourish when it should be working the opposite way around. Why have we got 3.5 billion pounds being given out through our subsidy system to large farms on the basis of how much land they have? That's consistently giving the upper hand to large landholdings over small landholdings, and there's only so long you can operate on a level playing field before for you totally slide backwards.

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The thing that's going on in the world right now that's super interesting are the farmers protests in India because that's kind of taking this whole thing were talking about to the contra point. Basically, there's millions and millions, literally millions of farmers in India that are protesting against some farm laws that have been passed there that have removed the protection that they normally get from the government, there were protections like a minimum support price for their farm products, laws that said that foreign investors couldn't come in and buy land in agriculture that protects them against that. Certain things that helped facilitate the development of cooperatives and other ways that the state can kind of support agriculture, especially small farms, agricultural cooperatives to buy products and to sell them and distribute them in mass.

All these things are being dismantled and almost half the population in India are farmers. This kind of just happened really quickly with the government under pressure, because they wanted to enter into trade deals and agriculture always gets bartered off and trade deals all the time to try and dismantle all these protections that the farmers in India have historically been able to benefit from and thrive under. And now they're just going, yeah, this is actually something we've got to make a stand against because otherwise we're not going to have this number of people employed in agriculture in the future.

And that's millions and millions of people's livelihoods. And those people driven off the land consolidation of land, lots of being bought by corporates. Bill Gates is the largest landowner in America and that's the sort of thing they saw in Indiaas a possibility.

If you open up to that corporate investment in land as small farms are driven out.

Adam Calo: [00:28:05] So what's preventing that kind of political awakening amongst farmers in the UK? I wonder if under this market imperative, the farmers that are in the niche can eke out a nice little livelihood because they are able to get those premium prices and they don't necessarily have to engage with the broader politics.

Jyoti Fernandes: [00:28:23] Well, mobilizing for political action is exactly what the Landworkers’ Alliance is seeking to achieve. A lot of the small farms, even though they can benefit from the niche shelves and it works quite well and we can prove that it is economically viable in one sense. In another sense, there's still quite an uphill struggle.

Whoever's still doing it is doing it because they truly believe in it. Not because the system is actually helping it out. And the more that you can spread awareness and I talk to farmers all the time and spread awareness of the impacts of volatility, how important it is to have that state intervention to guarantee decent prices, we need something like the milk marketing board that was already dismantled by Thatcher.

And also actually we're the heroes of society, in some ways. If people are producing food, they should be recognized as contributing a valuable public service. They're on the front line of doing something that's incredibly important to society. Why are they treated so badly within this system?

We need to reverse the land consolidation. We need to provide more access to land. We need to provide more training for farmers so that they can be looking after them and producing our food. We need to ease farmers through a transition towards agroecology and more resilient farming models.

All of these things are things that we have a right to invest in as a society and we should be recognizing that they're important for all of us to be engaged in now. We basically try and get people to understand that, to try and help people figure out when they need to be writing petitions, when they need to write to their MPS, talking to the ministers in the agriculture department.

Also it's the things from the village level up to national levels, up to the European Union level, to the Committee on Food Security level in the UN, that narrative needs to open up. Part of it, I think, is helping both consumers who eat the food that farmers produce understand that they have a stake in this too.

So they can back up the voice of farmers who realize we want a better system that respects our dignity and the land better. And helping everyone understand that it's not just about voting with your pocketbook, which I find is a slightly dangerous concept because in this society, a lot of people think, well, you pay for what you want to see. So we'll pay a bit more for organic and that'll drive more organics, but not saying actually we also have a political voice as food citizens to say, we want a food system and where are the subsidies to go? And the regulations that are surrounding it to reflect what we need from food and farming and our landscape in society. And we expect politicians to take on board what we need.

Adam Calo: [00:31:08] So a lot of these approaches are embedded in the platform of LA Via Campesina and therefore Land Workers’ Alliance. Can you talk a little bit more about La Via Campesina as a platform, how it operates, how it comes to these kinds of conclusions and policy ideas?

Jyoti Fernandes: [00:31:25] Yeah. So La Via Campesina is a huge coalition of farmers organizations across the world representing about 200 million farmers around the world. I think we're in 181 different countries. It's a huge coalition of different organizations spanning from the United States where there's the small and family farmers coalition, the black farmers coalition and Canada, the national farmers union across Mexico.

There's those two different farmer's organizations down through South America. We've got the Movimiento Sem Terra in Brazil and all the different agroecology training networks and the IALAs throughout all the different Latin American countries. North and South Africa both have their own coalitions of farmers organizations. We've got a Middle Eastern coalition. Across Europe, there's a European coordination of La Via Campesina. Most of the organizations involved in the farmers protest in India are part of La Via Campesina. It's just this enormous coalition of different voices, representing indigenous people and small farmers in those countries and their interests.

Each of the different constituencies in these kinds of geographical areas has a process for bringing the different farmers organizations together and democratically deciding, okay, what's our platform? What do we believe in, that we can all back up together and what's our action plan to get there?

They originally came together to try and fight the globalization of agriculture in the 1990s. When they realized that actually, the integration into the World Trade Organization was having a huge impact on small producers around the world, the push for the Green Revolution and more consolidation of the farming sector was really destroying livelihoods.

And they thought, this is a global problem that's being promoted without us having a voice at the table. We've got to bring our voices together, get a solid position and push forward a different platform for food security, which they called food sovereignty at that time and kind of set out the basic premise through loads of negotiation, amongst all the different groups about what is it, we're trying to promote?

Food sovereignty is the concept that they coalesced around. And to back up that principle of food sovereignty that all the different organizations ascribed to every four years, we have these big meetings, where two representatives from every organization go there with hundreds of translators, so that people can really communicate with each other and do loads of working groups and write loads of declarations and create lots of action plans and, fine tune what those policies mean and how we implement them around the world.

We share knowledge with each other about, say, an organization in France is leading these protests against such and such. How do we learn how to do that in England? Or, the Indian farmers are talking to us about what they're doing there and we're backing it up because some of the policies in the UK are actually supporting the sort of things that they're protesting against.

So we can show that solidarity. Or we do technical knowledge exchange, like, you know, in Africa, some of the seed saving banks that are being run by their projects and communities might be able to share drought resistant millet seeds with people in a drought zone in South America, for example. And they can exchange that seed or the knowledge about how to save the seed.

That mass movement of sharing knowledge and being able to democratically decide where we're moving as a movement to move forward has tremendous power, these 200 million farmers coming together.

And we've kind of got to because, food security is such a global thing and the power of those multinational corporations is phenomenal. Syngenta. Monsanto. Bayer. The ones that are actually gaining control of our food system. We've got to be quite organized to be able to push back and spread a different narrative.

We do that through democratically getting together and deciding things, sharing that knowledge as we go with our brothers and sisters around the world and moving forward in that way.

Adam Calo: [00:35:13] It must be lots of meetings.

Jyoti Fernandes: [00:35:16] Oh my God, it is the longest meetings.

Adam Calo: [00:35:16] Through this massive deliberation process, agroecology emerges as the preferred agricultural form. it's pretty clear. Why not “Climate smart”, regenerative, organic, sustainable intensified, why do you think that agroecology is the chosen form that matches the needs of over 200 million farmers?

Jyoti Fernandes: [00:35:33] The reason we really opt for agriculture is because it was originally what was defined as this form of agriculture that would back up the paradigm of food sovereignty. So we came up with the idea that food sovereignty is, how we want to provide food security for the planet while being in the hands of the people.

And a huge element of that is looking at the political context of how that food is provided. Who owns the resources or has access to those resources because they don't necessarily need to be owned. The land can be owned but be managed as a commons and managed for food security

With food sovereignty, it wasn't just about providing X number of calories so that everybody in the planet has 2000 calories per day. It doesn't matter where it comes from, who provides it and how the land is managed to get that food and who put profits or benefits from it. Okay?

You know, food security on a very basic level could just all be about everybody gets their 2000 calories, no kind of context to that. Food sovereignty, widens that out and says, well, actually some of those things do matter who owns or manages or has control or access to the resources that produce that food is an important consideration.

And we want to see it shared out so that it's providing a livelihood for as many people as need a livelihood from the land. We want to figure out who controls all the inputs into the farming system. Where is knowledge fit into that? Where does the natural environment and working in harmony, working with it? You can't just be exploiting the land to provide those calories. We can't be exploiting animals and packing them into industrial factory farms in order to provide those calories.

And, is it affordable so that everybody can access food and you don't have some people that are getting really obese off of too much rich food and other parts of the world where there's hunger and malnutrition. It’s the workers involved in the food chain-

are they exploited and paid fair wages? Are they treated like dirt? Also, who profits from it, you know, is the profit shared out to society or is it going to corporations? All those things are a fundamental part of food sovereignty and thereby agroecology.

So when La Via Campesina talks about agroecology, it's not just about all the ways you farm the techniques about farming. It's about that wider political context and making sure that that's embedded in the farming system, who's producing it, who owns it, who it's going to and who benefits, is equally as important as how you treat the soil or which chemicals you use on your farm.

And that's what makes agroecology very different from using the term organic or regenerative agriculture or whatever, because usually those are focused around techniques, rather than bringing in that wider political dimension. It's really important that proponents of agroecology and there's a lot like the Soil Association, et cetera, talking about agroecology actually recognize the origin of that development of the term agroecology from the peasant farming movement.

And there was a lot of work being done, just after the concept of food sovereignty came out to articulate that and to help the world gain a fuller understanding of that concept of agroecology incorporating an analysis of power and the social dimensions alongside all the practices.

Adam Calo: [00:38:47] There was a recent article in Civil Eats, that suggested that agroecology, as it becomes more legitimate, also becomes more at risk of being co-opted. Have you seen this in the UK at all?

Jyoti Fernandes: [00:38:59] Yeah, absolutely. It's an interesting one because agriculture has been being used a lot more largely because we've really, really, really been promoting it through the Land Workers’ Alliance, but it's picked up by a lot of organizations that sometimes forget the political dimension. I'm just continually bringing it up and making sure that it doesn't get forgotten in that narrative.

Because we are in danger in the UK of sidelining those social issues, partly because the government, in general, is quite neoliberal. And so, looking at the practices and the financial viability of our agricultural farms is a narrative that appeals quite easily. And thinking about those wider dimensions of making sure that that land is shared out more equitably, that people get fair wages that you incorporate more job opportunities on farms, that wider communities can benefit from access to that green space. The Social justice dimension- bringing in diversity and inclusion in terms of, the types of people that farm, all of those things sometimes get a bit sidelined. And, and so we need to just make sure that they stay a part of the narrative.

A good example last week, the Soil Association was commissioning a report about looking at, “can technology fit into agroecology” and they were looking at the potential for gene editing technology or vertical farms, data sourcing- all sorts of different things, And whether or not they could be considered agroecological or not.

One thing we really needed to continually bring up when looking at those technologies is that, if the end goal would be okay, it's going to mitigate climate change … It could be considered agroecology. But in our terms, if agroecology wasn't incorporating something that said, actually we're trying to limit corporate power and corporate control of the food system, then something like gene editing technology becomes much more problematic because the patents are usually owned by large corporations.

Or if you're looking at robotics in agricultural, maybe a robot can go along and weed things, and then you don't need herbicides in order to stop the weeding, but what's the impact, the social impact of adopting loads of robots on farms?

Does that mean that we're going to bring in fewer migrant workers and those migrant workers, are up against having to pick at a rate that would compete against the robot? And so their working conditions go down. Actually thinking about that social dimension of the adoption of technologies, not just the pure absence of chemicals.

Adam Calo: [00:41:27] I wonder if you could, let me know a little bit more about specifics in the UK, because perhaps there is once in a generation opportunity has arisen after Brexit to kind of rewrite the agricultural policy and there's been a slew of debates over the Agricultural Bill. It was my understanding that at one point an agroecology amendment was introduced, but then voted down.

Jyoti Fernandes: [00:41:45] Yeah. So the Agriculture Bill in the UK was passed. So it's in place, it's called the Agricultural Act now. But there was a large run-up of a debate about what was going to happen with it previous to being adopted. And now it's in the implementation stage through a scheme that's being rolled out called the Environmental Land Management Scheme.

The subsidy system that we inherited from Europe and that we were operating to previous to this, was that farmers were given payments on the basis of how much land they owned. There was some very, very basic environmental requirements but they were super baby step.

So by and large, it was a payment per-hectare for how much land you owned. And there wasn't requirement to produce a certain type of food or not, et cetera. What the Agriculture Bill was doing was actually ending that. And we were quite supportive of the idea of ending that subsidy system because of the distortion of impact it had on land ownership on consolidation of land ownership.

It also felt like it could just be done a bit better so that public money that was out there for supporting a better food system could be used more strategically to support agroecological farming and regeneration of wildlife corridors and tree habitat and that kind of thing as well.

We got really involved in the lobbying process and it was an interesting one because, on one hand there was a farmers union representing more larger, more industrial farms called the National Farmers Union. They were saying, well, no, actually we need to keep subsidizing food production because food security is really important, which of course is a message we do agree with.

We do think that is important for our society to support food production. The difference is that we're concerned about how that food is produced and who it goes to. On the other hand, there was a lot of people lobbying, saying, well, we want to transition to a system where farmers are paid for planting lesser trees on their land, and for regenerating the environment, et cetera, but not so concerned about that they continue to produce food and saying your food is left to the market. Farmers will only be paid for environmental public goods. We're very much in the middle of that because actually agroecology combines those two paradigms and gets the best of both because it's about producing good quality food, making sure it's being produced at an affordable price and feeding our communities.

And at the same time, it's about restoring biodiversity. Bringing back the insect populations and the wildlife, that's dependent on them. And looking after the soils and mitigating climate change and planting loads of trees and restoring peatland at the same time, but combining those two models, in what we call the land sharing scenario.

It's not just loads of food production on one side, very intensively and wild nature reserves on the other. It's about farming models that are supporting biodiversity across the whole landscape and sharing those two scenarios together. So in a way, the Land Workers’ Alliance coming forward with agroecology was that middle ground.

It was the main voice putting forward that scenario that combines the two scenarios. And it was interesting to watch through that process, different NGOs and the NFU and everything started to meet more in the middle as well. In the narrative of the vision of where we're going forward with our food system, which I found very positive and a lot that we were putting forward loads of awareness about what agroecology is what that middle ground is.

There's a fantastic network called the Nature Friendly Farming Network and ones like the Pasture Fed Livestock Association. And then ones looking at the social dimension, like the Community Supported Agriculture network, Campaign for the Protection of Rural England and ones like that, where it's like we're kind of moving forward and meeting in the middle.

There's a fantastic coalition called SUSTAIN the Alliance for Better Food and Farming, that was kind of bringing these organizations together that meet on that vision of, we need healthy, affordable food production, and we want to restore the earth from the ecological biodiversity crisis we're facing.

It's a funny government to be trying to put forward anything that the government is not completely adopting forward. So we did put agroecology amendments forwards and it was turned down, but there was a bit of a compromise where they did put agroecology in one part of the Agriculture Bill.

So we did, feel that we actually succeeded there in some ways, and a lot of those groups that I was just mentioning the ones that are on that middle ground, plus these other stakeholders slowly starting to adopt this idea, are all part of what's called the ELMs engagement group. So they have a stakeholder group that many of us lobbied to try and widen and open up to bring all those voices to the table, to actually co-create and develop what our new subsidy scheme looks like.

And I actually feel like there's quite a lot of potential there. I mean, we've been really heavily involved and that process along with all my colleagues, and it's just been quite interesting seeing, everybody saying, what is it that we want out of our food system, out of our farming system and moving forward with that.

The risk is that the environmental things are moving forward, but it's looking a little bit like what used to be done under the old countryside stewardship schemes. And we're trying to push them to go a bit further because actually we're facing a climate and ecological emergency. We need to move a bit faster.

We've got to get people using less pesticides and herbicides, composting their manure instead of slurry injectors. You know, we don't want it all based on technology. We want it based on this knowledge of sustainable farming system. And then we're also a little bit worried that food production will slide and that's not being held to.

So it's just constantly making sure we're holding that balance. And making aware that, that the detail of what emerges from the scheme actually reflects that balance so that it goes forward. And we have a good amount of our own sustainability in terms of self-sufficiency of food, but we've also restored loads of land for the environment at the same time.

Adam Calo: [00:47:26] So the critique of the Environmental Land Management scheme that I've heard in this vein is that as long as the United Kingdom sees itself as mainly a food importing nation, then ELMs ends up being kind of a countryside greening program, which is great places to be in and live in. But it's not necessarily a food policy, is it?

Jyoti Fernandes: [00:47:44] Yeah I think, the narrative internally at DEFRA, they are quite aware that they want to keep farmers still producing food. But it's also educating lots of farmers. And this is where the detail comes in is educating farmers that they can transition to ELMs.

And this kind of, lower stocking density, farming, more sort of conservation grazing, more trees across farms, through agroforestry systems- that farmers can actually convert to these things and still produce food. So a lot of it's about financial incentive, but also the support for farmers to relearn how to produce food alongside these systems.

The way it's developed in and of itself right now, isn't actually anti food production. And it really shouldn't be, it's just making sure that they hold farmers through that journey. And like, it doesn't mean that like active farms actually go out of business, which is happening now with the dairy industry. Loads of industrial dairies are going out of business and collapsing right now because of this, prospect of subsidy being removed.

Do you actually keep those farmers farming, but getting them transitioned to a more sustainable dairy model? It's not necessarily a bad thing that that big industrial dairy -the ones that are putting less a slurry in order courses and stuff- are ending, but we've got to keep those holdings still producing.

Or does that land just get bought, become like nice conservation fields. And lots of people put in tourism, and not keep producing the food? And I think that the choice is there. We've just got to make the opportunities really clear and government needs to put money into that transition process, for education and for all the new equipment that you need in order to transition and some kind of a buffer for the risk involved in the transition, because transition is no easy thing. It's quite risky and it takes some time. But once you get there on your own much more resilient footing.

Adam Calo: [00:49:42] So it sounds like your participation when, I mean you, I mean the Land Workers’ Alliance and other actors in debates over what food systems should be, have actually moved the needle in a positive direction. I'm wondering … you've participated in a lot of different types of policy work, writing reports, blocking the streets with tractors meeting with high level officials. What do you think has been the most effective in your policy career?

Jyoti Fernandes: [00:50:08] No particular line of action is going to be impactful in it of itself. People who want to see a better society have to think strategically about covering all bases and building a really broad-based movement where people are engaged at whatever level they feel comfortable in doing.

So, you've got to have the lobby advocates that are there at the table in all those DEFRA meetings, talking to the politicians, consistently putting in good quality recommendations, and then that's one part of it. But it's not going to succeed unless there's that wider societal awareness. You've got to have the grassroots projects on the ground, building those positive alternatives, the pioneers, the demonstration farms, the early adopter farmers, who've decided to transition and build something different. And they're the on the ground proof that this is possible.

And then you've got to have like your consumers going, “Hey, this is actually what we want out of a better food system.” And they need to be talking to the politicians and talking to their neighbors and anybody that's been a bit of annoyance and just say “Look, this is what we actually want as a system and make that super clear.”

And direct action plays a vitally important role in all of this, because it provides that visibility. It's something where the public can go, Hey, actually, you know, the trade Bill's going through. And if they bring in loads of terrible factory farmed meat from America, that's going to completely undermine what we were just saying.

We wanted with the Agriculture Bill, which is a sustainable, high animal welfare, environmentally friendly food supply. It's all of it working together. And what's beautiful about that is that a social movement of people working together is a way you can combine everybody's power, wherever your superpower lies and what you can combine it together with somebody else's. So you're really moving social change forward.

Adam Calo: [00:51:59] Let's say that there was a national farming policy that was aimed at maximizing this vision of agroecological production. What would it look like? Paint me a vision of what an agroecological UK is.

Jyoti Fernandes: [00:52:14] One thing we've been doing in my work a is working on modeling land use. First you need to just set what the big picture is, where are we heading with our land use and our food system. So we were doing this kind of complicated thing where we were going, we're going to figure out what it is that we need to eat, with the population we've got here on in the UK for a healthy diet, a good, you know, good nutritious food. Not necessarily what we eat now, but what we could be eating in order to make it, sustainable. What land do we have available? How much agricultural land is there?

There's 18 million hectares of agricultural land available. How many trees and wildlife areas do we need to restore in order to get our biodiversity up to a certain level? And also how many trees do we need to start sequestering the carbon that we need to achieve net zero?

We were trying to work all that out and then create what we set was a land use vision sort of saying, okay, we're going to have 6 million hectares of forest and, you know, X million hectares of wheat being grown and this much land under pasture for pasture fed livestock and then kind of combine that about what that means in terms of the food system.

And what we were picturing is that about 80% of what people eat here in the UK is produced domestically. In order to achieve that people would need to eat a bit less meat, a little bit less sugar, a bit less alcohol –some of these things that take up quite a lot of land—and like a more diverse, seasonal diet. In order to achieve that level of 80% self-sufficiency, we'd have to think a little bit more carefully about how we use our land, but then also, having those farms so that they are agroecological, so that biodiversity is across the farms.

We've got really rich diverse meadows without chemicals that insects can freely travel in regenerate across them. We've got agroforestry. Trees, being planted and dotted all around fields. Multiple stacking layers of usage so that the sheep are underneath the orchards and things are being rotated.

All the waste food is going back to feed pigs and chickens instead of them being fed on soil that comes from rainforest areas. And then, the food that we do import, it doesn't undercut any of the production here in the UK. So we don't bring anything in that could actually be produced here. Don’t bring in pork, don't bring in dairy products, don't bring in brussel sprouts and leaks and things that could be produced here perfectly well, but bring in things that are the extra things we want, like oranges and bananas and rice and some of those things that make our diet a bit more diverse, but bringing them in from places where they're produced, agroecologically.

And paying completely fair prices for things so that money actually goes to the producers and thinking very carefully about what we import so that it doesn't trade off food sovereignty of other places, because there is a big problem that the food being produced in other countries that's imported to the UK can often trade off with food security in the places where it's at, because it takes the best agricultural land for these luxury export crops. And we want to avoid that kind of situation where the things that we're trading are things that are being produced by say cooperatives or their excess to the requirements of the fruit security in that country.

And then, it's bringing in a bit of extra income to the producers on the ground there. So that's all part of the big picture. We have more new entrants on the land. We have more people engaged in agriculture and on what they're producing is being processed within the local economy.

And it's being sold through local restaurants and tourist places and through the public sector going to our schools and our hospitals, and then beyond that regionally through our public sector and through those regional supply chains and everybody all along the chain of everything we eat is treated fairly and with dignity.

Adam Calo: [00:55:57] It's a bold vision. It would be a drastically different economy in the UK, wouldn't it? Or do you think that life would look just the same, but just with better food?

Jyoti Fernandes: [00:56:07] I think, I mean, it would really revolutionize the economy in so many ways, because, they're saying we need a just recovery or we need the COVID recovery or whatever we need to build back better. This is absolutely the way to build back better because if we want to regenerate our economy, we need more jobs.

They need to be good quality jobs, where people enjoy what they're doing, they can get outside and get fresh air, or creating something on a level where you're not doing the same monotonous job all the time. This is the opportunity to get more people employed on farms.

And because they're diverse and there's a lot more seasonality, they're not just stuck in these huge rows of things where it goes on forever. You can actually kind of chop and change around, and you have some flexibility to also part-time, do maybe a computer-based job or some writing or some art, whatever it is alongside what you're doing.

And then, all the product that is being sold you're creating so much of an economic multiplier because, if you've got like small scale farms doing all this diverse stuff, and it's all being sold locally, and then you've got loads of restaurants, cooking with that food and you've got market stalls, and then you've got tourists that can come and see all this amazing local stuff that's going on.

And then you've got the other people employed, doing fencing or building or whatever it is, that's all ancillary to agriculture. You know, it's like regeneration, it's, creating a vibrant fabric of economic opportunity, that's completely sustainable. It's not depleting the resources, it is actually adding to the resources we've got for future generations.

Adam Calo: [00:57:38] So the last question I have is I'm embedded in a research Institute and a lot of what I do and what my colleagues do is we respond to. Calls for funding, grants, that say the agricultural system is in crisis. The climate system is in crisis. Biodiversity is in crisis. Write a grant to figure out how to solve this, particularly in the food system.

What should an agriculturally focused research institute like the one I'm embedded in be studying? what kinds of questions should we be asking? What kinds of research should we be undertaking to align with that vision that you've suggested?

Jyoti Fernandes: [00:58:11] I think that the important thing is to be led by the needs of the movement, so there's a lot of like technical farmer-lead research that needs to be done.

And it'd be really great, if research institutes could actually work with farmers on the ground to develop research projects, directly responding to the things that need to be improved in our agricultural farming systems. It's very hard to find the R&D funding through the conventional agricultural R&D channels.

Because much of that is focused on corporate controlled agriculture where somebody makes a profit, but the sort of things like developing more blight resistant potatoes or better yielding heritage grain wheats, or you're looking at systems for recycling food waste or better nitrogen fixing things. Those kinds of technical things, doing farmer led research projects with farmers on the ground, and compiling those ground up solutions is really important, but then there's also the social side of things that needs to be done with which responds to the needs of the social movement and the political lobbying and knowledge sharing and that kind of thing.

Finding out where can academia and research intervene to provide key bits of evidence or to collate data that the social movement needs in order to make its case, or to improve their own knowledge systems or their own impactfulness or effectiveness.

And, I've always felt that it would be really good if research institutes had more of an advocacy role as well. There's so many papers and bits of research being done on this kind of work and not all of that is getting translated through to parliament, to DEFRA to places where a lot of the decisions making actually is actually happening.

And it'd be really useful if academics were also activists and took that knowledge and information to the places where it's going to make a real difference on how they think. Because I noticed like every time say the effort select committee puts out calls for evidence, research institutes should actually just put in submissions compiling some of the evidence that they've got on some of these areas directly to the effort.

So that committee who then gives it onto a government to make decisions or responding to calls for evidence from the agricultural ministries or just sending stuff straight to MPS and saying, look, we'd like to have a meeting with you about this. We're a bit concerned about how the R&D budget is going or what's happened with this. And you know, I think it could really make a big difference because evidence does have power.

The Land Worker's Alliance has just hired an agroecology research collaborator, or a facilitator and agriculture research collaboration facilitator to try and bring the needs of the movement for agroecology together with researchers that have the time and the ability to do this research.

So if you're a research researcher or a research institute that wants to get involved in that, there are a number of ways you can do that. You can contact the LWA and we'll connect you up. If it's a specific research project or if you can just generally, want to be connected and we've got research need that we want to put forward to you to see if you want to research it.

That's great. Also we could do some financial support for the agriculture research collaboration, because it would be really great if universities as part of their budget line made a firm commitment to this kind of democratic collaboration on agricultural research. And we found the means to carry it this on beyond the shelf life of the small grant that we got to try and start this collaboration up. In a way it's a method of working that should be systematically backed up by universities and how they function.

Adam Calo: [01:01:42] Thank you, Jyoti, I really enjoyed hearing your perspective on agroecology.

Jyoti Fernandes: [01:01:45] Great. Thank you.

View Details

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

View Details

Transcript: The role of arts on landscape science - (Ewan Allinson) – Landscapes Podcast April 2021

*The transcript has been lightly edited for clarity and comprehension

INTRO

If you look at any major environmental problem today, I believe part of its origin story can be attributed to the consequence of some expert-led decision-making process. Undoubtedly, these experts assessed the available evidence and made recommendations to policy makers, claiming that adherence to their remedies and recipes would lead to progress for all. Yet,

As historian Jo Guldi has said “We are living in the wreckage of expertise’s past”

The problems with expertise, in the way it is socially constructed, in what is considered acceptable forms of data in scientific discourse, and how expertise is unevenly distributed, is a core concern of sociologists of the environment, political scientists and science and technology scholars.

Research in this vein shows scientists, not as some being with higher powers of knowledge, but simply human actors, embedded in larger structures that influence their actions, motivated by mundane forces like competition, pride, and adherence to personal values, as much as a they might be motivated by a quest for objective truth of some kind.

Despite the well established problems with expert-led decision making leading to perverse outcomes for society and the environment, the faith in the expert is still a powerful rationale and frequently used as a tool for persuasion or, in some cases to achieve submission.

That being said, there is a strong movement to break down the power imbalance between experts and non-experts. Ideas like citizen science and participatory action research have risen to normality and are frequently employed, and sometimes even mandated, in large government funded research programs. This suggests that there is at least an awareness that the scientific process will be improved by including a broader set of actors, methodologies and importantly, different forms of knowing.

In this episode I asked Ewan Allinson, who is an independent artist based in Edinburgh, to help explain the potential role for the arts in improving the democratic character of landscape decision making. And while we do talk about how art and artists can shape what landscapes are and ought to be, as well as Ewan’s role as an artist participating in some unique landscape collaborations, that are worth understanding,

we kept circling back to this problem of expertise.

And what I started to take away from the conversation surprised me. While I believe that the scientific community has much work to do in coming to grips with its own internal obsession with playing the role of the expert.

Our conversation made me think that maybe the role of the arts is the secret ingredient in fulfilling this ideal of an egalitarian science and society relationship where a diverse set of knowledge and knowers are truly valued and allowed a venue to convene.

Here's Ewan Allinson.

INTERVIEW

Adam Calo: [00:02:55] Ewan, you are an independent artist and it seems to me that a lot of your work has been right up at the intersection between artistic endeavors, but also in issues of landscape science. Engaging in questions of environmental sustainability, environmental degradation, how to make equitable decisions about land use in places.

So, I thought it'd be really interesting to have you to try and unpack the relationship between art and landscape decision-making and in particular, what can art bring to these questions that the social sciences and the biophysical sciences cannot?

Ewan Allinson: [00:03:34] As a disclaimer at the outset, Adam, I have to say that the things that I'm going to say about art, some theorists may agree with, some artists may agree with, some will disagree with some may disagree with strongly. So, the big caveat is that the things that I'm saying art can do or can be I very much emphasize “the can.” So, it's about potentiality rather than these things being an inherent property.

There's something about the position of being an artist of being a freelance artist—agency is sometimes a word that is used—and I think this is beautifully encapsulated in a quote that I often pull out when trying to describe that positionality. It's in a letter written from Leopold the First of Belgium to the young Queen Victoria, where he writes to her:

"the dealings with artists require great prudence. They are acquainted with all classes of society and for that very reason dangerous."

So, there's something quite profound in that. And I, myself as an artist, take what is, I suppose, consciously an ambivalent position. I am an agitator around issues of landscape people, nature and justice. I kind of relish being the awkward customer in the room really. And also having had a background in science, I have a huge amount of respect for the way in which science can, reveal, properties of nature.

Adam Calo: [00:05:24] You started off on an academic track, but then made a decision to switch over to the arts. Do you feel like you are succeeding more in your original interest in engaging with environmental problems through the arts? Why I approach it through this dimension?

If you really care about the environment Why not become a politician or work for a big conservation nonprofit?

Ewan Allinson: [00:05:44] I think particularly when you come from a working-class background, as I do, where your options may be circumscribed as a consequence of your position in the social hierarchy, as an artist you kind of escape that hierarchical positioning and find yourself with a pass to move through hierarchies with relative freedom.

That amongst many other things I think were influential in making that critical decision to cut a drift from institutions and systems and become a free agent that pursues the same set of interests that I would've pursued, as an academic or as you say, a politician. Again, a politician has to, unless they're independent, a politician has to sing from a hymn sheet.

Adam Calo: [00:06:46] I see you as somewhat reluctant academic, but that kind of raises an interesting question for me, because, it is recognizing that within this environmental domain, the natural sciences, biophysical sciences, and the social sciences do enjoy a modicum of power to influence these landscapes.

So, there must be some need to engage with some of that language in order to try and create some different kinds of outcomes that you might want, especially from that free agent perspective.

Ewan Allinson: [00:07:19] It's interesting. In my leadership roles, as vice chair of a landscape partnership, for example, my interest is to always first understand where a particular stakeholder is coming from. So within that context of working with ecosystem services, I certainly recognize that this language of ecosystem services has enormous currency and is being deployed from a position of good intentions.

So, while I have some profound epistemological and metaphysical issues around the language and concepts, I'm still keen to grant it as a system of thinking as a system of knowing, but as you say, from a position of slight skepticism. I do think that resonates amongst the scientists that they may be guilty sometimes of getting carried away with the success of the whole ecosystem services framework.

And the success of that is blinding them to nuances that can't be captured within that framework.

Adam Calo: [00:08:33] I always get frustrated with academic papers because they always talk in an authoritative tone. That's what they're supposed to be, expressing a little piece of knowledge that the authors have discovered through some method, but the positionality of the authors really plays a huge role, you know?

So, if you would write the same paper, but invite a couple of different authors in to participate and engage with the same arguments, you're going to come with a different conclusion.

Ewan Allinson: [00:08:56] And I think that's what I have found very refreshing actually, is—and I'm sure others in different circumstances have found … artists finding themselves in a setting that's dominated by scientists may face frustrations, but I've actually found it very rewarding to have my concerns around the totalizing instincts of the ecosystem services framework really taken on board by the scientists who I'm working with on, on this particular paper.

Adam Calo: [00:09:32] So, you've seen evidence of success of being that artist as agitator in these types of groups to broaden out the thinking, especially in the environmental sciences. I'm wondering, is this part of a larger trend? Where there's actual funding calls that mandate or encourage bringing together artists or art exhibitions, or even art concepts into a research collaboration?

Where, where does this come from? And in your experience, how do these collaborations go?

Ewan Allinson: [00:10:07] It's very interesting, isn't it? Part of the impetus for taking arts research or the type of research that an artist might do seriously, actually, goes back to the research framework. This idea that the arts departments had to justify themselves almost as research departments in order to contribute to the REF scoring of individual institutions.

Adam Calo: [00:10:35] And what's the REF?

Ewan Allinson: [00:10:36] What is that, research excellence framework, Isn't it? It's an evaluation process for how well a university is doing from a research point of view. This requirement of universities to justify their research existence has interestingly put the idea of arts research into the picture. That impetus is almost come from a very top-down requirement that has focused minds on the idea of art as research rather than merely as practice, which is what traditionally people would have associated art schools with.

Adam Calo: [00:11:15] Perhaps a strategic reframe. I really wanted to ask you about this though, because in that quote, where you talked about an artist being external and dangerous and of many minds, the art practice is external. It's not viewed with the purpose of forming new knowledge. Is arts research really about collaborating or creating new methods to solve important tricky problems or should art be really be that external thing? When I think of art that moves me or moves powerful decision makers, it's always an external act, that kind of raising awareness, rather than being integrated into the halls of decision makers.

Ewan Allinson: [00:11:58] I think that's a balancing act that that artists themselves are wrestling with. Part of what they want to do is just make, or work with material. I certainly find that when I'm doing site-specific public art sculpture, for example, my first step is to delve into … do intense research on that place from the geology to the fauna to the archeology, to the mythology, to the local history, to individual narratives of lived experience and so on.

That kind of sponge like inhalation, through research of the genius loci, the spirit of place is what feeds the creativity that produces a work that is resonant in that particular place. Research is part and parcel of an artist's practice. The question becomes well, how does practice feed back into research that might contribute, for example, to an interdisciplinary or transdisciplinary project?

One of the frustrations, I think that artists have in interdisciplinary settings is that, their contribution is not well understood and that people think, "Oh, well, the artist is here to illustrate visually or sonically some of the findings that we as scientists, social scientists, natural scientists come up with,” and there's nothing wrong with that. That's something that can be productive and great.

But, what I'm talking to is the fact that artists with their kind of synthetic approach to research and their interest in all these dimensions, the biology, the geology, the history—like magpies—their interest and approach from that position can contribute something very significant to the whole framing of the research that individual scientists are doing. And so rather than it just being an illustrative function, I think what the artist can do is reframe, the parameters of interdisciplinary research.

Adam Calo: [00:14:28] I must imagine that for run-of-the-mill biophysical scientist, who might be on a project that has an arts aspect to it, they're just imagining some exhibits on the side. Art as community engagement and, that's a relief because usually the scientists have to tack on that element and onto their research proposal. Now we can just let the artists take care of that. Cause that's what they do, right?

Ewan Allinson: [00:14:52] Well, that's right. That side of it is often very difficult, isn't it, for scientists. They don't go into ecology or biology to become a community engagement specialists. And are, as you say, very often relieved to have someone who can help fulfill that remit.

And there's nothing wrong with that, but, the message is that really, if you're bringing an artist into that interdisciplinary framework, they can contribute a great deal more than the community engagement side of it and the illustrating for public consumption.

Adam Calo: [00:15:32] Do you think you could illustrate that a little bit more? Let's think about a case that's relevant to landscape decision making, maybe about agricultural practices, because that's what I know most about, at least in terms of my background. You have social science, and you have environmental science studying this, trying to identify optimal land use. What can art offer in this case that those existing methodologies cannot?

Ewan Allinson: [00:15:58] Obviously science is tending to trade in hard facts, data. And there are things that get lost in that. A project that I undertook in the North Pennines, it was called Hefted to Hill, subtitle, digging deep into the knowledge and values of hill-farmers. As a dry stone waller, most of my clients are farmers. I often like to get chatting with them and get them onto subject matters that they might not ordinarily go into kind of philosophical almost.

It became clear to me that farmers sit on a repository of land knowledge that does not really lend itself to being captured through scientific methods.It's knowledge that's transmitted through narrative. It's stories. It's in the voice, it's a relationship.

And so this project set out as an arts project to simply capture the testimony of seven Hill-farmers in the North Pennines and there were two photographers involved as well,

whose brief was to capture these same farmers at work in the landscape setting as work, which in a sense, shapes the landscape. Britain's landscapes are managed landscapes, and most of the people who are managing these landscapes are farmers whose values are reflected in the landscapes that policy is being made for.

And yet policy makers are not really interested in those values. Policymakers are focused on the actions of the farmer and either containing those actions or promoting those actions in a certain way. And they fail to recognize that one of the assets that are part of the suite of benefits that landscapes provide society with. One of those assets is the farmers own set of values and their knowledge of the land, their intimate knowledge of the land, their intimate relation with the land their covenant, with the land.

And these are the things the science misses. And as a result of that, one of the things that was tracked in the course of this project was speaking to farmers who, who do take up some of the grants available in return for delivering certain environmental benefits through prescriptions that are created by DEFRA.

And the main problem is that these prescriptions are not developed in conversation with the farmer. They are developed at the outset, taken to the farmer as part of a deal, basically. And because these prescriptions fail to engage with a detailed knowledge of a landscape that the farmer they fail very often.

They're wrong headed. They take a generalized view of how nature is meant to behave according to the science, or according to the modeling, the policymakers draw from the science, which when it's truth checked, as it were, at ground level, It falls flat because landscapes are always granular particular, specific or unusual misbehaving, according to the models.

Adam Calo: [00:19:48] Well, it seems like the standard science approach to that is to say, well, of course there's uncertainty, but that's why you need to fund me to continue to develop more precise tools. Are you saying that there is always going to be a disconnect between the advanced abilities of ecological science with the knowledge of someone who lives in that space, in that quadrant that the modeler is trying to predict?

Ewan Allinson: [00:20:15] I think we're in a position where it looks like a disconnect. And in a way that's what I'm working hard to try and undo that sense of it being a disconnect. In fact, if we could find systems that allow the scientific modeling to sit alongside that local knowledge, that granular knowledge that comes through a daily toiling in an environment in a place, then you're going to improve your decision making enormously.

So I know with ELMS and the way that ELMS is being framed by DEFRA—

Adam Calo: [00:21:01] This is the newly designed Environmental Land Management Scheme replacing the Common Agricultural Policy because of Brexit.

Ewan Allinson: [00:21:09] That's right. If we're going to look for upsides from Brexit, then perhaps this is one upside where we can take a very different approach to the way in which land management and governments contribution to land management can take place. And so they're taking what they're referring to as a systems approach which includes whole farms. So rather than piecemeal, well, a field here and a field there in a farm gets to benefit from some kind of environmental grant or something. The whole farm is being considered as part of the priority. So it's this systems approach that seems to be the heart of the way ELMS is being developed. My great anxiety is that the way that that systems approach is being thought about is in technocratic terms, that just will not really allow for the expertise and knowledge of the farmer. What I think is, if a systems approach is what's being taken then that systems approach needs to have a model of complexity that admits that there are ways of knowing some of that complexity that come from direct working of the land.

Adam Calo: [00:22:44] So you wrote about some of these issues in a short piece on Medium, where you kind of describe the knowledge of hill-farmers. And in particular, you described a relevant exchange between something that the hill-farmer knows and something that the countryside stewardship officer knows, who is the government agent in charge of land management. Can you just describe that exchange and what it reveals?

Ewan Allinson: [00:23:08] There's one farmer, this is down in Teasdale and he farms in a beautiful Valley called Baldersdale. That leads up to the Pennine escarpment looking down to Eden Valley and he had a countryside stewardship officer come to visit his farm one day and start an assessment and a black grouse cock flew up in front of them both.

The farmer said, “Oh look, there's a a black grouse.” And the countryside stewardship officer refused to accept that this could be a black grouse because the landscape of Baldersdale doesn't fit the habitat criteria that the stewardship officer had in their rubric. And so it just didn't fit.

And so therefore it couldn't have existed as a black grouse. And that was the absurdity of that situation. And it was very interesting because when I first produced the article and tweeted it out, there was a great response on Twitter of people recalling very similar experiences of nature not behaving according to the book and therefore being written out almost of a farm's biodiversity report because it didn't accord with the textbook version of what should be there.

Black grouse are meant to be close to wooded areas basically. And in Baldersdale there's hardly any trees at all. And look, I'm putting science in the frame. Very often, this is a problem, not so much of the science, but how the science percolates into the delivery of policy on the ground they are two quite different things aren't they really?

Adam Calo: [00:24:55] Yeah, I think they are different, but science always percolates out into society, you know? I don't think there is a distinction, right? I mean, especially today, there's so much of this call to trust, follow, or even listen to the science. The example you described is an example where the science actually creates the blindness and the intuition, the general sense, the daily understanding is, what is more useful to act upon.

Ewan Allinson: [00:25:25] That's interesting, isn't it? This is the thing about disciplines and why the arts are perhaps, and artists are perhaps another type of researcher outside of disciplines. The disciplines necessarily have sets of blinkers. And I suppose in a way, isn't this what ecology as a science was to some extent, a pushback on that need to remember that things are connected. That you do damage to your understanding of nature when you, when you zoom in and fail to see the context in which something is existing, being, or struggling and so on.

Adam Calo: [00:26:09] So, I mean, one of the lessons to draw here is that an artist's intervention has the ability to reveal things that other disciplines that are traditionally used to understand, particularly in the natural sciences. But that there needs to be new mechanisms for integrating it. And you're a part of this, Valuing Nature Report, that summarized this goal of integrating art research into an ecosystem services framework and environmental decision-making.

And one of the key recommendations was quote,

"if the artist's interrogating perspective is to be harnessed, to compliment other research and decision-making models, it is essential that its contribution is equally acknowledged alongside disciplines, such as economics, ecology, and other natural and social sciences.”

Is it equally acknowledged, you know, does it enjoy equal power to these other existing modes of knowing?

Ewan Allinson: [00:27:06] No, I don't think it does. And that's what makes it exciting to be part of an attempt to assert its value. In a way, one of the things that very often drives artists is, is a quest for justice. And that's where the kind of agitation part comes in.

In a way, I think artists are always going to be thinking about disciplines in terms of power and power struggles. So, you know, the work I was doing with hill-farmers was very much an issue of power. I think, art and artists are engaging with issues of power within disciplinez, from a position of not having much power as things stand.

And that's quite an interesting position, which I think comes quite naturally to artists in any case, to have this unusual relationship to power where, as outsiders, they have a power, as outsiders, which in a way do they want to become insiders?

And of course, we're trying to assert the importance of artistic research within addressing environmental problems and wanting other disciplines to have a better understanding.

I think it's important that other disciplines start to learn to have great respect for the arts approaches to these problems because they're simply not going to solve the issues pertaining to the environment without artists being at the center of framing the narratives. Because it is about narratives. Data's all well and good. Producing data is all well and good and being guided by the science, fine.

But if you don't develop narratives that resonate and actually alert people, then ultimately, okay, the science on its own can influence policy, but it's more than influencing policy that needs to be done here, isn't it?

Adam Calo: [00:29:29] Well, in that same piece, you take a step further to say that science acts as a disciplining force and you write that “science is the stick to beat the farmer with” What do you mean by that?

Ewan Allinson: [00:29:40] It's almost as if it's deployed as a way to end the argument. That's how farmers experience it. It's almost a kind of cartoon type scenario that you come up against when you speak to farmers very often is of young science graduates coming on to their farm and telling them what they have to do with their land.

And you can kind of picture the farmer going purple in the face, hold holding back their indignation at being told in no uncertain terms, what it is they're going to have to do. And I think this why I engage, Adam, with, with philosophy.

Because I think there are some philosophical problems here that need to be addressed. There are different ways of knowing. Science is one of them and science delivers forms of knowledge that simply couldn't become to in any other way. But there are other forms of knowledge that good decisions need that are come to through other means.

Farmers themselves sit on huge repositories of knowledge that are not acquired through scientific method. They're acquired through other means. And yet within the systems that govern those forms of knowledge, they have no currency. It's the science that has all the currency.

And so that's a question of power really. That's a consequence of really the enlightenment and the relationship of knowledge to power that we've inherited from the enlightenment.

Adam Calo: [00:31:26] That cartoon you mentioned has such a strong class dimension to it as well, where you can be young and professionalized and work with the currency of models and ecology and economics, and therefore have more have the ability to tell someone who's older and working the land, what to do, right?

Ewan Allinson: [00:31:46] That's right. It's very much this degree-based deployment of authority. My own father, left school when he was 14 and worked down in the mines as a young man, and then he was keen Mountaineer, and he and my mother moved across to the Lake District.

And he got a job in the National Trust as a warden and then rose up to become the senior advisor for the National Trust on all their upland areas in England, Wales and Northern Ireland. Now that couldn't happen today because he didn't have, he didn't have any degrees. He didn't have any A levels. He didn't have O levels.

You can't imagine that happening today. And I think that's a real hindrance actually to making the most of the intellectual capital exists that exists at a grassroots level. And somehow there needs to be an overcoming of this fixation upon degree-based learning and all the authority that comes with that. It is very much a class thing. And the problem is there there's an effect of that. Chris Dalglish,

in his 2016 report, Community Empowerment and Landscape, talks very cogently about this problem that creates a “participation deficit” as he refers it, to where essentially a professionalization of decision-making—he’s specifically speaking around landscape designation in this context, but where the authority lies with those positions of power in agencies or in NGOs, the authority lies with those who have degrees and people at the local level are disempowered by that.

Certainly with the farmers that I worked with in the North Pennines, there are very severe mental health consequences that come with being disempowered. In that way, the farmers themselves are made to feel that their own knowledge has no value in the system as it stands.

Their views may be sought for the odd consultation, but the language they speak and the views they have never makes it into the reports. It's always the language of the NGOs and the degree-based practitioners. So this leaves them with a real issues of self-worth actually, and there are real life consequences to failing to take proper respect or proper account of the kinds of understandings that farmers have. I think if farmers felt valued more, there would be enormous well-being consequences, positive consequences that would flow.

And I think this is across the piece, really. More broadly my interest is in local expertise generally. By valuing the knowledge that people have at a local level, you do wonders for the confidence that exists at a local level and where you have confidence, you're going to start to have better decisions made at that local level because people feel empowered to contribute to those decisions.

Adam Calo: [00:35:28] There is a long tradition in the sciences of trying to contest visions of expertise. The subdiscipline of citizen science gets at this in a way, but still usually has a kind of top-down framing of the questions to be asked, but involves non-experts in data collection.

Then there's this slightly more radical field of participatory research, stemming from a Paulo Freire vision of knowledge production, which is truly bottom up and radical. Where do the arts fit into this? Because one, at least my conception is that the sciences need to shift the way that they do practices to engage in non-expert knowledge profoundly in order to address some of these harms and also reach these potential outcomes.

How does art help in bridge that gap? I think that's something that I haven't really thought about in too much depth before.

Ewan Allinson: [00:36:19] It values the overlooked. It values that which is not valued institutionally. It has an open mind around value that sees treasure where it might not be perceived through other lenses. Not only sees that treasure, but raises it up and declares it to be treasured. I wasn't necessarily that caught up in the Marcel Duchampian world view, that inspired Brit Art and some of the contemporary things in art, but that was at the heart of that. You take a urinal and you show it as a work of art. There's something intellectual in that where artists can, could come and treasure and value things that the prevailing systems of valuing fail to recognize.

And not only treasure it but fight for that to be treasured. So there's a campaigning element the arts around issues of justice that I think, I don't know whether that distinguishes it from other disciplines, but it's certainly an element that you come across very often where it sets its own mandate in that sense.

Adam Calo: [00:37:44] In that valuing nature report, I sense there to be a seeming contradiction in some of the goals, which was, one, to inject an artistic led valuing of nature within an ecosystem services framework to make one of the many ecosystem services or a set of them identified through artistic practice, to make the invisible visible, but within that framework.

But what you're talking about is art that has a standpoint to challenge the narrative and the original assumptions of such a framework. To tear it down, to reject the language of economics seeping its way totally into an environmental discourse.

Ewan Allinson: [00:38:25] Yeah, I think that's interesting. It's a one that I myself am negotiating constantly. I think arts research is quite good being home with its own contradictions, being relaxed about being ambivalent. So I think you can do those two things. You can rail against the idea that a particular landscape is delivering aesthetic services to society, which to me is an absurdity. This idea that the, the aesthetic experience of landscape is this service, is an absurdity to me. But at the same time, I'm happy to sit down with ecosystem services, people, and those, as you say, within cultural geography who are trying to engage with the ecosystem services framework. If this is a way of getting some of these aspects into the policy, then let's also run with that and see how we can, ensure this does enter the policy without being too absurd.

I think pragmatism is something that, essentially when you're a freelancer, you have to live by your wits. You don't have the luxury of being able to take a hard and fast position. You have to be flexible in your positioning.

I think arts research in general can be—part of it's power is being able be ambivalent about things and be a bit ambiguous and not be fixed in its contribution to knowledge, to be able to advocate and ridicule at the same time.

Being able to bring some of what we know to influence that which is actually happening, that is on the table and in the room. So yeah, I think pragmatism is at the heart of being a good idealist, really.

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Adam Calo: [00:40:23] You might be of the conception that art has the ability to shift environmental decision-making in ways that the natural sciences can’t accomplish.

Could you give an example, maybe a historical or a famous example where an artist exhibition or piece or movement shapes some kind of environmental decision-making or change in a profound way?

Ewan Allinson: [00:40:46] There are examples over since the 1960s, when the arts took an environment turn individual arts interventions, such as Agnes Denes Wheat Field in Manhattan, where she on an abandoned landfill lot, just a couple of blocks from the old World Trade Center …

She brought in 200 truckloads of earth and planted a wheat field and harvested it and developed an exhibition on the back of that, around the relationship of space to nature and farming and food.

There's the work of Alan Sonfist, in New York as well, a piece called Time Landscape in which he kind of reclaimed a plot of land in downtown Manhattan.

And he reclaimed it to the original vegetation that would have existed before New York itself was established. There are these things that, that just, capture people's imagination, but I think historically, it's difficult to come up with a better example than the romantic era of artists, particularly, in the Lake District. The poetry of Wordsworth and Coleridge and Southey and the paintings of John Glover and other picturesque artists.

In framing landscapes that had actually been overlooked in the national imagination—in framing these landscapes as places of the beautiful and sublime and capturing this beauty and sublimity in works of poetry and works of painting. They radically shifted the national imagination around these types of landscapes as places to go and experience for the sake of experience. So, Wordsworth writes his, as well as creating these amazing poems that we all love and know. And I should, I should say at this point that I grew up on the shores of Lake Ullswater on the other side of the Lake, from Wordsworth’s daffodils. One of his favorite views was from just above my house.

Of course, he translated this valuing of nature, this value is valuing that he and his comrades were generating. He translated this into his Guide to the Lakes and really drove this idea of these places as places to visit and to develop your own being through these experiences.

This led directly into the creation of national parks and areas of outstanding natural beauty—the operative word there, even if that no longer guides decision-making in quite the way it did—the operative word there is beauty. This valuing of these landscapes from that artistic point of view, has given us the phenomenon of landscape tourism. It’s a direct consequence of that art movement.

The interesting thing is, in this year of lockdown, this thirst for experience of those kinds of landscapes with that kind of experience, that was framed by those artists is still a kind of radical need for that people feel. The Lake district is I can tell you, is bracing itself as at the Highlands, is bracing itself for a huge surge of people going to those landscapes for those experiences.

Adam Calo: [00:44:42] I'm no art historian, when you talked about those landscape paintings and, poetry describing landscapes about identifying values of beauty, it gets back to this really important concept that value is something that's socially assigned. Because when I think of landscape paintings in the US it was, yes painting invoking this idea of beauty, but also invoking this value of emptiness.

And so that was also kind of involved in a dark legacy of imagining the beautiful places of the West as devoid of people, which in fact, there were people that were living there, indigenous peoples and in what ways does, does can the creation of value end up, always, it's always going to be someone's vision of value, right?

Ewan Allinson: [00:45:28] Yeah, definitely. Scotland celebrates the legacy of John Muir, but his own views about the American wildernesses were very regressive from that point of view weren’t they? He didn't have anything good to say about indigenous peoples.

Of course, these so-called wild and empty landscapes that were being portrayed were themselves actually the results of management for millennia. It's just that, that wasn't conveyed.

By the same token, there's a certain failure within the UK, to be properly respectful of the contribution that farmers and crofters make to the flourishing of nature and the landscape. They are beaten and typecast as these enemies of biodiversity, when nothing further could be from the truth.

A lot of the species that we value the curlews and the lapwings and so on. They choose farm landscapes. They're in a relationship with farming that is a positive relationship. To the extent that there has been damages come about as a result of farming, invariably, it's a result of farmers responding to the policy, particularly the post-war policy of intensification of agriculture, which has led to biodiversity losses. The farms themselves are not the culprits. They're simply enacting what they've historically been told to deliver.

Adam Calo: [00:47:07] I guess the demonstrates the power of … if artists' representations instill a consciousness of what a landscape is and ought to be, then making sure that that vision is representative is of crucial importance because the landscape decisions will certain follow those sense of values.

Ewan Allinson: [00:47:28] I think artists, are sometimes guilty of under underestimating their own power to shape the narrative and also, for that shaping and for that influence to serve interests that, are perhaps at odds with where the artists own instincts lay.

I'm thinking here about the role of artists within gentrification actually. This has become a phenomenon. And I know this first hand through putting on shows over the years as part of the Edinburgh festival. You have these very sophisticated gentrification processes. There'll be people who are interested in deploying the arts for these purposes. The arts always seem innocent, and this is part of their power and yet they can be part of a process that is not innocent at all.

Adam Calo: [00:48:26] I mean, to be honest, I feel like art is more criticized than science in terms of being involved in processes of delivering goods to the powerful. Science usually hides as something that's purely objective or a veneer of objectivity. Where arts are frequently criticized for being Oh, just for consumption for elites or, you know, irrelevant or, or to facilitate gentrification, as you said.

Ewan Allinson: [00:48:51] It's a dilemma that, that each individual artist wrestles with on their own terms, I suppose. I, as a sculptor, it tends to be wealthy people who can afford to buy my sculptures. That being the case, I cross subsidize, not that I earn much at all, but, I use those earnings to help support the work I do, or from a justice point of view in pushing for change.

So that's the way I reconciled myself to that.

Adam Calo: [00:49:24] I wanted to talk a little bit about the film that you just produced as part of the, AHRC research project, “Art is Not an Island.” Everyone should watch the film.

I really enjoyed it. I really enjoyed seeing the Highlands and Islands in winter. I thought that was kind of a key element. It seemed like the key argument of the film, if there was one, at least that I always trained to see things for in terms of arguments, maybe that's the wrong way of looking at it, was that this problem from the eyes of government and many others about a “de-peopled” Northwest of Scotland. That artists had a key role in not only rep-peopling those places, but bringing back a dignified existence in a strong sense of place. How do you read my take on, on the film and, and can you try and make, maybe make that argument in your own words?

Ewan Allinson: [00:50:13] I was conscious in pitching for the film, this idea that within the re-peopling agenda policymakers were somewhat missing a facet of it, which was , the contribution of artists and makers to it, and how to understand that and how to be cognizant of that in developing policies for re-peopling to support the presence of artists within a community is itself. Very often a point of pride for communities that an artist should want to come and celebrate that place. And in turn this contributes to a sense of confidence and of self-valuing, both in terms of the community of the place, which can have very strong implications for decision-making , and this was part of the point of the film. It's not all about community buyouts, but it can contribute to the confidence that will lead to the community buy-outs.

So, this dynamic that is introduced, when an artist living in amongst people celebrate not only that places, landscape, but that people's culture and that people's heritage, that makes a substantial difference in terms of local empowerment within decision-making processes.

Art itself was, during the 20th century, somewhat responsible for making itself an “island” for making itself this discrete world of value and meaning and emancipation. And in a way we need to go back—and this is how a lot of artists are engaging in this idea of art—as simply being part of the everyday life of not being something for elites.

Of course, you look into Highland culture and of course, art has always been part and parcel of, particularly music, but poetry too, has always been part and parcel of daily life. So it's not an alien concept to have the arts as a key generator of values in terms of place.

Adam Calo: [00:52:43] One of the scenes in the film is an art and community center, Taigh-Chearsabhagh on North Uist. The sense was from the film that the investment in that infrastructure a number of years ago has led to this tangible flourishing of the artist community and a sense of place.

I guess let's say that more investment continues to be made in a similar fashion. Explain to me, like I'm a run-of-the -mill environmental scientist, how would that then improve kind of landscape decision-making of import to me, further down the line?

Ewan Allinson: [00:53:16] What it helps to do is, create a community of interest in these issues. The existence of that infrastructure can become a rallying point for engaging with communities around some of the issues that you as an environmental scientist might want to be aired. Without that center there, you would be, perhaps, at a loss as to where to start to begin on that process of community engagement.

Through its artistic vibrancy, is a port of call for engaging with communities on their own terms because they themselves are the ones that shaped the narrative around what it is that the center exists for. And I think that's the key to its success.

It was very much a bottom-up enterprise. I think that's what shows through in the film.

Adam Calo: [00:54:14] The flip side is, if I was actually tasked with doing some kind of environmental assessment and making recommendations about what should change or what kind of land use should be used—and there wasn't that sense of place, then I would be able to accomplish that job, accomplish that task, but miss out on that local knowledge or miss out on any kind of counter agenda that might come from local people in the absence of that public sense.

Ewan Allinson: [00:54:42] Yeah. And that would make your job easier because the recommendations that would come would flow from your methodologies and your framing. But from a pure value for money point of view, the auctions that would flow from those recommendations that had had been developed in isolation would not have the local purchase that they would need to really deliver to the particulars of that place and that community, which is again … I think the value for money argument is quite good.

One to latch onto actually. This is ultimately a value for money issue. If you're spending the money, then you want to make sure there is a real purchase of those actions and interventions that work at that local level.

And they're not going to work if you haven't actually got through to what the sense of place is and to what makes that place tick. In insisting that these horizons that artists are very at home with, and comfortable with these complexities that become a second nature to artists, these nuances, they are absolutely essential for making sure that the money spent actually delivers down the line.

Adam Calo: [00:56:12] I work in sustainable food systems research, and a lot of my work has been spending time with new and beginning farmers or second career farmers who are going out into these rural spaces that are dominated by conventional agriculture, but are doing things radically different. They're bringing, different types of agricultural practices.

They're tapping in different markets. They have a different vision about what food production is for and who it should be for. And one of the critiques that I always get, in this research or presenting about it is, well these are just people who are hobbyists. They made their money in tech and now they're—even if this is inaccurate—and then they come out to this countryside because they have mobility, they have agency do to do this.

I wonder, can you address that same kind of critique in terms of artists going into these spaces, especially in the Highlands and Islands, are they going to be truly transformative or are they just moving there because they can and they already have the mobility to do so?

Ewan Allinson: [00:57:12] For the most part, I think most of the artists that appeared in the film, I don't think they can be typecast in that way. Yes, they may have mobility, but very often they're not sitting on nest eggs. It is not that they're not people who've made money in one field and then are living the dream, as it were. It's interesting. Hill farmers and crofters, there's a lot in common with artists actually is that they tend to survive on an income below £20,000 and they do it because they have to do it.

A couple of years ago, I went to the Oxford Real Farming Conference where, there was a couple of slightly more hard-bitten, shall we say, farmers of my ken from Teasdale came down to it.

And it's an interesting kind of chasm opens up between your, shall we refer to them as hardcore farmers, whose parents and grandparents farmed and these, ingénue or new farmers who are doing it from a different point of view. And hopefully over time, the two can begin to see eye-to-eye.

The real threat to these communities is people coming in and buying second homes or buying properties and turning them into holiday homes. And again, you mentioned that filming in winter, that was very much the gist of it, doing it in winter was to show these places, not as idols, but as places that are actually quite bleak, quite elemental, quite trying, not necessarily romantic, but nonetheless sources of inspiration for artists and that's what's driving artists there.

And interestingly, what's also driving artists there is the desire for low impact lives. Not to, be living in a consumer society, but to be living in the community and contributing to that community. My sense is that anything that contributes to the longevity and resilience of crofting communities is welcomed.

So I think, I think there's a welcome in the Hills and the Islands for the most part.

Adam Calo: [00:59:38] Let's say that I'm convinced that an artistic engagement, in issues of landscape decision-making is absolutely crucial. How do you actually make this interdisciplinary transdisciplinary framework function? One of the things that I saw from one of the feedbacks of your Hefted on the Hill exhibit, which was presented in a number of local churches to where the project was done was there was a farmer visiting from Scotland

and they said that they thought the exhibit was really well done, that it, they saw the same issues where they were from. And they said,

“the exhibition is wonderful and admirable, but it feels marginalized. I mean, only seen by those who have already had an interest in these issues … preaching to the converted. This isn't a criticism. I have experienced the same thing.”

And my sense, and other feedback was that, where were they people in power to actually come in and watch these exhibits? How do you actually take the value of some of these artistic endeavors and engage them landscape science and make them into meaningful new knowledge production and emancipatory decision-making pathways?

Ewan Allinson: [01:00:44] Good question. Actually, this advocacy process does begin in those same areas where those hill-farmers are operating because within these same areas, you do have a lot of incomers who, okay, they pass tractors on the road and they see farmers in the shop, but they don't the first thing about what that work entails, what it's for.

In a way there was the first act of advocacy is at that local level to get local people to value what it is that the farmers are crofters are doing in their midst.

The answer to the second one was well, on the strength of the exhibition, I was invited into the Uplands Alliance which is a kind of confederacy of lobby groups who have a close relationship to DEFRA.

The purpose of that was really to open up a cultural front within that lobbying process, whereby some of these issues around values and overlooked knowledge and so on. I am able to keep that front and center of the discussion at that national level. In a way that's what doing an impactful exhibition that resonated very well locally can do.

And on the strength of that valuing thought, it kind of empowered me and the broader project Northern heartlands to become involved discussions around policy-making.

Adam Calo: [01:02:33] I want to challenge you, Ewan, you said that it allowed you to open up a cultural front. What might you think of it being more like cultural stamp in which, you know, the artist in residence is you, which is a safe space to put the artist, carefully at the side of decision makers so that they can point to you over there and then continue to do what they do?

Ewan Allinson: [01:02:53] Yes, but that's where I, as an awkward customer, I suppose,

I'm able to reject being co-opted in, in that way. Cause I wouldn't permit that to happen. I think the point you make is a highly pertinent one. And many NGOs over the last 10 years have become tarnished, haven't they? With seeming to have legitimized actions and policies, through being within that decision making process that are actually contrary to their supposedly to their values and so on. That's definitely a tight rope that one needs as an artist to be very conscious of. To never let up in being awkward and being dangerous and calling things out. Well, one will be judged in due course as well.

Adam Calo: [01:03:54] It sounds like the theory of change that you are suggesting is one in which the artist engagement provides an element of community sense of place, community values that are inaccessible to the social and biophysical sciences, but then the individuals involved in those projects can become at the table of power in terms of being able to represent interests and block certain ideas that may go run counter to those interests.

Is that kind of the theory of change that you're suggesting with some of these large projects that involve our transdisciplinary in terms of the arts with the other sciences?

Ewan Allinson: [01:04:34] I think what I'm saying and what, what “AALERT” is advocating is that, yes, that theory of change and living change, more profoundly, requires that artistic input. Living in an era of change, there's this element of improvisation, I think, which is a key attribute of artistic practice.

Artists have this expertise, for improvisation. It's part and parcel of that, particularly as freelancers, is part and parcel of your practice. And we're living in an era where society as a whole is going to need to learn to improvise and adapt. Artistic approaches to improvisation and adaptation and being able to be coherent and know where you're heading as things are changing around you is, an attribute, I think that art, the arts, having quantity and

can contribute therefore to—as societies themselves learn to adapt to profound environmental change. So those values within the arts, that maybe don't resonate with ideas of the status quo, which is all about fixed positions and hierarchies. Those are going to find a bigger place within society and systems.

Adam Calo: [01:06:09] Are there projects that are ongoing that really demonstrate the power or at least demonstrate promise to show the power of artists engagement in these areas of environmental uncertainty and change?

Ewan Allinson: [01:06:20] AALERT itself—

Adam Calo: [01:06:22] That's a project that's called Arts and Artists in Landscape and Environmental Research today? That's why it has AALERT as its title.

Ewan Allinson: [01:06:28] Yes. Its latest incarnation in terms of the landscape decision program includes the “4DM” as in for decision-making. I think it is a decisive contribution to opening eyes amongst disciplines who maybe didn't realize that they needed that artistic input.

Making them realize just how much artists can contribute to a productive framing of the work of natural scientists and social scientists in ways that can be liberating.

Turning their gaze on the environment and on environmental change, I think AALERT itself is, is contributing to a seismic shift in the narrative.

Last week, we had a superb scoping workshop, that heard from international artists doing amazing things across the globe with policy makers and decision makers, very often about, and this is, again, about how artists can reframe the narrative.

So David Haley was talking about his work in, I think it was in Taiwan, about graceful adaptations to sea level rises. It's thinking about the framing of the era of environmental change and environmental crisis that we're going into. How do we frame it in a way that is not just about it being a hard technical issue, but actually ultimately it being issue of the imagination, that will help generate the solutions and the adaptations that will be liberating for the sciences themselves? It's waking the disciplines up to just how much artists and the arts can contribute, to the framing in particular, the imaginative framing of the efforts that the science is going to put itself to.

Adam Calo: [01:08:38] I guess that's another thing that I'm hearing from you about the true theory of change here is getting scientists asked the right questions and to use the right methods in order to get at the complexity that the problems they're studying deserve.

Ewan Allinson: [01:08:51] Yeah, definitely. If we go back to ecosystem services, that's not necessarily the language of science, that's the language of neoclassical economics, which science has formed a Faustian pact with, I suppose, to build its currency. But I really think we need to be thinking about the language we use as well and services really isn't it.

Ultimately, as I say, I'm happy to work with people who are using that language and to even contribute to discussions that use that language, but that let it be known, I have huge issues with thinking about that as a service and we really need to be talking about relationships, that we have relationships with nature. Not that nature serves as in these various ways.

Adam Calo: [01:09:39] Thank you, Ewan this has been really illuminating and I think you represented the arts well.

Ewan Allinson: [01:09:43] Thank you. I do my best.

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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

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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.

Links to items mentioned in the episode * 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.

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Landscapes - The Dasgupta Review - [Janet Fisher] Transcript [ep.3]

*The transcript has been lightly edited for clarity and comprehension

Introduction

Adam Calo: [00:00:27] Researchers in the environmental sciences spend a lot of effort evaluating the diversity of frameworks that guide land use management.

Consider on the one hand making some change to the land based on a deep multi-generational local ecological knowledge, where wisdom passed on through narratives and myths instill a common sense about how to manage a local watershed for certain desired outcomes.

Compare this to the rise of computational and geospatial modelling software that predict environmental outcomes based on available data and guide land managers what actions to take, like what crops to plant and where, sometimes even integrated into modern industrial farm vehicles.

What academic preoccupations over such varying approaches tend to overlook, is the relative power different frameworks enjoy throughout history and across geographies.

I’d argue that big dog on the block when it comes to decision-making frameworks is encapsulated by the concepts of ecosystem services and natural capital.

In this worldview the pathway to conserving biodiversity and addressing environmental crises is done by translating the evidence from ecology, a science about the relations between organisms, into the language of economics.

Where a conventional approach to environmental conservation uses knowledge about how the biosphere functions in order to best protect it from irreversible destruction, the ecosystem services framework takes an addition step to understand how human endeavors are directly supported by ecological processes.

The new thinking offered by this paradigm is that properly valuing the complex ecological relationships that underpin human progress should reconfigure the types of economic activities that build wealth through rampant resource degradation.

“The pollination of bees is free, but no bee ever sent you an invoice." – notes Pavan Sukhdev, former head of World Wildlife International and a leading proponent of the ecosystem services and natural capital framework.

I thought it would timely to reflect on the rise to dominance of this conservation worldview, given the recent publication of the Dasgupta Review, an independent, global report on the Economics of Biodiversity commissioned by the UK Treasury and authored by leading environmental economist Sir Partha Dasgupta.

The review, in my opinion was widely applauded by the mainstream press and by conservation organisations claiming it provided an urgent call to use the power of economics to get serious about a green growth agenda.

But the publication of the report also revealed an acrimonious controversy between those who may embrace the logic of natural capital as the best, if imperfect, hope to motivate the business leaders who have real power to shape the environment and those who feel uneasy about ceding the terrain of environmentalism to the discipline of economics

Highlighting the tenor of this debate, George Monbiot, prominent environmental journalist, wrote:

“What Sir Partha Dasgupta promotes is a kind of totalitarian capitalism: everything must now be commodified and brought within the system. It extends the capitalist revolution even into our relations with the living world.We cannot defend nature through the mindset that’s destroying it. The notion that it exists to serve us and that its value consists of the instrumental benefits we can extract has proved lethal to life on Earth.”

As much as this episode will discuss the review in more detail, what I really want to accomplish is to use the report as a jumping off point into understanding how the ecosystem services concept works, how it has ascended to near universal adoption and what that means for scholars trying to think about new ways of landscape decision making.

To do this I needed a guide, someone who has studied the ecosystem services framework both directly as a policy intervention but also as a general theory of conservation philosophy found within high impact conservation non-profits.

Joining the podcast is Dr. Janet Fisher, an environmental social scientist, and a senior lecturer in the school of geosciences at the university of Edinburgh.

One of the high-level messages the authors of the Dasgupta report put forth is:

that to save the planet we need a new grammar to understand how our economic activities interact with ecological systems. What I think our conversation in this episode asks is: If indeed a certain grammar about how humans relate to the environment becomes dominant, how does that shape the possibilities for environmental action going forward?

Here’s Janet Fisher

The Interview

Adam Calo: February, 2021, the Dasgupta Review is published. It's an independent global review on the economics of biodiversity commissioned by the UK's Treasury department. What the treasury department does is they tapped Sir Partha Dasgupta, who's an Emeritus faculty of economics at Cambridge to lead this review.

And I think it's a really interesting report. It was kind of controversial as these elements often are, and I thought you could be a really good guide in helping me and other listeners understand, , what's at stake and what's going on underneath the hood of this, this report.

Janet Fisher: [00:05:23] Great, yeah. I followed the coverage with interest as well. And I'm delighted to try and help you unpack that. There's a, there's a lot really in this, in terms of the ideas it draws on.

Adam Calo: [00:05:33] I should say that it a 600-page document and I've done my best to read, , as much as I can, but also a lot of commentary about it to try and understand what's going on underneath it. It's a really good diving board to kind of think about the broader ideology of frameworks to address environmental problems. And, and this one in particular, is through this lens of an economics approach to biodiversity.

Janet Fisher: [00:05:58] Yeah, I think that's right. It's kind of unashamedly using the language of economics and frameworks from conventional economics, although it's seeking to adapt them, I think.

Adam Calo: [00:06:09] What is this kind of report that the United Kingdom does when, , a government body taps an individual to produce a report that ends up getting a name on it and something that seems kind of unique to the UK.

Janet Fisher: [00:06:19] Yeah, it's interesting to hear you say that as, somebody from, the US. I mean, to be honest, I'd never thought about it, but you're right. That, there is a kind of political culture here, I think, in the UK of, putting a kind of authoritative name on a report. And I guess that intends to give it a weight and, and really authority in terms of how it's read and understood and assimilated into public life in some way.

Adam Calo: [00:06:47] So it's the treasury, it's not like they're going to tap an environmental social scientist to write the report for them. Instead they end up going with Sir, Partha Dasgupta. Do much about his academic background?

Janet Fisher: [00:07:00] I mean, he's an enormously decorated individual. I was having a look at his CV and, , he's held academic positions at very high profile institutions in the UK and the US. So LSE and Cambridge and many very high profile universities in the US where he's had visiting positions.

He's had a number of, what would you call them honors, in, in recognition of his contribution to different kind of articulations, I guess, of economic disciplines and he seems to started out, in development economics, but maybe increasingly engage with, environmental and natural resource economics, as well, as that grew up as a discipline, maybe through the eighties, nineties. And evidently, he was chosen as an authoritative figure, from that background in economics to try and translate, I guess, some of these ideas, around the application of economic thinking to the environment-- to diagnose some of the challenges we face and to bring on board … I guess it's desired to at some level, new constituencies in terms of corporate sector and, and government, to think differently about these issues.

Adam Calo: [00:08:18] I find interesting about his background from what I could read was his role in developing the field of Ecological Economics in particular. Because, just from my understanding of the field it’s incredibly divided in terms of where and how to use the tools of economics to understand the world.

And I think he kind of, comes down somewhere, perhaps in the middle—someone who is trying to use the tools of existing tools in neoclassical economics, but apply them to the new problems that environmental breakdown is presenting rather than trying to develop new tools.

Janet Fisher: [00:08:50] Yeah, I'd agree with that. I mean, I think I find the distinction between environmental economics and ecological economics quite a useful one to think about. And it's complicated and to some extent it's contested. But my understanding of it at least is that environmental economists tend to use relatively mainstream concepts of neoclassical economics and apply them to environmental questions.

Whereas ecological economists may be start with slightly different premises that the human economy needs to exist within limits that are imposed by living on a finite planet. Ecological economics, I think has slightly different kind of premises. And I was really trying to understand the background of Dasgupta in relation to this sort of dichotomy of environmental and ecological economics.

And I saw some slightly, maybe more critical coverage of the report from people who would identify, I think more as ecological economists. I think that's right, because as you've said, really, he's arguing that, we need to adapt some of the mainstream tools of neoclassical economics and environmental economics to face, I guess, new scarcities and new challenges that we face as a global society.

And I, interestingly, I think in the early stages of the report he makes a point though. I think maybe I'd never thought explicitly about that, , through the development of these neoclassical methods for economics it was reasonable to kind of approximate the idea that environmental limits weren't that pertinent to most, analyses, maybe in the 19th and 20th century, early parts at least of the 20th century. So, these methods grew up in a kind of atmosphere of abundance, I guess, where there were maybe more pressing issues that were motivating economists in terms of the development of their methods.

And then we're left in the second half of the 20th century in the 21st century, increasingly seeing problems of scarcity and over consumption that that has serious problems for the future of continuation of business as usual in society, as we know it. And so, he's arguing, I think that we need to adapt these methods.

He's not trying to bend them all and start completely from scratch, but he's arguing that we need to adapt these methods. But I suppose having his depth of perspective on the discipline of economics is, is useful to make those kinds of reflections.

this is obviously also a man who was born in 1942, right? So, he's seen the development of, of these disciplines through his own lifetime.

Adam Calo: [00:11:42] I'd like to get into a little bit about the feel of the report. This was the quote that got repeated a lot. And it's from the very beginning and introduction:

“We're all asset managers. Whether as farmers or fishermen, hunters, or gatherers foresters, or miners, households, or companies, governments, or communities, we manage the assets, we have access to in line with our motivations, as best as we can. This review pays close attention to a class of assets we call nature and studies it in relation to the many other assets in our portfolios.”

And this was the main quote that drew a lot of attention and it was something that kind of divided the people at my work at the James Hutton Institute, , in half, whether or not this was a good idea or a dangerous idea.

How do you feel about this kind of central analogy being pressed as one of the top line messages of the report?

Janet Fisher: [00:12:29] I see this idea of asset managers come up in slightly different ways in different iterations of this report. So, I think in the abridged version or the headline messages, it talks about, asset managers, more framed in terms of the decision-makers in corporations and government. Whereas the quote you identify, it explicitly references farmers, fishers, hunters and gatherers and, and, , people maybe further up the power ladder, as decision-makers, and it's a kind of interesting universalizing language, right?

We are, we are all asset managers. To be honest. I haven't seen myself personally as an asset manager, particularly. It raises a lot of questions I think for me. I think that universalizing language, tends to maybe de-politicize the idea that, societies globally and nationally are very unequal.

One of the manifestations of that is that some people have a lot of power to determine these sorts of questions that the review focuses on and others have very little power. So saying that we're all the same and we're all trying to achieve the same outcome in terms of good, sound asset management maybe denies the differences between us and the way that, exploitative systems have developed and, , characterize really environmental management and particularly, the management of commerce and extraction of resources.

I think it's also a very financialised language, right? And it's using this metaphor of an asset, to speak into the sort of language, I guess, that is deemed to be powerful in decision-making around these questions. In line with the whole motivation for the review, I think it's trying to bring in these ideas around natural capital and financialization and economics to our analysis of environmental problems. And so that quite striking quote that you talked about, I think is all part of that project of a language of very much economics based and financialization based as well.

Adam Calo: [00:14:50] So this is a great segue because I think what we really want to talk about is how this report is representative of a much larger movement in conservation philosophy, which revolves around the idea of ecosystem services and natural capital. And using that as a frame to influence decision makers and make change in how we consume resources and interact with the environment.

And you are someone who studied this in from a really interesting perspective.

Description of ES and Critiques

And so to start off, from your perspective, maybe you could try and help describe what are the natural capital and ecosystem services frameworks, and where did they come from?

Janet Fisher: [00:15:30] I can certainly have a go at that. I used to run a master's program, at Edinburgh in ecosystem services. So, I understand the origin of ecosystem services terminology in the late 1970s and maybe early eighties.

So key figures in this were, Westman and Paul Ehrlich whose work is attributed quite widely, actually in the Dasgupta report—

Adam Calo: [00:15:57] And also one of the people who submitted a praise in the introduction.

Janet Fisher: [00:16:02] Yeah, that's right. There's a quote from, Westman in 1977 in a paper, from Science I think it was, that talks about ecosystem services, I think for the first time. And it talks about society kind of inexorably heading in a certain direction. I mean, maybe I should just pick that quote out.

So Westman writes in, in 1977:

"In the quest to rationalize the activities of civilization, policymakers in Western societies have increasingly asked the monetary value of items and qualities formerly regarded as priceless. "

And the paper is entitled, "How Much Are Nature's Services Worth?" So, in a way I see this is one of the early formulations of this idea of services.

And the field of ecosystem services as a subdiscipline, and to some extent, it's like what people have called a boundary object. So this is an idea that lots of disciplines feel that they can speak to some element of. And I think in that sense, it's potentially quite powerful as a sort of interdisciplinary boundary object-

Adam Calo: [00:17:06] Also you have Gretchen Daily at Stanford, who was a student of Paul Ehrlich's and they often published together. Paul Ehrlich being famous for a lot of work, but perhaps the most notably for the book, "The Population Bomb.”

And then you have around the same time of Gretchen Daily explicating on ecosystem services, the Costanza et al. paper, which, attempted to value the world's ecosystem services. And, in doing so said, it's worth just a lot more than the total world's global GDP. And what you said, just there about it being a powerful boundary object that Costanza and Daily dialectic is kind of the environment economists and the environmental scientists coming together around this concept.

Janet Fisher: [00:17:51] Yeah. So someone said to me, I think as I was starting my PhD, that they thought this was a really powerful concept for ecologists and economists to get into the same room and start talking the same language. And in a way like the Dasgupta report is a manifestation of that, however long 40, 50 years down the line.

So, I think it's useful to think about ecosystem services as fundamentally both, utilitarian in the sense that it's focused on our use of nature. It's not talking about intrinsic value or ecocentric ideas. Substantively it's really focused on usage at some level.

And it's very anthropocentric, right? And, and that's evident in the definition, right? The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, published in 2005, uses this quite open definition: “the benefits people obtain from ecosystems.” So it's a very anthropocentric set of ideas. The Dasgupta review is framed very much in those terms as well.

Adam Calo: [00:18:59] How do ecosystem services get described in the literature? What are they, not to go deeper of what are they … ?

Janet Fisher: [00:19:06] Sure. There are several frameworks that people use. I mean, one of the most foundation I think is from the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment and it categorizes services into four categories. There are supporting services, which underpin the production of other services. There are provisioning services.

So, these are kind of quite familiar things that I guess in many cases happen to be commodities. So things like fish and timber and fiber, or other non-timber forest products. There are regulating services. So these are the services that underpin effective functioning of agricultural systems or water filtration or natural floods management.

I guess these speak to some of the kind of healthy functioning of, systems that we rely on. And then there's this kind of unusual category … or a category that people tend to scratch their heads over more, which are cultural ecosystem services. So I guess these can be defined in different ways, but I guess it's the non-material aspects of nature that we all at some level derive some benefit from. So, access to green space might be very pertinent for urban Western societies. Spiritual value is very rooted in the natural world in many different cultures and religions and Dasgupta makes that point as well.

And, , sense of place. Cultural geographers, some have interacted with these ideas of cultural ecosystem services and got on board with it and try to kind of modify some of the ideas associated with it to further insights into how humans relate to the natural world at some level.

So that four-part framework of the Millennium Assessment, I think is foundational. And then in the UK, again, there was a commissioned report, the national ecosystem assessment, that was a kind of national level spinoff of the MEA, the millennium assessment that further refined the way that we think about ecosystem services and develop this what's called a cascade model.

It has the stages of development or production of ecosystem services. It has sort of inputs of manufactured capital that might help society draw down on ecosystem services and it further refined the types of benefits. So talking about health benefits, financial benefits, wellbeing, benefits, well, there's so much to say, but, I guess ecosystem services in the MEA at least the millennium assessment was, very much highlighted as, as foundational to human wellbeing. And, and there's a kind of quite an iconic figure from that report, which put ecosystem services on the left-hand and then talked about human wellbeing using conventional, I guess, understandings of human wellbeing in various different parts, inspired by, Amartya Sen's work, particularly thinking about capabilities and non-material aspects of wellbeing. Cutting edge at the time, this was published back in 2003, 2005.

Adam Calo: [00:22:34] I think one of the classic ways that I was taught ecosystem services was as a decision-making framework, right? So you have this coffee plantation, in Costa Rica, say, and the productive area of the of the landscape is the coffee plants, but you also have some natural habitat around. The coffee farmer wants to clear that natural habitat so that they can make more coffee. But then if you use the ecosystem services framework, you understand that the pollinators coming from that natural habitat are providing a service to the coffee beans that if that habitat was removed, the farmer would have to end up paying in terms of either having to pollinate, manually, or just in a reduction of productivity because of the pollinators not being there. And therefore, presenting that information to that coffee farmer, they decide not to deforest, right?

And there's kind of a monetary evaluation, but it's more of just, kind of a heuristic to understanding what values are at play within a particular landscape.

Janet Fisher: [00:23:38] Yeah, that's right. And, and I think like you have outlined in that example and we could think of others about watershed management in, in New York state—that’s another very classic example. The upstream management really determines what happens downstream in the catchment in terms of water quality. And in a way, I think one of the very central motivations of the ecosystem services framework is to put things on the agenda that may go unaccounted for.

And this is a strong narrative in the Dasgupta report as well: The idea that lots of environmental benefits are public goods effectively, and they get taken for granted and never accounted for in the decisions that that humans make. So this whole narrative is to sort of put these things more on the agenda by measuring them effectively and incorporating them into decision-making.

Yeah, ecosystem services. I'd say it's really a plural field.

And I think it's important to note that right back to the start of these ideas, you were talking about Ehrlich and Daily and Westman. There is this kind of assumption that we need to sort of use the language of economics to understand these issues. And some have plowed on fully with that. And then to some extent, I understand the origin of the natural capital term and the framework associated with natural capital accounting. I think in a way that's a manifestation of the work of those who've sought to build upon the valuation, like monetary valuation, orientations of the ecosystem service framework.

They've developed this into a suite of natural capital accounting tools and it's very much kind of oriented around assets and valuation methodologies and things. Other manifestations of, of ecosystem services worker are very heterogeneous. And I think, like I was saying, some cultural geographers have got on board with cultural ecosystem services and, and had a go at thinking about that and further to my understanding the, the contribution of, ideas of that nature.

There's interesting and kind of innovative methods around deliberative valuation as well, which don't necessarily use any kind of monetary metrics for understanding value in nature. And it's much more about, deliberative fora for decision-making around the environment and, and grounded in an ecosystem service framing.

So I like to see the plurality in ecosystem services ideas. I think in many ways it's probably been quite an academic preoccupation; it would be fair to say. And I think maybe one of the explanations for the natural capital framework is that it, maybe the language of it is more evidently targeted towards financiers, the corporate sector and maybe treasury departments of government. I think natural capital has one set of issues associated with it. I would say ecosystem services still has quite a plural atmosphere in terms of the type of work that's done. Some of it very much assimilates evaluation, monetary valuation ideas, and others, essentially kind of looks at quite holistic ideas of wellbeing rather than just financial or income based ones.

Break

Adam Calo: [00:27:07] In that example of the coffee farm, there is a clear valuation process because you have the price that you can get for a certain number of beans being produced and you have the number of beans that are pollinated and successfully become a sellable commodity, right?

So that's very clear, but then when you talk about valuation, you have to do some shadow pricing in a lot of these circumstances where if you're talking about a cultural landscape or an amenity value or something, the a beauty of a landscape, in order to actually get it into that frame. I can imagine it as a service in my head, just totally fine. There is no problem with that. But to actually get it into the kind of comparability, I might need to design some kind of survey that says, how much would you be willing to pay for a house if this lake was swimmable versus polluted, right?

And then work that into some of this cost. So valuation becomes a key element and area of research into evaluating all the different ecosystem services—the ones that are more prominent and kind of more hidden, and valuation is also an element that one of the main critiques falls upon.

Janet Fisher: [00:28:19] So if we think of your coffee example that the coffee is already a commodity, it has a market value, but the pollination services, typically have no marketable value in most societies.

So economists have kind of taken it upon themselves to try and provide some way of accounting for these things. They have developed a suite of tools for what you called sort of shadow pricing or a non-monetary or non-market valuation, I guess it's non-market more precisely. And so there's this whole suite of methods, I guess inspired by neoclassical economics that can be used to understand the, the value effectively, of a non-market resource.

And that's where a lot of =the energy is in things like the Dasgupta review. It's all part of a kind of rationalization of seeking to make visible the invisible, seeking to account for the unaccounted for. And, and I think you're right to say that it's this area that has, been contentious, I guess from various different perspectives about these sorts of initiatives, people who are highly critical of the idea that, if only we just put everything into financial and monetary terms, we'll solve all the problems of environmental degradation and under undermining of human wellbeing.

So yeah, there's a whole kind of lively and vigorous set of debates about the effectiveness of these methods of making the invisible kind of more visible in environmental decision-making.

Adam Calo: [00:30:15] Yeah. And I think one of the critics of evaluation is, if you're talking about valuation, value is something that is assigned societally right? And values are always contested. And when values are contested, it becomes about power relations. And thus who gets to decide what has value at what level?

Janet Fisher: [00:30:34] Yeah. I think that's a central concern of critics of these approaches that, if we put a price on these things then, ultimately, they will go to the agents or actors who can pay the most for them. And in a way that entrenches existing, social inequalities.

Adam Calo: [00:30:55] For example, if you look at that same coffee example, if the price of coffee goes down and it's more valuable to plant pineapple and you don't need that pollination service, then the farmers is going to destroy it ... the landscape.

Janet Fisher: [00:31:08] Yeah, that's an important concern with all of these things. If we stake out a case that nature provides these things to us that are kind of irreplaceable. And then we find a technological replacement effectively. Then we have completely undermined any other case that we might have made for nature.

And, and that's pretty troubling, particularly in climate terms, with prospects of various geoengineering strategies. If some massive technological advancement was made in that field, then overnight we could decimate the rationale we've been building up for the conservation of tropical rainforest is so important in regulating the carbon cycles.

Adam Calo: [00:31:56] One of the other arguments for the pro-column of the ecosystem services framework is that it is using the power, the demonstrable power, of market-based instruments. That markets have been the main tool to allocate value most equitably. And perhaps if you disagree with that, it's at least the language of power.

So it's a kind of strategic move to take environmental concerns away from an aspirational appeal to just protect or conserve and towards one to actually change the modes and the mechanisms of consumption and resource extraction.

Janet Fisher: [00:32:39] Yeah. I mean, I think there's been a current running through the framework, right from the very inception of it that is very motivated by this idea that, okay, we've already won over environmentalist's with ideas of intrinsic value and ecocentric imperatives. We now need to speak to broader constituencies- government business in particular, about the importance of these things for underpinning human life, ultimately.

How do we make the case more broadly than just the, environmentalist's?

Adam Calo: [00:33:13] Another big critique of the ecosystem services and then natural capital framework is, one of the core ideas of how capitalism functions is, it creates value where there was none by creating markets for things that were previously carried out through other exchange mechanisms. And then the capitalist imperative is to reduce the time or labor costs of the resource and then put it into circulation.

And that's how you get profit. To de-value labor in order to increase profit. For someone who is concerned about capitalism as a macro political economic system … that this just represents the further penetration of capital into places that it hasn't been. This is actually just incredibly, completely predictable in terms of how capitalist production works.

Janet Fisher: [00:33:58] Yeah. I mean, I strongly recognize that critique. And I think in a way it's a tussle between people who see themselves, maybe as pragmatically, promoting some of these ideas and those who call for just a completely different world order that is post-capitalist maybe, or doesn't rest so strongly on capitalist foundations.

And the tension between those two -- I, on different days I feel more like leaning in different directions. Sometimes I feel quite pragmatic and I think maybe some of these ideas have merit and, maybe it is important to have ideas of inclusive wealth in project planning at government level and account for these things that we have historically really ignored.

And other days I think, well, this isn't going to work and we need a completely different kind of foundation for an ecological and just society.

I think maybe one, useful insight, to some of these ideas is, that I believe it is different to undertake a valuation process where you are trying to account for different aspects of the natural world and show how they underpin different outcomes.

And there's a difference between doing that and promoting the commodification of the environment where you parcel bits up for sale and you might make new markets like the sort of things you were talking about. And we can see this in the carbon markets effectively. These are new-ish markets, 20, 30 years old at most.

There's a reinvigoration of energy around the carbon markets, I understand at the moment. There's been some recent kind of press coverage of this in the wake of the Dasgupta review and Mark Carney's role as a UN Special Envoy on climate and, and UK leadership of COP 26. These new commodities from the natural world and the financialization of these, in many ways, I find this very, very worrying, but I think is a different process to sort of parcel things up and commodify them then simply to account for them more fully, and show their importance in ways that have been ignored in the past.

One challenge I would maybe make to people who dismiss these ideas completely out of hand is to be a bit more careful about identifying exactly what is going on in these different processes. It's very difficult. It's very opaque a lot of the time, and it's a nuanced terminology that takes quite a while to kind of get to grips with.

But I think it doesn't make sense to me to equate quantification with valuation. They may be linked. Commodification might depend on valuation at some level, but they're not the same thing. And I think it is kind of disingenuous to equate them.

Adam Calo: [00:37:05] Right. And a lot of good work, looking at the empirics of some of these systems, even when they are kind of markets, maybe these payment for ecosystem services programs, they end up behaving not like a market and more like a direct subsidy. So, even though there might be some valuation of, for example, an upland farmers management practices and the way that influences downstream drinking water and you do some valuation, you're not necessarily just paying them for every management action they take. There's a general identification of different practices and then almost a redistribution of public money in order to accomplish those public outcomes, if you look at it in that way.

Janet Fisher: [00:37:44] Yeah. I mean, it's an interesting debate, I guess, focused around payment for ecosystem services as a kind of, market-based policy instrument, that although that's rationalized very much on a kind of neoclassical foundation of economics, it's a, what would you say, like a paradox or a quirk, that actually many of these systems aren't, that have been set up in practice.

Like, they don't bear a lot of likeness to a pure kind of market instrument. They're often state subsidies in some form or another.

Maybe because we're early stages with some of these ideas, some of the early foundations of the promise, the silver bullet of payment for ecosystem services have been kind of seen to be a bit naive, really. That these would be very self-sustaining, they wouldn't require any kind of form of government intervention in in these markets. And it would be willing buyers, willing, sellers exchanging and a more pure market-idealized form. And that's really not been the experience of these kind of mechanisms.

Adam Calo: [00:38:52] I think that's really interesting that there's something happening when you try to do all this work to create these new values. And it does take a lot of work in abstracting these processes of ecosystem services into a market. And then they need additional social attention to make them function as intended. I found this quote from Dempsey and Suarez, who wrote about the rather small impact of PES programs that act in that kind of full neo-liberal economic market way but in the end they said,

“To be clear, we do not suggest that neoliberal conservation is inert or benign because it is small. Rather we draw attention to how the relentless talk of selling nature to save it, although limited in the realm of actual accumulation, still has consequences, as it continues to reaffirm narrow anti-political explanations about biodiversity loss to reinforce neo liberal political rationalities among conservationists and to foreclose alternative and progressive possibilities."

So for them, they're saying, don't be so worried, like you said, about the total marketization of nature, even though these ideas are being expressed, like in something like the report. What they're concerned about is more of the type of thinking that closes down the possibilities for alternatives.

Janet Fisher: [00:40:09] I have a lot of sympathy with that idea. I think, in a way that the very prominence of the metaphor of economic value in nature is probably a lot more profound, particularly in the ascendancy it's had in recent decades. I think that those changes are probably much more profound than necessarily some of the limited policy approaches we see out there that are market oriented in their approach.

It seems like the metaphors that could be much further reaching if these ideas strongly dominate the way that we analyze problems in the environment and analyze environmental degradation. The sort of analysis that market instruments have a particular power to resolve environmental challenges. I think some of these metaphors, almost are responsible for the more profound changes in the way that these ideas are articulated in public life.

Janet's Work on Conservation Philosophies

Adam Calo: [00:41:10] Given the broad history of different conservation philosophies and then perhaps the recent rise to dominance of the ecosystem services and natural capital framework, how did that evolve and where where's the future going?

Janet Fisher: [00:41:30] Some of the research that I'm most excited to have done in the last few years has been looking at conservation philosophies and trying to characterize them and trying to identify the kind of key differences between them. With collaborators we've developed quite a kind of granular tool for identifying different ways of conservation thinking. This has been called the Future of Conservation Project. And it's a global survey that has something like 16,000 respondents of conservation professionals around the world. There's, important biases in that dataset, particularly it's quite Western oriented.

It has a very Anglophone bias, although we have different languages now represented in as options in the survey as well. But we were keen to identify debates and identify different positions within debates that were taking quite a lot of energy and momentum in the international conservation arena.

Some academics in 2012, published what they called a new conservation manifesto and it kicks around some of these ideas that we've been talking about, natural capital and economic metaphors for rationalizing conservation, and their publication of that manifesto set up a kind of quite acrimonious, in a way, debate between what I characterize as a bit more traditional approach to conservation: prioritization of ecocentric ideas in particular, some skepticism, I guess, of economic metaphors in environmental management—

Adam Calo: [00:43:17] Is this Peter Kareiva who was at the time the, the executive director of the Nature Conservancy?

Janet Fisher: [00:43:22] That's right. It was Kareiva and Marvier, published in 2012, that “agenda for new conservation.” That sparked a series of quite high-profile to-and-fro in the in the academic journals about the proper of conservation to some of these big ideas in the 21st century.

What Karieva and Marvier described as new conservation, very much assimilates I guess some of the philosophies of ecosystem services ideas that we were discussing. So very much a kind of anthropocentric case needs to be made for conservation. And again, they're very highly motivated, I think, that the proponents of that approach speak beyond the community of conservation and to speak to other sectors and build a constituency for conservation. It has other ideas embedded in it as well. This kind of new conservation, it's quite open-minded about non-native species. It's inclined to kind of be not so bothered, maybe, about protected areas or so-called wilderness areas.

It's more interested in interspersing benign environmental outcomes in multifunctional agricultural landscapes. So it's interested in interspersing slightly better conservation outcomes through broader landscapes, including agricultural landscapes and not so fixated, I guess, on protected areas as maybe some of the more traditional conservationists, tend to be.

The new conservation debates are the foundation for some work we later did to characterize these ideas and identify different positions on three dimensions of conservation thinking. And those three dimensions we generated from this data set of thousands of conservation practitioners around the world.

Partly inspired by some of this work with the Future of Conservation survey that people who've used that within the group that they're working with, they've written to us and said, this provoked some really interesting discussions in our team and made transparent the differences maybe we have in how we see these issues and gave us some kind of traction for talking about the differences.

And I'm interested in the idea that if you make transparent the different positions that people have in these kinds of debates, can you use that as a platform for a more productive deliberation about the future? And making the positions more transparent, can that give you a basis for working together to accept differences and come up with some kind of compromises and use deliberation in that way?

Adam Calo: [00:46:11] I think that actually provides a practical area of work and a piece of evidence against a homogenous framework for landscape decision-making perhaps the natural capital ecosystem services framework, where if there is space for multiple values to come to the fore to deliberate, then you can actually get at some of the core lock-ins that prevent decision-making in one direction and then open up alternative futures.

Janet Fisher: [00:46:36] I think the scope for deliberation to allow different views to be represented is really exciting. And to come up with new possibilities from a deliberated kind of basis, I think is going to be a productive area, given all the changes in land policy frameworks that we're kind of living through at the moment.

I think in a lot of payment ecosystem service programs, the monitoring is very, expert led and technocratic. And in a way that's disempowering for farmers or land managers, sorry, land managers or land stewards who are at the receiving end of this in terms of selling some kind of ecosystem service commodity.

Adam Calo: [00:47:23] It places the core responsibility of making valuation into the hands of experts, even deeper. And if I'm concerned about power relations, you can have kind of these tools of mapping, the InVest software, the types of geospatial science and modeling to describe, well, actually this is the value of what's happening on your plot of land.

And if you have these other types of knowledge, how does it compete?

Janet Fisher: [00:47:46] There's interesting work I've been aware of the last year or two, particularly Geoff Wells, someone I've collaborated with, has thought quite hard about different monitoring models in PES and what monitoring might be more accountable to those at the land interface of these, types of policies and how you promote strategies that give more power to those managing the land in terms of monitoring in what can be a very opaque process, for them in particular, because it's so opaque.

What I'm really interested in is there should be enough evidence now from where evaluation studies have been done, to ask the question, did this really change the orientation of decisions that were made as an outcome? And, I don't know of any work on that front. It could be an empirical question. Like, how far does evaluation process and monetary evaluation processes change people's decision-making?

Adam Calo: [00:48:47] One of the threads that I saw in this paper, but also in some of your other work is, so what if these—the conservationists, these academics, have different visions of what is the best way? And particularly, I'm thinking about this paper that you wrote with Katrina Brown: “Ecosystem services, concepts, and approaches and conservation: just a rhetorical tool?

What happens and, and why are conservationists, choosing these different types of allegiances, these different visions about either the best or the most moral or the most pragmatic approach ostensibly geared towards achieving outcomes in terms of environmental resilience.

Janet Fisher: [00:49:26] That just a rhetorical tool paper, that title came from an interview, where I was interested to investigate how large international conservation NGOs were adopting ideas around ecosystem services and how they interpreted their own adoption of these ideas.

And I think, like is born out in our earlier discussions, many people recognize the kind of plurality of possibilities that the ecosystem services framework offered a conservationist, but, definitely the kind of overriding motivation for adopting these ideas was one of broadening a constituency, speaking a language that was acceptable in other sectors around assets and capitals. And making the case for conservation in those kinds of economic terms.

By far the major motivation for conservationists in picking up these ideas was, this idea that it could lead to a very strongly improved conservation finance. So these are ways of generating sustainable market-based funds for achieving conservation outcomes.

Interestingly in that interview where the title came from, just a rhetorical tool, I was having an interesting discussion with one of my respondents about, well, It's almost like the person had sort of denied that this was really changing their practice. Although he was very high on expectations potentially about the possibilities it gave them in terms of new financial flows and new constituencies that they could speak to. He said, “well, it's just a rhetorical tool you know. At a fundamental level, we believe in a kind of ecocentric conservation, but this just allows us to speak to different constituencies. And, and it's almost like you're sort of dealing with those two things.

I guess, like Dempsey and Suarez, in this work I was trying to problematize the idea that you can strategically adopt these ideas without them really having more profound implications for your whole kind of raison d'etre as a conservation organization and your practices as well as the sort of policies that you're pursuing.

In a way that work speaks to a particular time, maybe when there was a particularly high expectation around finance generated by international PES. And then maybe that hasn't really been born out in reality. But we're seeing that again now with this Dasgupta review and all of the kind of contemporary policy processes that put a lot of emphasis on carbon and other ecosystem service markets to redress some of the challenges that are identified in the past around not accounting properly for these benefits from nature.

Adam Calo: [00:52:21] I mean, I think that's a really fascinating point. Some of the early scholars who wrote about ecosystem services have bemoaned that—it was always supposed to be a metaphor. How come, you're not supposed to actually go and measure this stuff! That's impossible.

It was supposed to be like, wake up, our economic system, if you view it through the ecosystem services thing, is going to destroy everything, not to actually try and fix it through markets. But clearly, there's a connection between the grammar that's used and then material changes.

And you mentioned this in that same paper, the funding landscape for researchers. I find it in my own work too, if I'm starting to describe something… Yeah, maybe I'll throw in ecosystem services in there, when I'm really talking about something else and that you see kind of a shift, a rhetorical shift towards framing the entire work of research into social environmental factors, social environmental change, agrarian change, political and social questions, into the framework of natural capital in order to get to get that funding.

Janet Fisher: [00:53:25] Yeah. Speaking from experience of applying for lots of grants through the years, I'm not above trying to make strategic arguments and use in vogue concepts to try and highlight the importance of some work I'm trying to do. We have to hold our hands up, I think, and have some sympathy with conservation organizations who are sometimes adopting some of these ideas quite strategically without necessarily recognizing the more profound implications it might have for what they're doing.

Adam Calo: [00:53:56] Some of the biggest detractors of the ecosystem services concept like you said, they tend to focus on payment ecosystem services. I'm thinking about Bram Bücsher in particular, and coauthor Robert Fletcher who write consistently from an antagonist point of view.

From an example of a paper that they wrote, which is entitled The PES conceit:

“We need to move away from market-based instruments, even poorly functioning ones altogether and instead pursue forms of environmental management that promote cooperation and that in turn are guided by the logic of gift, reciprocity and affect and that celebrate the joyful and life-affirming aspects of conservation care labor. “

So they kind of are trying to present an alternative to that traditional conservation and the new conservationists, saying both are misguided, but what, what would you say to them?

What is the future of PES? Is there a defense of perhaps a simplified PES that can accomplish objectives?

Janet Fisher: [00:54:56] Yeah. I mean, in a way I think their critique goes to the two ,stereotype maybe, futures that I wrestle with, whether to pragmatically try and, alter the system we inhabit to have better outcomes for society and environment or to envisage a completely different set of possibilities.

I see a lot of potential in some aspects of the ecosystem services framework for thinking very clearly about, links to human wellbeing. To be honest, I'm relatively skeptical of payment for ecosystem services instruments in achieving maybe all the early protagonists thought they could. I think market instruments are fundamentally limited in terms of the achievement of social equity and I think a lot of the research on PES shows that. It does also concern me that the way these metaphors and the intrusion of kind of a market-oriented language into the environmental sector. That does trouble me.

I guess I have sometimes taken the view, that payment for ecosystem services tools … they're out there and they're being used and many of my have, have really, I think, taken the view that if these things are going to happen beyond our control, largely, as researchers, are there ways of mitigating some of their kind of worst outcomes? Are there ways of developing approaches to this sort of policy mechanism that can promote slightly better outcomes in terms of social equity?

I mean, that's the key one for me. I've seen the very real kind of inequitable outcomes of some of these mechanisms, particularly in terms of their manifestation in parts of the global South. If you see that really, it's only a kind of local, wealthy elite, that are making much form these programs and some people potentially stand to get dispossessed because of land consolidation that's partly related to a PES program, then I think we did need to look with a very careful lens about what these sorts of instruments, imply.

We can't use the argument that any transfer of funds to the global South is by definition good. If it's promoting inequity locally, then to my mind, it's problematic. So, I'm interested in debates about how PES could be better, given that they probably are going to keep persisting, particularly with the sort of traction that the Dasgupta report gives some of these policy ideas.

Adam Calo: [00:57:54] I can bang my fist on the table and point out kind of a Marxian critique of how these things abstract value, how they kind of ignore the root causes of the problem. But then, it's like, this report is sponsored by the UK government. If you look at the new Environmental Land Management scheme that is supposed to replace the Common Agricultural Policy post-Brexit, it's following this logic of payment for farmers, right? You have kind of general acceptance that this is the way forward.

Do you decide to be someone like Dasgupta and be kind of an environmental economist to try and use the tools that you have? To try and bring in those externalities into the market, into consideration? Do you maybe, perhaps like what you're saying, become an environmental pragmatist and ask how can I achieve equity and well-being within these tools that are being put into place? Or do you consider … do you look to these radical alternatives and continue to advocate for them?

Janet Fisher: [00:58:53] I don't have a kind of answer to that question. These are the tensions, I guess, that motivate a lot of my work and that keep me up at night to some extent. Quite how we see our own place within this tussle, I think is, is really important. Where there is scope to use different metaphors and different premises than the very dominant financialized and asset-based ones, I think that's fantastic. But I think we do have to recognize that to a large extent time is against us on many of these questions. And I do find the idea that we need to work within the current system and try and modify it relatively compelling, given the urgency of some of these challenges.

Dasgupta Review in Context

Adam Calo: [00:59:41] Thanks for your explanation, Janet, we now have an understanding of what ecosystem services are, how natural capital frameworks kind of spawned from them and how conservationists are deploying these terms. That leads to the report. In your opinion, does the Dasgupta report break any new ground in this conversation, or just kind of, deepen, its commitment to this “new conservation” model.

Janet Fisher: [01:00:08] I think it's important to think about the target audience of this. And I don't really think this report offers new methods particularly, or even a new narrative. I think it just tries to make that narrative, to broaden the constituency that cares about the environment. And I think it's very much targeted to kind of high-level decision-makers- corporate sector, government- to make a case in what's sought to be an authoritative way that uses authoritative ideas around neoclassical economics.

So, I don't think it's transformative in the ideas behind it in any sense, it's targeted to broaden the constituency, I think.

Adam Calo: [01:00:55] I thought it was interesting … I was watching the release video and the first question was, if someone reads the report, what's the one thing you hope to that the report accomplish. And Dasgupta responded, “I hope that economist listen to it.” Suggesting just like you said, that this is a strongly audience-driven type of document.

And perhaps that maybe explains why some things were left out or not explored? One of the things that bothered me was this assumption that nature is silent, mobile, and invisible. And that's why the tools of economics have failed to see it, or to represent it.

And that our markets have not captured that. So we need new economics to speak for nature. In my opinion, it didn't explore it all capitalism—the word capitalism only occurs once in the whole 600 page document. So it doesn't explore the idea that there's an unequal consumption through capitalism that that has purposely used the depreciation of natural resources and the wellbeing of human labor for certain purposes of profit and accumulation.

Not that there is a kind of an error of accounting.

Janet Fisher: [01:02:09] Yup. I think that's right. Going back to the silent mobile and invisible set of ideas, I mean, in a way that is another reiteration of this central idea of ecosystem services that many of these things are non-market and therefore they go unnoticed they go unaccounted for. The externalities are born more generally in society because of these aspects of nature.

Adam Calo: [01:02:35] But maybe if Dasgupta starts talking about precisely who has benefited it would turn off the audience, or he can't turn that into the treasury I'm not sure.

Janet Fisher: [01:02:47] There's a really telling figure in the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment that has a chart and it has monetary evaluation studies that have tried to tot up the kind of value to society of both intact ecosystems and degraded ones.

And it shows every time that an intact ecosystem provides more value to society. And I agree with that. I think the elephant in the room is that the degraded ecosystem, often a private beneficiary has extracted value from that for a private motivation. And the ability to capture that value has motivated the environmental change in the first place.

The report, I don't think really addresses the kind of power relations that explain why private economic gains can be made from the environment at the expense of public benefits and often, those at the sharp end of this are often people in relatively resource poor settings who stand to lose, the most in terms of livelihood resources.

Adam Calo: [01:03:52] And then in the broader equation that the report puts out, this “Impact Inequality” equation that looks at trying to show that the rate of consumption of the human population, moderated by the efficiency of consumption is just greater than the rate of regeneration of natural stocks.

And that's the problem.

But it homogenizes all of the human population into one variable. When in fact, certain humans in certain nations have been using resources at much greater rate, to the disservice of other humans elsewhere.

Janet Fisher: [01:04:25] I think that differentials in consumption between the kind of super wealthy and the wealthy and the more marginalized, in parts of the world. I think that could be much more prominent if you took a kind of environmental justice approach to all of this. It would put emphasis on very different drivers of some of these challenges.

I guess it's, again, it's about the audience and the message, but it's probably not palatable to the sorts of actors that this report is targeted at to make big kind of justice claims or big political claims about redistribution or North-South differentials in consumption or wealthy and marginalized kind of differentials in consumption.

Depending on your analysis, you could come to quite different conclusions maybe than this report does.

Adam Calo: [01:05:15] I was looking for positive things to say about the report. The treatment of values I thought was, fairly nuanced, particularly for an economic text with that audience in mind. And the report talks about how, we need to improve valuation massively. But also that some things are always going to be really difficult and impossible to value. And that means that we shouldn't always use price or a tax. And sometimes we need what the calls, or the authors call, quantity restrictions, which would be, more back to that old, conservation paradigm, a sacred area that is not, or is never extracted.

Of course, that then brings up that need to center power relations, because who gets to decide what's sacred and not is not necessarily put forth in the report, but it is recognized the kind of limits of the evaluation process to deal with a world in which values are socially constructed.

Janet Fisher: [01:06:16] I think that's probably an important thing for the report to have done. To have tried to tread some line between the sorts of dichotomies we've been thinking about—to commodify everything versus to have a radically different kind of world order. I think taking some aspects out of the general narrative of the report that, a more extensive valuation is required to account for aspects of the environment that don't get accounted for. Taking some aspects of out of that proposition I think is, is a useful thing for the report to have done.

Adam Calo: [01:06:50] One of the other interesting aspects of the report that I saw was the treatment of GDP. There is a strong recommendation to use GDP if you want to do short-term, macroeconomic analysis, but to do away with it entirely if you want to understand what direction we should move national economies in the long run.

The report instead tries to create this idea of an inclusive wealth. If you measured inclusive wealth and replace that instead of GDP, then you have a better definition of sustainable development, which previously has been very amorphous. Let's say nations heed this advice, what would that look like and what might that change?

Janet Fisher: [01:07:29] I do think, if the conclusions of the report were really implemented in a committed way by national governments, it could be pretty transformational. I think the critiques of GDP are so well-known, so familiar in a way. It's such an inadequate measure for any kind of notion of progress, particularly one that takes in more holistic conceptions of human wellbeing and environmental quality or health.

If we really did inclusive wealth accounting and countries were able to implement this into their project and kind of program planning—frameworks for a much more holistic accounting process, which did take account of environmental degradation and put that on the agenda in relation to investments in industrialization, let's say, that could be very profound. I don't want to undermine how profound that could be. I guess it remains to be seen whether countries are really willing to transform the way these things work. Partly because of the vested interests in the drivers of environmental degradation.

It just remains to be seen how far really, even the UK government who commissioned this report is prepared to go with it.

And I guess, there's one school of thought that says, well, you commission a report because you want to look like you're dealing with something and adopt the rhetoric of some of these ideas without actually implementing any changes in the way that you operate. So it could be a kind of, green-washing tactic to look busy without actually changing anything.

Adam Calo: [01:09:21] Wow. That's very cynical! I appreciate it. Well, one of the things I noted was in the release video of the report, Boris Johnson, the prime minister was there, touting how great the report was. And he said, "There are those that say that the global economy and the natural world are at the opposite ends of a Seesaw. And for one to go up, the other must inevitably decline. I'm very pleased to say that with the release of this report Sir Partha Dasgupta has well and truly knocked that myth on its head."

And I was thinking that's not the, of what the report says! That sounds like, Yep, now we can continue to go do business as usual that we can grow and we can be green and thank you very much. So I was very concerned, that when you choose, as the report says, to try and make a new grammar of economics, but if it's still the grammar of economics, you end up allowing that move for nations to take.

Janet Fisher: [01:10:13] I agree with you. I'm highly skeptical of, of Johnson's analysis of this. Because I don't think the profoundness of the suggestion to do our accounts very differently .. I don't really think that is being seriously apprehended in the way that the report has advocated.

Adam Calo: [01:10:34] Getting back to the very beginning, this analogy of becoming asset managers, in which we include the environment as one of our most precious assets. Because when you think about portfolio management, I don't know if that's the best metaphor to be using in terms of how to responsibly take care of things. An asset develops wealth by holding it and controlling it and seeking rent from it over time and into the future.

And so if there really was kind of a deep measuring of natural capital stocks, you would see, I think, you would see that flow—almost a rapacious flow—of value of those assets from point A to point B. Point A being marginalized and devalued labor to point B being, global elites.

I think there would be actually something profound, like you said , if it was possible to do that kind of evaluation completely, you would see not just better ways and different pressure points to reduce our impact on the environment, but also who is benefiting most from resource extraction.

Janet Fisher: [01:11:40] Yeah. I think, without addressing the kind of powerful interests that, in many ways, many places are kind of implicated in environmental degradation we're not going to see many changes and lots of powerful and wealthy interests are highly invested in the status quo. And we shouldn't forget that.

Adam Calo: [01:12:05] So going back to what the Prime Minister said, If this type of reasoning is the default and you and I are both involved in this Landscape Decisions Programme, which has this idea of trying to improve management—In fact, assets is in the tagline of this research program “How to better manage the United Kingdom's assets.”

And we have this dominance of this one framework that might be contested within conservation and academic circles, but seems to be increasingly accepted within high levels of government, within the nonprofit sector, and increasingly with business, what should we do? How do we improve landscape decision making within that sense of dominance of the ES framework?

Janet Fisher: [01:12:48] At every step and every opportunity, I try and keep that plural set of understandings around the ecosystem services framework on the table. And I know a lot of maybe particularly ecological economists are motivated to do the same. The framework, I think, has a lot of merit for thinking quite broadly and drawing on different disciplinary expertise.

But if we always communicate it in a way that fully adopts those, very financialized metaphors, then things will drive in that direction and we'll become complicit in the assimilation of many of these assumptions and metaphors and ideas in public life.

So I think, using the framework in diverse, plural and non-monetary oriented ways, I still find very appealing. Although I recognize it has dangers. Keeping kind of plural definitions of human wellbeing on the agenda as well. Diverse kinds much, much further than income oriented … Looking at satisfaction, looking at freedoms to act and to determine environmental futures, health aspects, some of which might interface usefully with aspects of economics, but others of which won't. So, keeping the kind of plurality of ideas in the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment on the table, I think is the way I want to approach this going forward with research.

Adam Calo: [01:14:20] I think it's a nice way to think about how to go forward as a researcher. To one, not necessarily just blindly accept this language, even though it might be attractive in terms of funding resource and within kind of other institutional logics of what is “good science.” But also that there's a lot of room to test, well, what actual outcomes are achieved and who benefits? That's the social science standard question is, who benefits from this stuff? Not just what is achieved and that kind of allows for, by its own logic, do these approaches actually change the status quo in the ways that the proponents of it suggests that it will?

Janet Fisher: [01:15:06] Yeah. And there's enough of these approaches that have been used for years now, sometimes decades that we can look at this as researchers and draw conclusions from the implications of some of these approaches, now. And maybe it's incumbent on us to do that work to show where these ideas are driving us and what their implications are and what their outcomes are.

Adam Calo: [01:15:29] I think that's a good place to end. Thank you, Janet so much for having this conversation.

Janet Fisher: [01:15:34] No problem. It's been a pleasure

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Transcript - EP2 - A Human Rights Approach to Land with Kirsteen Shields *The transcript has been lightly edited for clarity and comprehension

Adam Calo: My research is all about the problem of access to farmland. The whole premise is that without secure long-term access to quality farmland, the types of sustainable agriculture that we can propose, run experiments on, or fantasize about are really just a pipe dream. In the United States, I'm most familiar with the types strategies to provide land access to farmers, which often involve a heroic effort of some kind —fights over small parcels of land or a long journey to extending a lease from one year to 10 years, and so on.

And then I saw a presentation by the guest of this podcast, Dr. Kirsteen Shields, who is an expert in international law at the University of Edinburgh, that first introduced me to this idea of a land reform agenda in Scotland. And for me, that was really important revelation—what it did was flip this problem of land access on its head, that instead of thinking about what the farmers need to be doing or pro- farmer organizations need to be doing to win small parcels or preserve a few farms, what if we could reshape the entire system of land use as a national priority.

And I think what's really important to get from our conversation in this episode is how the land reform legislation itself attended to this problem of aspiring to reshape land entitlements for everyone but without infringing on the rights of property for individuals. And it turns out that a key move that may have pushed the Scottish Land Reform Acts over the line was an appeal to human rights legal framework, suggesting that where an individual right to property might be unbalanced in the eyes of the law is where it stifles the flourishing of all other entitlements. This legal manoeuvre raises important questions about what land for, what is does in society, and who gets to decide.

Kirsteen Shields: There's been a land reform agenda in play at Scottish parliament for quite some time. The land reform legislation effectively extended a pre-existing community right-to-buy abandoned neglected land. And then in the Land Reform, Scotland Act 2016, there was a new community right-to-buy land to further sustainable development. This is expanding the grounds on which a community can seek the transfer of land from private property ownership into community ownership.

In 2018, I think, the Island of Ulva was bought for £4.4 million as a community buyout. And that was a very small community group who successfully received support from the Scottish land fund to buy the Island.

Adam Calo: This seems pretty radical, that the government is using money from its lottery fund to transfer an entire Island from a single land owner, to I imagine it was just a handful of tenants who were there before, right?

Kirsteen Shields: The Ulva story is so interesting. I mean, it's amazing stuff you couldn't write this stuff. It wasn't the happiest of handovers, shall we say? And also the other thing, just incredible, Ulva itself is just this place of incredible beauty, a kind of a mythical beauty.

Adam Calo: So immediately I think, while community control seems nice. What about the rights of these landowners who might feel threatened that their assets are at risk of being expropriated by the government?

Kirsteen Shields: Okay. So that has been a key concern. And there was a lot of lobbying, against the most recent legislation, the Scottish Land Reform Act 2016. Statements made in the press that this would be a violation of landowners absolute right to property.

And there was, it was quite a kind of heated and hostile debate. Misrepresenting the law as it stands as well on this. Some parliamentarians were even saying, we're even talking about an absolute right to buy. But there is no such thing as an absolute right to own property. The right to property, when you trace it back, if you're using the ECHR definition, which is the most reliable right to use if you want to defend property within UK courts—

Adam Calo: That's the European Convention of Human Rights, which Scotland's subscribes to.

Kirsteen Shields: Scotland is a member through the UK. The ECHR right to property is, is actually a right to enjoy peaceful possession of property.

And it is qualified and can be qualified … it can be limited in respect to the public interest. And when there's a phrase like that within law, “public interest”, that then may fall on judges to define, the meaning of that term, given the facts of the specific case. So we can look at how the court has interpreted public interest throughout history. We see that the court gives a lot of discretion to member States as to how they define public interest and taking property back into national ownership for the benefit of the nation has been seen in previous cases.

Adam Calo: There's one concern that the right to property is kind of apex right. I mean, it is article one protocol one of the European Convention of Human Rights.

Kirsteen Shields: Okay. Well, first of all, I would say that understanding it as “protocol one article one” makes it sound more important than it is. The main body of rights are within the Convention. Protocol really means annex or, you know, late addition to the Convention and the Convention has its own catalogue of rights.

So as you know, the kind of scroll that you would see someone holding up and that original scroll is the ECHR, the Convention. And there has been added onto it, important amendments in the form of protocols. The first of which was protocol number one, which includes the right to property and it also includes the right to education. So although it's the first right is actually like the 21st, right. Because the right to a fair hearing, the right to be free from inhuman and degrading treatment and all these other rights are in the main text.

But some couldn't be agreed. And this represents, the fact that it was a late comer, it's often misinterpreted and mis-understood as being more significant to the ECHR historically than it was. And when you think about the history and the merging of different ideologies that was happening in Europe at that time right down the middle of Germany and East and West Germany, right and left politics coming through Europe from different directions.

Leftist politics coming through from the East and more liberal, libertarian politics coming from other directions. Then you understand why they couldn't agree on the right to property at the first sitting, because Germany was at the table, Poland was at the table, a big melting pot of countries were at the table. And they couldn't agree.

But article one, protocol, number one, the right to peaceful enjoyment of possessions, states that every natural or legal person is entitled to the peaceful enjoyment of his possessions. No one shall be deprived of his possessions except in the public interest and subject to the conditions provided for by law and by the general principles of international law.

Adam Calo: So is that where you're saying that in that second part where it says, yeah, you can't be deprived of your possessions unless it's in the public interest. So as long as you do due diligence to explicate and make a case for the public interest, then, there is a balance between a right to property and other rights.

Kirsteen Shields: Absolutely, these aren't absolute rights , the state can interfere in those rights if in pursuit of the public interest. If the state decides that property has to be requisitioned or confiscated the state or the agents of the state agents of government can do that.

Adam Calo: You were involved in debates about what exactly how these different types of land reform legislation should be written and described. And you testified to the Scottish Parliament about these issues, and specifically it seemed like one of the things that you contributed was trying to think about the public interest more clearly by injecting thinking about other rights that might be involved in terms of land use decisions, most notably, economic social and cultural rights.

Kirsteen Shields: Absolutely. Economic social and cultural rights are things like, right food, right to education, the right to health, and the right to housing. What human rights advocates, especially those who are economic, social and cultural rights focused, advocate is that by incorporating these rights as legal obligations, states can still be free to pursue any political agendas that they wish, but there is a basic platform of say welfare provision or support that States can't violate.

So last night there was the vote in the House of Commons about whether or not free school meals will continue to be provided over the Christmas holidays in England. The background to this is that in recent years there's been a good amount of research demonstrating the problem of holiday hunger for children. So when children who may normally go to school and receive free school meal, and when they go on holiday over the summer, they don't receive a sufficient nutrition.

That's been recognized and documented and there have been successful campaigns to encourage the government to provide school meals over holidays. Now, it seems to be, especially this year, every time there's a holiday on the horizon campaign groups have to go back to campaigning and lobbying the government to make public funds available for this. And really if that was a legislated, if that was in law and codified as a basic right, that the state should not infringe this, the state should protect people from hunger and protect the right to food, then we wouldn't have to campaign for these basic services.

So the economic, social and cultural rights agenda has always been left a little bit in the air, hanging dry — That States can pursue economic, social, and cultural rights as political objectives as far as they want, but they don't need to be legally bound by these obligations.

But within human rights, I think, there's a very strong movement to say that it's time now that economic, social, and cultural rights were rebalanced and integrated at the same level of civil and political rights are.

Adam Calo: I think one of the things that you've made a distinction about in the land reform debate is kind of reactive versus proactive position towards human rights.

Kirsteen Shields: If we can restructure systems so that we're actively promoting and protecting rights rather than trying to avoid violations, then it's a much stronger place for governance it's a much healthier, foundation for society.

Adam Calo: You wrote something in this “Land Lines” piece that I often refer to, to learn about the progress of land reform and the way it connects to human rights. You write:

"in the European Convention of Human Rights, the right to property is nevertheless not an absolute right, nor a priority, right nor a trump card over all other rights and interests."

So are these economic cultural and social rights. These are the other rights and interests that you're talking about there?

Kirsteen Shields: Absolutely. Although I would also say, you know, why not include all of the other rights? So, it could be at civil and political rights, such as freedom of thought, belief in religion or freedom of expression or freedom from slavery and forced labor. So it's not only, the right to property versus economic, social and cultural rights.

It's the right to property versus all other rights. It's taken on an importance that's completely disproportionate to its value to society. And the reason why it was always upheld was because it was considered to be extremely valuable to society. If people don't have the right to property, then perhaps they don't have the same economic incentives to incentivization and markets don't function as well and so forth.

That may be true, but there are there are other ways to experience the world than through markets.

Adam Calo: It seems like in the beginning, when some of these ideas about land reform in Scotland we're being started, there was a worry that they would impinge on this kind of idea of an absolute right to property. But by the end of the of the process with all of these land reform Acts coming into force, it seems like the Scottish Parliament is accepting the premise that you have offered that there is virtue in balancing the rights of property with other rights.

Kirsteen Shields: Absolutely. The Scottish parliament in this legislation have been very progressive, and that's due to really good leadership, of the committee. Recommendations about integrating the UN international, covenant on economic, social and cultural rights were heard and were responded to and the international covenant on economic social and cultural rights is embedded in the land reform act as a sort of reference document to which decisions can be referred. So when thinking about the public interest, the covenant should be referred to. So, so that's really progressive.

And I mean, at the same time. Why not?

Adam Calo: One of the things that I hear if I'm talking to maybe a more traditional economist when I'm telling them the story of Scottish Land Reform as I know it is, they say, well, that's all good, trying to increase productivity, increase wellbeing of the public, but why does the ownership have to change?

Why not just change the behavior of the individuals who own the assets so that they, their activities lead to better ecosystem services, more food production, whatever you want to do. It's probably easier to mobilize these individuals who own the assets, rather than these kinds of community bodies that have a charter and many members.

Kirsteen Shields: Absolutely. I encounter that all that often is too. And I think it boils down to really decision making processes, fairness, and democracy, around decision making processes. And where there is fairness and democracy, what that then regenerates and, uh, but then within communities and within populations.

So yes, you may have a very benevolent landowner and he may be perceived as very benevolent to everyone. Without participation, active participation of communities, in decision making, There's a sort of lack of certainty and a lack of net investment, personal investment in the outcomes of that community and off that piece of land. There must be such interesting research to do around the psychological benefits of community ownership.

But we don't necessarily need to look to new research and we can also look back to What we know about when communities are indentured or owned by individuals the psychological harms that comes from being a passive community, not having any real power to change the direction or the use or the ethos over particular territory.

Historically we see that that has been very damaging and very harmful and leads to significant deficits in representation, especially of minorities. We really need to level up on some of these structural disadvantages and transferring ownership is a way to do that, to treat people with dignity and with decency and to engender equality in decision making.

Adam Calo: Yeah, it makes me think, you know, cause I feel like there is a consensus emerging that land use should change, and quickly in order to address some of the threats of loss of biodiversity the negative effects of climate change and the need to provision resources to an increasing population.

But, in the end, that's just another value that is being placed on the land. Is it a victory if you have these landscapes that are changing in land use, but without any of that representation without any true distribution to the people who are embedded in that place?

Kirsteen Shields: Yes, and these are really difficult balances to get right. But we can get there. And we see that we see the other communities have been able to do that from around the world. And increasingly, I do think that it is possible. It's not beyond the wit of humanity to find win-wins, Although it is difficult. It is very difficult.

And if you know if we were thinking about kind of unintended consequences of successful campaigns for economic, social, and cultural rights, if we focus so much on economic, social, and cultural rights that we neglected the evolution and the emergence of environmental rights, that would be the next failure or the next kind of challenge.

You know, we don't want to be sitting in 20 years time saying “We focused so much on the right to food that they didn't think about the right to environment. And so we've got to keep all these things in play and regard for the green shoots of rights and try to build them up and try to make the rights framework as well equipped to align with restoration of ecosystems as it can be.

So if we focus purely on everybody's, right to food, health, and housing and don't think about how this has to be balanced with environmental interests, then we will be facing an even greater crisis very quickly.

Adam Calo: What do you think that land is for?

Kirsteen Shields: Land represents so much and it's got a lot of personal, as well as professional interests tied up in it and therefore it's a real passion subject. But I also think that everything does go back to land scientifically, and also historically.

Land. It can be good for, for so many things. Our challenge is to look after it as a shared resource and as a collective good as a common good, and to, try to save it from the greed that seems to permeate our cultures. Land should be enjoyed present and future generations and it should not be used to exclude or denigrate populations. But I have to say that is a very, very difficult question.

Adam Calo: That's a really good answer though.

Thanks for talking land with me on the podcast.

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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.

Episode Links * 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

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Transcript of Episode 1 -The Parable of Portobello with Malcolm Combe ###### *The transcript has been lightly edited for clarity and comprehension

Adam Calo: Land use contributes to 23% of all human generated greenhouse gas emissions, says the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The panel goes on to urge policy makers to prioritize a new land use paradigm that both meets human needs AND mitigates and adapts to climate change. I like to think about two contrasting ways to achieve this goal. First, introduce an entirely new regulatory regime, where the vast and complex network of landowners and managers are somehow constrained, nudged, or incentivized to change how they use land.

Despite the many challenges of tweaking and regulating many, often competing landowners ... it nonetheless appears the most attractive option for governments. The marginalized alternative is to shape who the land managers are. To set up new pathways to bring in new owners or managers who have different skills, different visions, and different powers to implement the types of land use that would reign in the out-of-control emissions associated with the business-as-usual land use activities.

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 considering a third option … one 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.

I think the case really demonstrates the challenge of negotiating the many, often competing interests on an asset like land but also presents a fascinating scenario ... what if the use of all land or other assets that have public impacts were subject to a true, meaningful democratic oversight? What would change?

Adam Calo: Why don't we start with something that seems basic. But I think as you know is a little bit more complex. What is property?

Malcolm Combe: Jings! Now there's a, there's a few ways I can take that question. I'll not go for a full-on theoretical answer as I don't want to lose listeners at the start. And also, because I didn't bury myself in Marxist theory or anything like that as prep for this podcast. But what is property? It's a rubbish word in the English language property can mean two things. At least two things. It can mean the physical object, or it can mean property as a right in terms of I have property in ... a car a house whatever. And so let’s try and avoid getting confused at the, at the very outset.

But essentially, property is a scarce resource. Um, it's something that's, we'll normally be thinking about things that are tangible, but also you might conceptualize debts and claims that people owe to one another as patrimonial objects. But again, I'll, I'll slow down and just roll back and say the, way we conceptualize property and Scots law drawing very heavily on what the Romans did was its part of private law. And you've got rules relating to people and how they regulate their day-to-day life sort of family and domestic relations, that kind of thing. You've also got rules relating to obligations.

And then you've got rules relating to objects --

Adam Calo: It kind of sits in between all of those in some way, right? Because it can order how we interact with things, but also the relation to things.

Malcolm Combe: Absolutely. Absolutely. And I mean, obviously, it's not objects that go to court is it? It's human beings that might go to court and argue about things. So absolutely it's about human relationships. But, in terms of coming back to the fundamental of "what is property?" it's whatever people are willing to, to recognize as property and, regulate it and subject it to that sort of system of private regulation.

Adam Calo: Is this something that you teach to undergrads? You know, when I was, teaching at UC Berkeley, I would, would do a little bit on property to try and , work towards figuring out what are the assumptions and the power that's underwriting, the concept of being able to own something.

Malcolm Combe: So in terms of how I go about teaching it, I can kind of cheat a little bit as a law lecturer or a law teacher in that it's about what is justiciable.

It's about what people can go to court regarding, so we tend to focus on that aspect at least to start with and sure, we'll also explain what people can have rights in, but it's, it's all about sort of showing how people can enforce rights or defend positions. And we, we tend not to think, too much about where ownership comes from conceptually or indeed practically at the beginning of the course that comes later when to try and sort of blindside them with some chat about land reform.

Adam Calo: I think that’s really powerful to think about. To what extent there is a powerful authority that will protect some kind of claim to property. In the end, if we take this to its conclusion trying to take something that is socially agreed that it's owned eventually the state, will back that up, via a police action, essentially. And so property is, is deeply bound up in the law and in the states idea of who has the right to own certain things.

Malcolm Combe: Absolutely. Absolutely. So, you're getting it to the sort of fundamental questions of what, what properties for what does it serve? What does it do? And yeah, I mean, it's sort of. Prevents the law of the jungle operating, to use a, a bit of a bit of a trope.

Adam Calo: So, as an American, I think, my conception of property for a long time before I started and studying these things and looking around was that it's just a thing that you own.

That might be considered—and this is something that you've written about—is kind of the in quotes castle-and-moat model of property or the ownership model. Is it fair to say that that model is dominant both legally in certain parts of the world, but also, in the social mind?

Malcolm Combe: I think so, whole kind of, Englishman's home is his castle and the Victorian ideals almost of having a, uh, sole despotic, right, in relation to and well it actually goes way back to before Victorian times. But yes, the idea that sort of having control of something allows for, people to maximize the usage of that valuable resource.

And as I say, prevent competitions and ensuing and the, the law of the jungle operating and competitions and emerging in relation to objects in a way that won't serve anyone. And that's why the state tends to sort of accept that you're essentially giving monopoly power to people when you recognize property rights.

Adam Calo: So it's in a way it's kind of the, almost an absolute right to exclude?

Malcolm Combe: That is one of the sort of things that people focus on as the nub of what property is, which makes for sort of quite an interesting sort of potential discussion angle, which might be for another talk in terms of how does that work in terms of traditions of public access to land?

Can, can people exclude people from, can an owner exclude other people from an asset. Under what circumstances can they do that?

Adam Calo: Well, I think that's actually a really good point because I think if we're thinking about an object, like a cell phone or a car, the absolute right to exclude, it has strong coherence in my mind. Right? That makes a lot of sense. and in fact, the cars and phones are designed to support that, with our security codes and our keys, but then when we started exploring it to other areas and in particular one that you and I share, which is the land or the landscape, or other dimensions suddenly it gets a little bit more tricky.

Malcolm Combe: Absolutely.

Adam Calo: What, what could be some of the challenges or what are some of the conflicts that emerge in your mind when you're trying to apply that ownership model “castle-and-moat model” of property to a thing like a landscape or, or land?

Malcolm Combe: The panoply of people who are interested in a landscape is completely different to someone who's interested in the mug that I'm holding at the moment as I slurp some coffee surreptitiously in the background. And yeah, with land, it's the classic sort of, sort of framing of ... “You're not making any more of it.”

So, it's a finite resource. Subject to volcanic eruptions and other geographical events. It's not that you can just rustle up some more land in the same way that you could replace, um, a mug that someone breaks or something like that. And then you get sentimental attachment to land.

You've got people who might have traditional connections to a place you might have. Um, certainly over lockdown I think people have realized that people need local opportunities for recreation. And if you exclude people from land then that's not necessarily going to be good for the wellbeing of society.

So, there's a balancing act, to, to strike when it comes to land and land use that you wouldn't find in relation to ownership of a car or ownership of a musical instrument or ownership of a piece of crockery.

Adam Calo: When you look at it that way, as you so eloquently framed it. What did you say? “The panoply of interests on land.”

Malcolm Combe: I've quite liked that.

Adam Calo: It's so clear that that is acting on the land. But I think, you know, as one of the scholars who I really appreciate, Tania Li says, you know, “Land isn’t a mat. You can't roll it up and take it away.”

But these kinds of visions, dueling visions are placed on it by different actors at different times. And you talked about a balancing act, but what tools are available to try and achieve that?

Malcolm Combe: Good question. So, you start off with a conceptualization of what ownership is, and it's the strongest right that's normally recognized in a, in a, in a system that, accepts private property. Then any, any sort of interaction with an object by a non-owner has to come at it from a, it's almost like a sort of reserve model, so, ownership is the sort of starting point anyone else has to be able to show that they've got some kind of exception that allows them to be able to influence the owners right. I mentioned responsible access to land but also there might be situations where neighbors or, someone's obnoxious use of the land, whether it's sort of use that create fumes or noise or whatever. And in that situation, the law will absolutely say, “well, actually, wait a minute. Your absolute right of ownership is, is qualified here.”

And there might also be environmental protections, wider societal rules that influence how someone can use property. If you've got a car you can drive at speed, on public highways. if you, if you own fireworks, you can’t set them off, at ridiculous times or in a dangerous way.

So, there's, there's a lot of ways that, other people and indeed the state can, can influence ownership.

Adam Calo: So, it seems just like you have these competing values of what land should be for and at certain times some of these values get expressed more loudly or strongly either through kind of social means or through legal means.

I did want to go back once more to origins of property, because this is something that I, understand, more through a sociologist lens, but not necessarily through a legal lens is: How do you get property? It's not like, you have the right to exclude because you're like the best and most wisest user of it. How do you, how do you generate a property right?

Malcolm Combe: The two ways that Scots law will say that someone can become an owner is: derivative acquisition where you derive title from the previous owner, or there are some circumstances where there's something called original acquisition. But that's pretty rare.

Where you create a piece of art and that, that new object is then treated, as a thing that belongs to the person who created it. But in terms of how any human being in Scotland can come to own land. The normal situation would be you take title from the previous, owner that might be through a market transaction that might be through inheritance from someone who's deceased. And then the, the way that you are eligible to acquire that right tends to be connected to cold hard cash. And there are some legal systems where, you might have certain land use rights or ownership. Where, there might be some kind of residency connection or, yeah, just some kind of productive use connection. In Scotland, generally, that's not something that we look at in relation to the right of ownership, you can, as, as long as you are of sound mind and you have legal capacity to acquire the land, then if you've got the money, you're allowed to acquire it.

Adam Calo: I think that's so interesting how, with, the rare case that you presented, which was original acquisition, right? Where you have to create something. But that's almost the same process as if the land that it was kind of created. Originally, but really what happened, right?

It was kind of created as a form of property at one point. And then essentially, it's being traded in the marketplace ever since.

Malcolm Combe: Indeed. It's a reminiscent of the caricature of ownership where someone is taking a walk on an English country estate, and the person says, get off my land. And the guy goes, well, how did you get this land? And he goes, well, I got from my father. How did he get it he got it from his father and keeps going back and eventually it's now, Oh, how did he get it?

Well, he fought with William the Conquer. Oh, how did he get it? … they fought for that. Well, I'll fight you for it now. Obviously, you can't go back that far. And the way property law deals with that as a sort of essentially says, right, well, we'll have a cutoff point where we won’t look further back than however many years ago.

And we'll just look at the situation as it exists now. But yeah, at some point you can, you can maybe ask bigger questions as to, well, is this, is this right? That this has come to pass, that this situation has, has developed? Now obviously you can't just rip it all up and start again without causing huge problems for people in terms of people who might have invested quite happily people, who've made plans in relation to land but that the sort of existence of property law as a sort of bulwark to prevent anarchy, carnage, whatever, yeah, absolutely, that does make sense, but that shouldn't stop people being able to ask questions from time to time to make sure we're getting it right in the present day.

Adam Calo: If you look at recent reports that are concerning climate change, biodiversity, food security. From groups like the UN FAO or the IPCC they all note in their executive summary, that an urgent reform of how use land, is needed. They don't necessarily talk about how we govern land, but they are very clear that the way we use land has to change, how might property be involved in that dimension?

Malcolm Combe: I feel like I should be asking you this question Adam, but in terms of my take on it, the right of ownership as I've sort of highlighted as is, is obviously an important agenda setting tool. If you were to blindly accept current conceptualizations of, of property law and not sort of critique that at any point, then you may struggle to manoeuvre the change that is being driven for, by some of these entities that you mentioned. So, there are a few things you could do in relation to property rights. And essentially this comes down to the two broad approaches to reforming land, to land law reform are, you can change how you conceptualize ownership for all the owners or you can seek to change who the owner of an asset is in the hope that any incoming owner does better than the outgoing owner.

Now, obviously you'd hope that in the latter situation, that it wouldn't be, an unfair process that would lead to that and there'd be suitable procedures to follow and suitable compensation, et cetera. But in terms of the right of ownership, having an impact in relation to say climate change biodiversity, Food security …

You have this important sort of agenda setting role as an owner, if you own a large area of land, for example, and you're able to make sweeping decisions, which obviously in relation to, as I say, like other items of property, you would expect to be able to, to make those decisions about food, your weekly shop, your car, a musical instrument that you own, but when it comes to an area that that can have massive impact in relation to say carbon storage or, the, the habitat of some important wildlife then clearly the decisions that an owner takes will matter.

And, to come back to a point, I was just making about land governance if you can regulate that land use effectively for all landowners in relation to, for example, habitats, nest sites, whatever. Then maybe you don't need to think about how you allocate ownership rights.

But, if it's something which is bigger than that, or you're not able to directly influence habitat protection. A way that just doesn't let people railroads their own interests across when it's something as important as climate change is, is surely going to become an emerging part of the property law story.

It's probably the, the biggest contemporary challenge for property, to face up to.

Adam Calo: I think what you're saying is quite profound. I think what you're talking about is that there are some governance objectives that are incredibly important that will have impact on, you know, the life of the planet, essentially to put it blithely. In which the, the power of ownership of the ownership model, unbalanced stands to defeat. You point out these two these two alternatives: One change the meaning of property for everyone in the law, but also in society and two give someone else crack at it, via an asset transfer mechanism.

And I'm here in Scotland and I know a little about what’s going on and almost come to internalize some of these things. But as an American, those, both of those strategies although you said them very calmly appear to me as extremely radical.

Malcolm Combe: Yeah, and I, I completely get that. Especially if you've got a tradition of suspicion of government and need to have property as a conceptualization of your own dignity, your own way of expressing yourself a foundation of your liberty. Yes. The idea of anyone coming in and mixing that up is bound to be challenging.

And, and frankly, it should be challenging because you don't want settled possessions to just be ripped up. But if it's something that is as fundamental as climate change, or if there's other things at stake, if there's issues of concentration of ownership and that's something that's again, why we're speaking from a Scottish context.

So, so we've got our own story here.

Adam Calo: I wonder if, if we could get to brass tacks and, and explain what, what some of the moves here in Scotland are about.

Malcolm Combe: There are reports of concentration, of land ownership, being a particular issue in Scotland. There are a number of writers who've, who've commented on this probably following on from John McEwen and the seventies, and you could people most notably in the present day, Andy Wightman, who is, an MSP in the Scottish parliament, for the Scottish green party, have identified issues where they think, hang on a minute, there is, there's a striking concentration of land ownership here. At some point, if just because someone happens and own a lot of any particular asset, the economists would see, well, where's the market failure? What's the problem?

And, and Scotland's geography is such that there are certain, areas. Where an economy of scale suggests that you should perhaps have a larger area to make it viable. That's absolutely fair enough for to run that as a counter argument, but there might also be situations where actually, the way that land is concentrated and decisions that are, that are made can have something of an impact. And there's a new entity that was set up, after our second Land Reform Act was passed in Scotland called the Scottish Land Commission that has been looking at things like concentration of land ownership.

Adam Calo: What are the, actual tools … the main legal manoeuvres of the Scottish Land Reform Acts?

Malcolm Combe: This is where suddenly I, I fall onto home territory as it were as a, as a Scots lawyer. There are four community rights to buy that exist in our various land reform acts. So, we've got a community right-to-buy, which was introduced by the Land Reform Scotland Act 2003, which allows communities to get first dibs on an asset.

They get a right of first refusal a right of pre-emption so they can register an interest in land that is local to them and say: If and when that land is ever exposed for sale, we as a community will be able to buy that before anyone else can buy it.

This used to be a rural only right, but in 2016, the law was changed to all over that to also be used in urban areas. And, uh, we'll maybe talk about that a little later. I think? There's also the 2003 legislation allowed for communities in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland, Crofting communities to buy their crofting land. If we start talking about crofting, I'll be here until next week.

So, we might want to just gloss over the back story of crofting. But the, the interesting thing with that crofting community right-to-buy is, it's a stronger right. It's not a right to first refusal. It's a situation where you can actually force the landowner to transfer the assets so you can choose when the sale happens.

In terms of, analyzing that then sort of justifying what the, why that might be the case, you might look at the particular demographics of the Highlands and Islands maybe justifying that, the crofting story that's led to that form of land tenure to be in existence.

But I suppose the, the key difference with crofting law and crofting land and non-crofting land is, crofting law really dictates what that land can be used for. So actually, changing who the landowner is, is probably not going to change a huge amount. Certainly not as quickly.

Adam Calo: Because to be a croft you have to adhere to a variety of kinds of, use activities, and other, other regulations.

Malcolm Combe: Exactly. Unless you can follow a recognized legal process to “decroft” the land and sort of bring it out of crofting controls, then yes, you've got to essentially live and work in the land and follow certain traditional use, as you say, use rights have existed since the system was introduced in the late 19th century.

So that's the Crofting community right-to-buy. And then more recently there was a bit of legislation called the Community Empowerment, Scotland act 2015, first of all, changed the earlier community right-to-buy to apply to urban areas, but it also introduced a right for communities to buy land that was categorized as, abandoned neglected or environmentally detrimental land.

So in these situations where there's been some issue with, the current owner, essentially, leaving the land to be underused or actively doing something that's caused a problem, then a local community in that circumstance in relation to that narrow class of land is entitled to stake a claim for that asset and then force a transfer from the land owner.

That has not been used all the way to its logical end point of a force transfer. Yet there has been some attempt to use it, but it's not, it's not actually been deployed officially yet.

Adam Calo: That's one of the things that I've been finding interesting about these new legal entitlements is that essentially the threat of it going to its fullest expression creates new types of relations and interactions.

Malcolm Combe: I think that's right. And actually to come back to the crofting law, right-to-buy situation, it's there has been some litigation about it, but again, it's never actually had to go all the way through. The, the formal process it's been, it's been possible for the, the community and the landowner to get to eventually come to an agreement, albeit with this right-to-buy in the background that could force something through.

The final thing to mention very quickly is this newest right-to-buy which has only been on, on the statute books since April 2020. This is the right-to-buy to further sustainable development. That was introduced by the most recent Land Reform Act in 2016. It took a few years for it to come on stream and yeah, this similar to that

other right-to-buy, you mentioned the right-to-buy for abandoned, neglected or detrimental land it will allow for a sale to be forced. Where, the landowner doesn't necessarily plan to sell, but the community can, because of the particular circumstances, if they can make a sound enough case, and there are a lot of things they need to do, to do that for any right-to-buy any of these rights to buy that I mentioned the community has to show that

their scheme will comply with local, sustainable development goals as it were, and also need to show that the scheme is in the public interest and, and that the community is on side with it. And they've got local buy-in and approval for it. But with this newest right-to-buy the community is also got to show that not allowing a transfer

will cause the community harm and that there really is a strong, profound case for this transfer and that's a really high hurdle to clear. We'll see whether or not that actually gets deployed in the future as I say, it's early days yet, but it wouldn't surprise me if that's more a background feature.

Adam Calo: That's a great summary Malcolm. There's a lot in there. Just trying to summarize in my head, there is a couple of ways that this type of objective, which is diversifying land ownership. And changing some forms of land use, for example, clearly it's that vacant and derelict land is not prioritized. That's not a value that the government would like to see. What I'm interested in, in focusing in on … And getting towards the case is the different, the mechanisms that have been chosen to try and deliver this. So one, it's by preferencing this idea of community and community ownership.

So that's a certain ownership that's clearly … the finger is weighted on the scale in terms of that form. The other is that it still preserves ownership. It's not like these are being passed to kind of collective or commons or public lands. And then third that, compensation is always at the end.

Regardless if it's a forced sale or if it's a willing buyer.

Malcolm Combe: So there's a few things to sort of jump in on there in terms of you're absolutely right. That doesn't sort of create a common resource. It doesn't transfer into public ownership. It stays within the uni-titular or one title, one landowner model. And what the community has to do is become a legal form that then owns the land as if it was any other owner, albeit its structure is such that it is locally accountable, and it's got to govern the land

in terms of its own constitutional documents in a way that is suitable for that area. The third point you mentioned, you're going to have to remind me exactly what you said. Cause it was going to say something really profound and I've no forgotten what that was.

Adam Calo: Compensation. I think

Malcolm Combe: Compensation. Thank you. Yes. That just shows you how zany I am at the moment.

Compensation is absolutely crucial in human rights law terms. There is something called the European Convention of Human Rights. It's actually just celebrated its sort of 70th birthday. It came into being in the aftermath of the second world war.

And there was a heck of a lot of nasty things happened in the second world war. You don't need to listen to this podcast to tell you that, but amongst some of the horrible things that were happening, there were a lot of forced takings of property. There was a specific provision brought in: Article One of the first protocol, the European Convention of Human Rights, which guarantees the peaceful enjoyment of possessions.

And if you want to deprive someone of ownership or if you are to somehow denude the right of ownership so much that it's worthless, then that would be a problem that would engage, the European Convention of Human Rights, unless it somehow in the public interest and also the proper process has been followed,

it's not arbitrary, it's not discriminatory. And when it's certainly when there's a deprivation involved, when you're taking someone's property away, compensation should be in the frame. And the way Scotland's lawmaking works at the moment. We've got a devolved Scottish parliament. That is the delegated lawmaking body in Scotland, which has had power transfer to it from the UK parliament. And there are certain things the Scotch parliament cannot legislate on.

Some of these things have been expressly reserved to the Westminster parliament. Other things though, the two key examples that were mentioned in the statute when it was passed was anything that went against European Union law and anything that went against human rights or European Convention on Human Rights.

Obviously, the EU points has moved away some work with the Brexit vote, but the European Convention of Human Rights is absolutely still there and if the Scottish parliament was to do something that engaged any of those rights in the European Convention of Human Rights, then it wouldn't be law. So that's why the Scottish parliament, it will, it should have been actively concerned about human rights anyway, but it's particularly concerned about anything in the European Convention, Human Rights, cause that's hardwired to a constitutional settlement.

Adam Calo: So, then the strategy becomes focused on that second clause, or I don't know if it's the second clause focus on that clause, which has in the public interest and with just compensation.

Malcolm Combe: Basically. Yeah. So we don't see just compensation in quite the same way that, um, the Americans do, but yes, particularly if there's a taking, if there's a, someone's been deprived of ownership, then you should be compensated in an appropriate way. And also it's the public interest.

There are, there are some human rights where it's just absolute. So, prohibition of torture or there's no, there's no qualification in relation to that in the European Convention of Human Rights, but when it comes to property, that's not absolute, in the same way. So, if you can make a case that it's in the public interest, then you can reform the law without engaging, and tripping the European Convention of Human Rights.

Adam Calo: I wonder if we could get to a case to actually put some of these abstract concepts into more tangible means. You recently, wrote a paper about one of the cases, which is the case of Portobello. Do you think you could, you could walk through this case of an asset that's important to a variety of web of interests, a community group, trying to assert their rights to that asset and, and the various, tapping into these new laws that ensue?

Malcolm Combe: I'm conscious that I must show respect to the people of Portobello who were involved in that transaction. And if any of them are listening, I do apologize in advance if I, uh, comment like an outsider on anything, but the, the key interests that myself and it's a chap called John Lovett.

Who's a professor of property law over in Loyola, New Orleans, Louisiana. He has a huge interest in Scottish land reform, which just shows you actually quite a radical, some of the, the Scottish land reforms are, if it's caught the eye of people, not just yourself from over the pond and other people as well, Adam.

John was over in Scotland a few years ago and he's been over it a few times and was really interested in the, the land reform goings on. And this was roughly at the time when the community right-to-buy was being expanded to not just apply to rural areas, but also to urban areas of Scotland.

And he was based in Edinburgh, at the time I was up in Aberdeen at the time. And we took a trip out to the Bellfield church over in Portobello. So, this is, to some, they would just quietly say it's in Edinburgh, others that would be an anathema. No, no it's definitely not part of Edinburgh. Anyway, it's, let's just say it in the Greater Edinburgh area, up towards the Firth of Forth. And there were three churches locally in the Belfield area and or the Portobello area and all, all Church of Scotland churches to the extent we have an established church in Scotland, but that's the sort of the main, uh, Protestant denomination in Scotland.

And in terms of the demographics of the Scottish religious community. It's fair to imagine that there are less people going to church now than there were, in the past. Be that as it may, there have been a few instances where the church of Scotland is essentially sort of rationalized its estate. The village where I grew up had two Church of Scotland kirks and has now got one. That’s in a village called Kilbarchan in Renfrewshire and the church of Scotland in terms of divesting itself of these assets has done what anyone on may want to do and basically just sold them. The first of the three churches to be sold was sold on the open market. The community was aware of what was happening with this. And when it came to the second church also being sold off, I think there were a few people in the area,

were, well keen not to lose what they thought was an important community asset to another private scheme, which might've just been more converted flats. And there was a degree of serendipity that the, this expansion of the right-to-buy, to cover urban areas coordinated with the second sale.

Or the second church being put on the market. So, they took steps to acquire it for the community and they eventually were successful in doing so.

Adam Calo: So, the community forms a community group of the right as you write juristic persona. And they have a different vision of what they would do with this, this thing, which is a building that's been in their social lives for a long time. What is that vision that they would hope to do with it? If they did have more power to decide what to do with it?

Malcolm Combe: So, it would have been used as a sort of community venue. There could be childcare facilities, there could be sort of sports events. I know shortly after the buy-out was sort of used as a Fringe event that has the Edinburgh Fringe, the sort of festival of culture that happens in Edinburgh when there's not a pandemic on.

And essentially, they just wanted to have a community space that would not otherwise have been available to them. And they, rather than just have the sale proceeding to someone who would not have shared the local’s views of what was needed they thought, well, you know what, we're going to form a community body.

Try and work out if there is a viable scheme here and local support for it, which evidently there was, there was the sufficient sort of local social capital to demonstrate that. And then as you say the, the associated together formed a juristic persona and said to the Church of Scotland, “We'd quite like to buy this, please.”

And then, initially I think this is not to criticize the Kirk in any way, shape or form. But I think they were initially of the will. We've got a duty that we just need to sort of maximize the bottom line here. So we are not sure that we're going to embrace your scheme straight away, but the expanded community, right-to-buy allowed the local community to say, well, actually we are the only show in town for the time being.

So you need to talk to us and we can show we've got local people who are interested and we're going to proceed with a scheme. Thank you very much.

Adam Calo: So, I think land owners, asset owners, is probably faced this dilemma or scenario many times where if the point does come up to sell, there are many competing interests, but ultimately they have a variety of, values and interests that they would like to see accomplished through the sale.

And so it's just … that's the power of property is for them to decide.

Malcolm Combe: Exactly. And so you mentioned the right to exclude as one of the key aspects of property ownership. Another key aspect of property ownership is the right to dispose and the right to choose if and when you transfer and on what terms and, the land reform act schemes, they, they do tweak with that right, to dispose. And that's why to some, it's "hekka" radical.

Adam Calo: I'd like to turn to a quote that you and John Lovett write about this case in Portobello: "It gave marginalized communities a reason to believe that they could become players in the marketplace for rural and urban land. These communities can now bring property owners, whether they're owners of large rural estates, or even an entity as historically powerful as the church of Scotland to the bargaining table to discuss the transfer of property. Either in the shadows of the new legislation or under the formal auspices of that legislation."

Can you describe that a little bit more? What you mean by that?

Malcolm Combe: Yeah. That sounds quite nice, doesn't it? Probably John rather than me. The point being that suddenly with these sort of legislative routes to allow a community to acquire land. They can't just be dismissed out of hand. They can't just be ignored and sure, you would expect someone like the church of Scotland to be more sympathetic to community than other landowners or whatever, but then again, they were, their trustees would have just been thinking, we need to maximize a return here.

So, without this right they would have been able to just go "thanks, but no thanks." They would have been able to not bother with the community's plans and that's a huge shift. Even if you might sort of say that this right is slightly bureaucratic or this right, it's not as powerful as it might be in terms of it's only a right of first refusal.

It's still absolutely profound in terms of the way it can change the dynamic or at least it can, it introduces a dynamic that previously wouldn't have been there.

Adam Calo: What you just said is part of the reason that I was interested in learning from the Scottish case, because what you mentioned there is a change, in, to talk more specifically about power relations. And property is only as good as powerful actors of authority are to legitimize that property.

So, while some of these moves appear to be legal, they are also cultural and social in a way that is subtly shifting the power relations about what, what property is.

Malcolm Combe: I again, I'm not sure I can follow that up with a response. That's a really fitting way of describing it.

Adam Calo: In your paper you mention these three pillars, that you say happen in the Portobello case. And then you draw from that, that must be there for a community land acquisition. So there has to be the legal tools that you mentioned there has to be the financial support, and there also has to be the social and cultural support.

Can you describe those three pillars a little bit more? Cause we didn't touch on that financial one necessarily.

Malcolm Combe: Indeed. So. That the community would like to, by legislation says that you've got to buy the land at market value essentially, and, the vendor and the community are happy to agree a value between them. If they can't, then there's a process for that to be set, but there is no mechanism for an automatic funding mechanism built in for the community.

But there is separately something called the Scottish land fund. That's been in existence for a few years in Scotland in a few incarnations and it can be approached for grants. They will not 100% fund anything. They will always want to have the community, having a certain amount of skin in the game to make sure that they are serious. I think is the way they approach it, but this is the sort of internal processes rather than any legal point. And then that would also mean that, well, the community has got to find other income from somewhere else, which might be partnering up with someone. It might be local fundraising, and then they've got to within a certain time limit have that money available to allow for the transfer to take place.

Then in terms of the local support essentially, you've got to go out and say vote for me and canvas locally to make sure that people are in favor of a scheme and that when you are using a formal, community right-to-buy route, then you've got to have sufficient turnout and have that sufficient turnout, at least 50% of the community being in favor of the scheme.

Adam Calo: What you're saying is in the law, there's a geographic restriction on who can be a community, and that there's, a legal requirement to meet some kind of democratic approval of actualizing the right.

Malcolm Combe: Yeah. So within the legislation your community, is demarcated by geography, as you say. So initially it was done rather crudely by postcode units. Now there are different ways that you can identify the community. If it's, if it's an island, that could be the boundaries of the Island. If there's a local community council, you could, you could use that as a, as a way of marking it.

But within that area, then those who are eligible to vote in a local election are also eligible to approve or otherwise a scheme that's been put forward. And that basically means that you need to make sure that you're taking the community with you. And it's not just one or two loudmouths in the community who've got a scheme. No, that it's got to be everyone on board with it.

Adam Calo: But Isn't that how these kinds of community actions work is a, is a loudmouth with energy and free time, you know, and, and perhaps enough capital to spend on, on these kinds of acquisitions. I think what the case of this paper really points out to me is that, yeah, I can imagine a rural area, a big hunting estate where the tenants who've been there and would like to see the land use differently implement these rights, but in an urban area with, with so many different competing interests, it's hard for me to imagine that successfully expressing the values of "a community" in quotes.

Malcolm Combe: Understood. And this is not to diminish the important role of loud mouths they absolutely have a place. It's just, they can't be a solo loudmouth. They've got to make sure that they've got others who will take what they're seeing on board. And as you say, in an urban area, where often people's associations and modern Scottish cities are going to be more like communities of interest than communities of place. So, you're right, that you can imagine a difference between urban and rural areas. But here, it was an example of nevertheless, an urban area coalescing and saying but wait, we've got a resource here. We've got a common plan for what we're going to do with it. And, they were able to do that.

Adam Calo: I'm just starting to, I'm formulating a thought now, which has to deal around that kind of community of interest versus community of geography, because in some of the issues that I'm interested in, which is these landscape level land use changes. The community of geography might be at odds with the community of interest.

You might have a group of urban consumers who want different food to be available in their schools, for example. But the land base from where that food is coming from is well outside of their geography. Even if it's rather close, it's still outside that limit. So there seems to be, there would need to be a lot more work done ... community building to, to generate the, that same feeling of the Portobello case, but across broader geographies, it seems to be a limitation with changing the landscape there.

Malcolm Combe: Again, you've explained something quite nicely without me needing to do much else.

Adam Calo: That also brings me to something that I just saw recently in the news, which is the Morven Woods buyout. I was following it just loosely, on Twitter and headlines, it was a. Well, a quote unquote rural case where, it looked like the community was doing what they seem to do because they have some of the lottery fund, but now they need to raise, obscene amounts of money to buy this large estate.

They're doing everything they can to get it, including concessions from the vendor. There they do a public financing campaign. And then at the last moment they didn't get enough votes to implement it.

Malcolm Combe: Yeah. So, a few interesting things to comment on in relation to that. And I similarly am outside looking into this. But the key point to note was that scheme wasn't making use of any of the legislative routes. So, the need for a community ballot was not a legal one. It was either a funder requirement or a vendor requirement, or just a local sort of community building requirement.

Someone thought it would be a good idea to make sure that everyone was on side with it. Now, I'm not sure whether—I didn't see this Scottish land fund parameters in terms of any grant they would have got, I'm not sure of any, I wasn't party to any discussions between the vendor and the community, but had that ballot not taken place.

I mean, that's not a European Convention on Human Rights issue or anything like that. And there was actually one of the few cases to do with the community, right-to-buy, in crofting areas was a buyout up in Park and the East coast of the Isle of Lewis, they'd been a, a challenge in relation to the way the ballot process had run.

But, the relevant judge, Lord Gill at the time said, But the ballot, it's not needed in terms of the European convention of human rights, it, that sort of almost like a Rolls Royce, just to make sure that everything's a A-OK. So the Crofting community right to buy process does need about built-in. To come back to, to Morven what you've got there, is no legislative requirement for a ballot. And then for reasons that I'm not sure about, I don't know for why, that the scheme just didn't win the day.

It wasn't carried. There have been other close votes in the past I know the Wanlockhead Buyout, I think it was a big 52, 53% to 47 or 48%. But it just got through where does this scheme at Killundine didn't get through and the community, or whether it's the funders, whether it's the vendor that that was enough to say well, actually we need to, we need to take this off the table for the time being.

Adam Calo: What it made me think of is, just going through an election in the US when we're recording this. And my home state is California and we have the propositions there, where if you have enough signatures, you can put a proposition on the ballot, which is essentially a kind of a citizen way of, of rulemaking and lawmaking.

And one thing that always comes with those ballots is tons of gamesmanship. So the different interests that might serve to win or lose, if that proposition becomes law, both sides spending a lot of money to try and get the greater public to vote yes or no on these propositions. And so, I was wondering if that's something that you've observed in this process.

Malcolm Combe: It's obviously, there's going to be a need to, take people with you. And this has been the first situation where, that effort has noticeably failed. Another interesting analogy. The BBC, their Gaelic documentary program, Eòrpa, did a study from the Bays of Harris, which is in the outer Hebrides and the community there was going through the machinations of whether this would be a place for a community buyout to happen, and both sides were put across and it looked very finely balanced. As it happened, with the arrival of COVID-19 everything got put on the back burner I'm not sure the situation of that at the moment. But that report, would be worth a look if anyone's interested in, in some of the challenges that communities face to, to make sure that everyone's on side.

Adam Calo: Sometimes I might look at these processes with a little bit rose-tinted glasses. What, what does it actually mean for the individuals who are deeply involved in these places and who the transfer of ownership might change their livelihoods and in a variety of unknown directions. I think that's part of what you mentioned that the Scottish Land Commission is doing is trying to study and understand that the purpose of these types of transfers are actually meeting their goals.

Malcolm Combe: Yeah. And conversely, I just, through an item, there might be some people who are like, well, I don't think this does make any difference to me. So why should I vote for it? And these are people who would need to be convinced.

Adam Calo: There's also this other kind of critique, which is if you do have the land fund spending money. So, this is a public fund. Why not just spend it on the community, why do you have to change ownership? You know, why don't we just build a road or, or build the school that the community hopes to produce, if they gain ownership?

Malcolm Combe: Correct. And that's something that John and I made a point of highlighting with reference to the Ulva transfer and some of the correspondence that was seen in the press at the time of the Ulva transfer or the Ulva funding. So the Scottish land fund give a lot of money to the, Isle of Ulva community group, that that was allowed to proceed with, an acquisition scheme.

It actually reminds me a bit of some of the work that was done on the difference between fragmented ownership versus concentrated ownership in terms of the, patchwork of who, who would own land, in a local estate or a local area, and how that would impact on the vitality of life there. and studies would highlight, well, actually, maybe it's whether or not there's a local post office that's really important. And again, that’s someone you're going to have to get a different guest and for a different podcast, Adam.

Adam Calo: So we started talking about kind of what is property, and I feel like talking to you, you've helped explain how property can be many things and it serves, many roles.

Do you think property is taking on new meaning in Scotland compared to what it was, or perhaps compared to other places in the world?

Malcolm Combe: I think Scotland is currently more willing to look at property than it was. And even relatively recently, people are willing to critique it and think about it. Why that is? it's a good question. Is it the fact we've got a relatively young parliament? Is it the fact that it was unfinished business? There's a really great chapter, in the collection that I edited with Jayne Glass and Annie Tindley by Ewen Cameron from the university of Edinburgh, on the strange survival of the Scottish Land question, he looks at some of the reasons why we're still pondering and still happy to look at these things.

Other people have pondered that Scotland didn't exactly have its sort of French revolution moment or American revolution moment where things got critiqued and stress tested that other nations would have had, hence why we're doing things now, as opposed to say what Ireland did about a hundred years ago.

For whatever reason I think Scotland is, certainly in a UK context, in a European context, it's doing more than other jurisdictions seem to be at the moment. And from my perspective, as a scholar of land law, it's a really interesting place to be.

Adam Calo: Well, me too. I mean, I think I always find that idea that, Oh, Scotland is just behind, other nations in terms of redistributing and, and reshaping its property rights, because at this moment, for folks who are really worried about land use, landscape decision-making, people are looking to Scotland saying, well, what, what are they doing?

How have they brought a willingness to critique property into a slightly more, friendly space that's not taboo? I think that's where, where it stands for me. I mean, the first thing that I was aware of was walking out, in a semi-rural place and coming to a fence and my Scottish partners, you know, just going through the fence and me getting very worried that I was suddenly trespassing, but that's a whole different sense about, being an owner doesn't necessarily mean an ultimate right to exclude, but a responsibility to provide access as well.

Malcolm Combe: There you go. You'll be one of us soon, Adam.

I suppose the, the final point to try and sort of draw the, the various threads together is we need to have a bit of a pause, I think, to just see what these newest rights to buy do in the, in the coming months and years. This newest right-to-buy for, further sustainable development. It's, it's only been there since April. So, let's see what happens with it. And maybe having this discussion in three, four- or five-years’ time would be a worthy thing to revisit.

Adam Calo: Thank you, Malcolm. This has been great.

Malcolm Combe: I hope so. And I apologize for my usual across so many different areas in my responses. I hope I've provided the odd insight amongst that.

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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.

Episode Links 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

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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.

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Adam Calo