Landscapes

It all comes back to land. Landscapes is an interview style podcast about the role of land in society and the environment, presented by Adam Calo.

An Alibi for Ecocide 06/28/2024

Building new land relations from within the core - (Dido van Oosten) 03/21/2024

The People's Land Policy - (Bonnie VandeSteeg) 12/27/2023

Holistic grazing, holistic thinking - (Nikki Yoxall) 12/11/2023

The Visible Hand - Roz Corbett 09/08/2023

The Where of Law - Nicholas Blomley 08/03/2023

Farm Subsidies and the Green Transition - Kai Heron 07/24/2023

Nature's Vote 04/28/2023

Transcript: Landscapes and Interdisciplinarity (Beth Cole) 09/26/2022

Transcript: Landscapes and Interdisciplinarity (Beth Cole) Interview Transcript: Landscapes and Interdisciplinarity (Beth Cole)* *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... /episode/index/show/landscapes/id/24494985

Landscapes and Interdisciplinarity (Beth Cole) 09/23/2022

Contested GM Worldviews - (Andrew Flachs) 05/04/2022

Transcript: Contested GM Worldviews - (Andrew Flachs) 05/02/2022

Transcript: Contested GM Worldviews - (Andrew Flachs) 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... /episode/index/show/landscapes/id/22976741

Transcript: An Agroecological Vision for the United Kingdom with Jyoti Fernandes 05/11/2021

Transcript: An Agroecological Vision for the United Kingdom with Jyoti Fernandes 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... /episode/index/show/landscapes/id/19059299

An Agroecological Vision for the United Kingdom - (Jyoti Fernandes) 05/10/2021

Transcript: The Role of the Arts on Landscape Science with Ewan Allinson 04/14/2021

Transcript: The Role of the Arts on Landscape Science with Ewan Allinson 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.... /episode/index/show/landscapes/id/18688559

The Role of the Arts on Landscape Science - (Ewan Allinson) 04/14/2021

The Dasgupta Review - (Janet Fisher) 03/23/2021

Transcript: The Dasgupta Review with Janet Fisher 03/22/2021

Transcript: The Dasgupta Review with Janet Fisher 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... /episode/index/show/landscapes/id/18420887

Transcript: A Human Rights Approach to Land with Kirsteen Shields 02/18/2021

Transcript: A Human Rights Approach to Land with Kirsteen Shields 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 “” 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. /episode/index/show/landscapes/id/17995781

A Human Rights Approach to Land - (Kirsteen Shields) 02/17/2021

Transcript: The Parable of Portobello with Malcolm Combe 02/10/2021

Transcript: The Parable of Portobello with Malcolm Combe 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 , 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... /episode/index/show/landscapes/id/17896478

The Parable of Portobello - (Malcolm Combe) 02/09/2021

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