Dr Gregory Thaler on ‘Land sparing’ in the tropical forest
On November 12th, the LAC Main Seminar hosted a book launch for Gregory M. Thaler’s Saving a Rainforest and Losing the World: Conservation and Displacement in the Global Tropics. Dr. Thaler joined the LAC in September of this year as Associate Professor of Environmental Geography and Latin American Studies, jointly appointed between the Oxford School of Global and Area Studies and the School of Geography and the Environment. He was joined for the book launch by discussants Laura Rival, a LAC affiliate and Professor in the Oxford Department of International Development, and Raisa Pina of Global Canopy, an NGO that provides data tools to support forest conservation.
Dr Thaler opened the launch with a summary of the book’s main arguments. For two decades, the concept of land sparing, the claim that agricultural intensification can spare land by preventing forest clearing for agricultural expansion, has dominated tropical forest conservation. Land sparing policies transform landscapes and livelihoods with the promise of reconciling agricultural development with environmental conservation. Saving a Rainforest and Losing the World shows that land sparing promise is false.
Based on six years of research on agrarian frontiers in Indonesia, Brazil, and Bolivia, the book explains why land sparing appears successful in some places but not in others and reveals that success as an illusion achieved by displacing deforestation to new frontiers. From the oil palm plantations of Indonesian Borneo to the soy fields and cattle ranches of the Brazilian Amazon and Bolivian Chiquitania, the book exposes the harsh truth behind assurances of green capitalism: capitalist development is ecocide.
Following Dr Thaler’s presentation, Prof Rival shared reflections on the book grounded in her decades of research in the anthropology of development. She commended Saving a Rainforest and Losing the World as a work of both ambition and courage. “By choosing to put into comparative relation two forested regions, the Brazilian Amazon and East Kalimantan in Indonesia, Gregory has no fear to take on the world analytically,” she observed. “His analytical lens redefines what is meant by comparative analysis in political economy, political ecology, area studies, development studies, and politics.”
Ms Pina reflected on the book in light of her childhood growing up in the Cerrado, Brazil’s tropical savanna region, and her research on the globalization of Brazil’s ranching sector. She affirmed that Saving a Rainforest and Losing the World captures the dynamics of displacement behind conservation policies that have turned places like her childhood home into “sacrifice zones” of ecological destruction.
Comments from the discussants were followed by a lively question-and-answer session with seminar attendees and a post-seminar reception.
Saving a Rainforest and Losing the World was published in February 2024 by Yale University Press, and in October it was awarded the International Science Prize of the Hans Günter Brauch Foundation for Peace and Ecology in the Anthropocene.
