The Case for Conservation Podcast

For decades I've been trying to get a definitive picture on whether organic agriculture is actually better for the environment. And if it is — where's the widespread adoption? When I started out, organic was treated as a fringe idea. Now, the pendulum has swung so far the other way that it's often treated as inherently virtuous, even beyond environmentalist circles. Perhaps it's for that reason that it's been remarkably difficult to find anyone willing to discuss it. That has made me even more keen to do it properly, and I finally found the perfect person to discuss it after realizing how relevant it was to his main focus, and another great interest of mine — the land sparing versus land sharing debate.
Andrew Balmford is a Professor of Conservation Science at the University of Cambridge, and a Fellow of the Royal Society, whom I met many years back when he was on sabbatical in South Africa. He is one of the world's leading authorities on land sparing (using the land intensively on a smaller footprint, so we can leave more of nature intact) and land sharing (using the land gently but across larger areas and making it friendlier for wildlife). Organic is a somewhat classic example of land sharing, as we discuss. Andrew has spent the better part of two decades across five continents, measuring what different kinds of agriculture do to biodiversity. We talk about what the data show, why he thinks the conservation movement has got organic wrong, and what a serious plan to feed the world without wrecking it would actually require.
Links to resources:
Sustainable high-yield farming is essential for bending the curve of biodiversity loss - 2025 paper by Andrew and co-authors in Philosophical Transactions B.
Reconciling Food Production and Biodiversity Conservation: Land Sharing and Land Sparing Compared - 2011 article by Andrew and colleagues in Science.
The environmental costs and benefits of high-yield farming - 2018 article by Andrew and colleagues in Nature Sustainability.
Reflections on the Global Biodiversity Framework: Achievements, gaps, and future priorities - The 2024 essay compilation in One Earth that Andrew referred to i the discussion.
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In its purest form, environmental science is meant to describe the world objectively, and let policymakers decide what to do about it. But what if the tools we rely on — assessments, indicators, models — do more than describe, and quietly help shape decision-making? Why do certain framings of biodiversity come to feel like simple facts rather than choices? And what happens to other forms of knowledge when we try to integrate them into scientific narratives?
To explore these questions, I spoke with Esther Turnhout, Professor of Science, Technology and Society at the University of Twente. Esther’s work focuses on how scientific knowledge is produced, made authoritative, and put to work in biodiversity policy — including through assessments like those of IPBES. We discuss how facts and values become entangled in environmental science, what tends to go wrong in interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary collaboration, and whether plural knowledge systems can really be integrated. In closing we transition onto a broader topic: Esther suggests that science may be no more universal than any other form of knowledge. This is a claim I find myself strongly resisting, and which I might pursue further another time.

Links to Resources
‘Measurementality’ in Biodiversity Governance: Knowledge, Transparency, and the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) - 2014 article by Esther and colleagues
A better knowledge is possible: Transforming environmental science for justice and pluralism - 2024 article by Esther
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Few ideas are as deeply embedded in how we run our societies as economic growth. Across the political spectrum growth is treated as self-evidently good, and the debate tends to be a tug-of-war between those who want to keep growing and those who argue we urgently need to do the opposite. Degrowth is the argument that wealthy societies should deliberately shrink their economies to stay within the planet's limits. Most of us can probably sense that there's no end to the expansion of human activity, and that something has to give. But how well does degrowth actually hold up when you examine the evidence behind it? And is it a realistic strategy for confronting our environmental crisis, or is it missing the point?
My guest is Jeroen van den Bergh, a Research Professor at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and at VU University Amsterdam, and one of the sharpest critics of the degrowth movement. But as you'll hear, he's an equally sharp critic of growth-at-all-costs. In 2024 he published a widely discussed review of the degrowth literature that concluded much of it is built on conviction rather than rigorous research, a verdict that earned plenty of push-back. In this conversation we dig into the appeal of degrowth, the reasons it's politically radioactive, and what a more evidence-based approach to growth and the environment might look like.

Links to resources
Reviewing studies of degrowth: Are claims matched by data, methods and policy analysis? - Jeroen's 2024 paper with Ivan Savin, reviewing the body of work on degrowth.
Environment versus growth - A criticism of "degrowth" and a plea for "a-growth" - An earlier (2011) degrowth and a-growth paper by Jeroen.
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Synthetic biology, the engineering of life at the genetic level, is advancing at pace. Much of the public conversation fixates on de-extinction and charismatic creatures like woolly mammoths, dire wolves, and moas, but is that really what matters in this new world we are looking at? And while we debate whether these technologies should be applied to the natural world at all, massive investment in human medicine and agriculture is already releasing genetically modified organisms into open systems, including soils, freshwater, oceans, and even our own bodies. Synthetic biology also raises difficult questions about who benefits, who bears the costs, and what it means when private intellectual property becomes embedded in the genome of an endangered species.
To explore all of this, I spoke with returning guest on the show Kent Redford, a conservation scientist who has spent well over a decade trying to bring synthetic biology to the attention of conservationists. We discuss the blurry line between genetic engineering and synthetic biology, the promise and peril of engineered gene drives, and why he believes the field's obsession with de-extinction is largely a waste of time. Kent also makes a deeper, more unsettling argument: that conservation is gripped by a kind of "Holocene hubris," still trying to restore a past that is already slipping away.
Links to resources
Strange Natures: Conservation in the Era of Synthetic Biology - Kent's book on synthetic biology in conservation
Synthetic soil crusts against green-desert transitions - 2021 article by Solé and co-authors 
Beneficial Microorganisms for Corals (BMC): Proposed Mechanisms for Coral Health and Resilience - 2017 artilce by Peixoto and co-authors
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Collaboration is one of the most widely accepted ideas in environmental governance. When faced with a complex problem, the instinct is almost always to bring stakeholders together and work toward a shared solution. When that process fails the response is often to “collaborate harder”. But what if that instinct is sometimes counterproductive? What if the sheer number of collaborative initiatives is stretching participants so thin that none of them achieve very much? And what if the conflicts that collaboration is supposed to resolve are actually being deepened by the process itself?
To explore these questions, I spoke with previous guest Örjan Bodin, Professor at the Stockholm Resilience Centre at Stockholm University. Örjan's research examines how networks of actors collaborate — or fail to collaborate — around environmental problems, and what determines whether those efforts lead to meaningful outcomes. We discuss why collaboration is not always the best response to every problem, how conflict and cooperation coexist, the role of power imbalances in shaping outcomes, why trust takes far longer to build than most initiatives allow for, and whether the small, incremental wins that feel unsatisfying might actually be the best path to lasting progress.
Links to resources
Polycentric systems for coping with collective action and global environmental change - 2010 Ostrom article about the benefits of small initial gains.
A population ecology of network domains. Public Management Review - 2023 article on the issue of ever-increasing number of collaborative venues.
Reconciling Conflict and Cooperation in Environmental Governance: A Social Network Perspective - 2020 article by Örjan and others on the interplay between conflict and collaboration, and its (partial) separation in scholarly work on environmental governance.
Collaborative environmental governance: Achieving collective action in social-ecological systems - 2017 article by Örjan in Science.
The Environmental Performance of Participatory and Collaborative Governance: A Framework of Causal Mechanisms - 2018 article by Newig et al.
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