Adam Calo

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?

Using this for my class this Spring. Is there a non instagram version somewhere?

Why won't the "feed the world" myth ever die? (New essay in Spectre)

Great synergy with:

Advocates of agricultural intensification argue that industrial farming is a necessary evil that wards off global hunger.

But when we recognize that yield increases are not the key to feeding the hungry, the argument falls apart. New, from @rajpatel.org

Who is an American farmer? Who counts in American agriculture? - Agriculture and Human Values Agriculture and Human Values - The most recent changes in the US Census of Agriculture (CoA) have caused substantial increases in the number of farmers. At the same time, by including lifestyle and...

Here's my open access paper "Who is an American farmer? Who counts in American agriculture?"!
I show that using $1,000 sales value as the threshold to be considered a farmer in the Census of Agriculture + increasing the # of operators per farm results in vast overestimates of "farms" & "farmers" 1/

The Afterlives of Coal Energy transitions without confronting the legacies of land ownership? [Landscapes Podcast 16]

Full transcript for the latest episode of Landscapes now available.

Listen to Lindsay Shade and Karen Rignall describe how the legacies of land control challenge simplistic ideas of transitions.

Does anyone have a good English translation of Illich’s “Necesidades”

(PDF) Afterlives of coal: land and transition dynamics in Central Appalachia PDF | The US has witnessed unprecedented federal investments targeted to ‘energy communities’ since 2021. Scholars, policy-makers, and activists have... | Find, read and cite all the research you need...

Confronting the legacies of landownership may be the only path to meaningful landscape transformation.

The article that this episode is base on was originally shared by @jmijin.bsky.social

www.researchgate.net/publication/...

Lessons from the research of Dr Lindsay Shade and Dr Karen Rignall offer a stark warning to those who see the key to progress as simply a challenge of streamlining procedural impediments. Powerful interests have their way of shaping what happens on the land.

The Afterlives of Coal Landscapes · Episode

Visions for a green transition collide with the deep legacies of land control in central Appalachia.

Listen on any podcast app: plinkhq.com/i/1552882054...

Teaser for the upcoming Landscapes Podcast episode.

open.spotify.com/show/2wmTB5K...

Restaurants aren’t the protagonists of food system change.

The assumption here is that this ag produces food and spares land, but in a food regime intent on growing capital, these factory-inspired farms expand monocultures while not providing more food for hungry human consumption

...and thanks to @adamcalo.bsky.social , Maywa Montenegro, @alastairiles.bsky.social , @beniuliano.bsky.social , Richard Solomon, Rawa Abdelbaki, Rana Sukarieh, and @shaneburley.bsky.social for taking us through the second half of July.

Links in thread 👇🏽 🧵

“As engaged scholars, we commit to working within and alongside the social movements of farmers, urban gardeners, workers, organizers, land defenders, and advocates who are transforming our food and political systems towards justice, community nourishment, and ecological health.”

🇧🇷Brazil is off the UN #hunger map! A historic achievement. THIS is how to beat hunger.

"It took concerted political action—putting people, family farmers, and access to good local food at the centre – and by including those most affected" says our Elisabetta Recine

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

2025 Land Reform Platform - Community Alliance with Family Farmers Agricultural land reform is an urgent and necessary step toward creating a just food system that supports sustainable rural livelihoods and reliable a

There can be no sustainable food system without contesting land consolidation.

This report from the Community Alliance with Family Farmers is the first of its kind to explicitly call for land reform in over four decades?

Normalize land reform as a common sense policy platform.