Adam Calo

The Enduring Fantasy of “Feeding the World” – Spectre Journal Members of the Agroecology Research-Action Collective argue against the productivist logic underlying the "feed-the-world" approaches to feed security.

“Land is about the relations between the material aspects some people might think of as landscapes—water, soil, air, plants, stars—and histories, spirits, events, kinships, accountabilities, and other people that aren’t human.” — Max Liboiron

NextGen Academic Coordinator University of California, Santa Cruz is hiring. Apply now!

Open positon for a cutting edge community-engaged agroecology project in California: recruit.ucsc.edu/JPF02013

odometer reading 20023km

The bakfiets all black cargo with the waxed cotton raincover, set in front of a snowy wood.

20000km on the cargo bike.

Do I get Dutch citizenship for this?

The Enduring Fantasy of “Feeding the World” – Spectre Journal Members of the Agroecology Research-Action Collective argue against the productivist logic underlying the "feed-the-world" approaches to feed security.

spectrejournal.com/the-enduring...

With COP 30 winding down, we're reposting some of critiques of Green Capitalism and productivism from the previous year.

By @kaibosworth.bsky.social , @andrewonearth.bsky.social , @beniuliano.bsky.social , @alastairiles.bsky.social , @adamcalo.bsky.social , and Maywa Montenegro.

Links 👇🏽

Frontiers | The JUST GROW framework: conceptualizing how city regions can govern urban agriculture for equity and sustainability City regions hold much potential for advancing sustainable and just food system transformations. A mosaic of models for producing more food in and around cit...

City regions may turn to urban agriculture to solve a variety of problems. How can we ensure this action centers justice alongside production?🧪

@eliaskoenig.bsky.social

The Ministry of Spatial Planning An institution with real power to shape land use, relegated to a meme

The defunct Ministry of Spatial Planning:

Which is to say, yes, land sharing (preferably commons based) is the ideal, and should be first choice when available, but there is also room for non-market based sparing as well.

Without some sparing this planet would already be one big parking lot, at the “debate” would me moot.

Mentioned this almost a year ago, could be fun to dive into the land sparing debate: bsky.app/profile/adam...

(previously bsky.app/profile/vive... )

While Bill Gates is in the news, this is a great read

@adamcalo.bsky.social and Maywa Montenegro talking about agroecology and the problems with productivist solutions to hunger on Sustainability Now!

Sustainability Now! Oct. 26, 2025: The Enduring Fantasy of ‘Feeding the World’ with Professors Adam Calo and Maywa Montenego The Enduring Fantasy of ‘Feeding the World’ with Professors Adam Calo and Maywa Montenego  On Sustainability Now! Sunday, October 26th, 5-6 PM Even before the publication of Paul Ehrlich’s The Populat...

With SNAP benefits in jeaopardy, the question of how best to feed hungry people is in the air. Out of many interventions, I'd put intesifiying commodity production very low on the priority list.

Pod interview based on The Eduring Fantasy of Feeding the World piece for @journalspectre.bsky.social

It all comes back to land.

WorldFoodDay Brazil's recipe to end hunger

🥣 Brazil’s recipe to end hunger is shockingly simple – and it works.

👧🏽 Universal school meals
💸 Cash transfers + minimum wage
🌾 Buying from family farmers
🍲 Community kitchens
📜 The right to food in law
🌱 Support for agroecological farmers

ipes-food.org/brazil-beats...
#WorldFoodDay

Who wants to push the Landscapes podcast to 10k downloads?

landscapes.libsyn.com

A wicker basket brimming with sweet chestnuts

A gazillion chestnuts on the ground

The chestnut tree and its spiky offerings

Abundance discourse

The Useful Idiot Where I keep warning you about the resurgence of lazy land sparing rhetoric

Useful repost if one believes glyphosate is the key to sustainable agriculture:

Revealed: EU Farm Subsidy ‘Bankrolls’ Widespread Labour Abuse This investigation was developed with the support of Journalismfund Europe. Farm owners convicted of exploiting migrant workers continue to claim millions in taxpayer-funded subsidies, DeSmog can reve...

“A scandal that the EU is funnelling large sums of public money [via the #CAP] into farms accused & even convicted of labour abuses.

“Social conditionality has proven toothless – failing to prevent abuse or trigger meaningful sanctions” says @deschuttero.bsky.social
www.desmog.com/2025/09/29/r...

Can the food sovereignty movement really play a role in systemic transformation? Freedom, egalitarian societies, and planetary boundaries From the nineteenth century to the end of the twentieth century, the belief that the industrial working class was destined to transform the world prevailed. That small-scale food producers and Indi...

From the General Coordinator of La Via Campesina International:

Can the food sovereignty movement really play a role in systemic transformation? Freedom, egalitarian societies, and planetary boundaries

www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

@ezrakleinbot.bsky.social @dkthomp.bsky.social

AI

let’s do an RCSc seminar on this pape.

Many are craving the stance you articulate.

Abstract: Under the banner of progress, products have been uncritically adopted or even imposed on users — in past centuries with tobacco and combustion engines, and in the 21st with social media. For these collective blunders, we now regret our involvement or apathy as scientists, and society struggles to put the genie back in the bottle. Currently, we are similarly entangled with artificial intelligence (AI) technology. For example, software updates are rolled out seamlessly and non-consensually, Microsoft Office is bundled with chatbots, and we, our students, and our employers have had no say, as it is not considered a valid position to reject AI technologies in our teaching and research. This is why in June 2025, we co-authored an Open Letter calling on our employers to reverse and rethink their stance on uncritically adopting AI technologies. In this position piece, we expound on why universities must take their role seriously toa) counter the technology industry’s marketing, hype, and harm; and to b) safeguard higher education, critical thinking, expertise, academic freedom, and scientific integrity. We include pointers to relevant work to further inform our colleagues.

Figure 1. A cartoon set theoretic view on various terms (see Table 1) used when discussing the superset AI (black outline, hatched background): LLMs are in orange; ANNs are in magenta; generative models are in blue; and finally, chatbots are in green. Where these intersect, the colours reflect that, e.g. generative adversarial network (GAN) and Boltzmann machine (BM) models are in the purple subset because they are both generative and ANNs. In the case of proprietary closed source models, e.g. OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Apple’s Siri, we cannot verify their implementation and so academics can only make educated guesses (cf. Dingemanse 2025). Undefined terms used above: BERT (Devlin et al. 2019); AlexNet (Krizhevsky et al. 2017); A.L.I.C.E. (Wallace 2009); ELIZA (Weizenbaum 1966); Jabberwacky (Twist 2003); linear discriminant analysis (LDA); quadratic discriminant analysis (QDA).

Table 1. Below some of the typical terminological disarray is untangled. Importantly, none of these terms are orthogonal nor do they exclusively pick out the types of products we may wish to critique or proscribe.

Protecting the Ecosystem of Human Knowledge: Five Principles

Finally! 🤩 Our position piece: Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia:
doi.org/10.5281/zeno...

We unpick the tech industry’s marketing, hype, & harm; and we argue for safeguarding higher education, critical
thinking, expertise, academic freedom, & scientific integrity.
1/n

Who controls California farmland? The hard-to-find answer is disturbing OPINION: “By creating a transparent, public record of ownership and transactions, we could then design fairer markets, protect local control and plan for a sustainable future.”

Our summer fellow Meredith Song worked with Community Alliance with Family Farmers to analyze geospatial data of agricultural land transactions in California. She co-authored a @sfchronicle.com piece to explore what can be done to rein in corporate land ownership:
www.sfchronicle.com/opinion/open...

@ netherlands 👀

Who controls California farmland? The hard-to-find answer is disturbing OPINION: “By creating a transparent, public record of ownership and transactions, we could then design fairer markets, protect local control and plan for a sustainable future.”

To regain democratic control of the food system, we call for the establishment of a Land Observatory.

The energy transition forces new struggles over land. Latest from the Landscapes Podcast:

Listen: plinkhq.com/i/1552882054...

@greenprofgreen.bsky.social "existential politics" in action?