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 mor...

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...

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 activ...

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 syst...

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 t...