"How far to the edge of the earth?" Land-sparing vs. land-sharing and other questionable questions

Background/Question/Methods

Given a growing human population, persistent and widespread malnutrition, and the rapid loss of biodiversity, the tension between providing human sustenance and environmental sustainability remains at the forefront of popular and academic concerns. The relevant, complex dynamics of food and ecological systems have often been simplified to this idea: if we can produce more food per unit area, we can use less land for agriculture and “spare” more land for conservation of nature and biodiversity. As in the infamous quip by H. L. Mencken, this approach is arguably simple, neat, and wrong. Land-sparing, and to lesser degree, competing “land-sharing” approaches are in danger of misframing the most important questions, and thus misleading us as to potential answers. Using a synthesis of literature from political science, sociology, political ecology, and environmental justice, I will examine alternate ways of stating “the problem”, and the alternate solutions this may present.

Results/Conclusions

The question of “sparing land” only makes sense given a specific set of (possibly inaccurate) assumptions. Thus, studies have found the relationship between agricultural productivity and “land spared” to be positive, negative, or nonexistent. The question of how agricultural land area is related to conserved land elides the question of whether a sensible mechanism relating them exists—and if it does, what is its relationship to human malnutrition? My synthesis implies that a) conserved land, productivity, and food security are more strongly related to other sociopolitical factors (e.g., gender inequality and education) than they are to each other, and b) even in cases of “effective” land-sparing, increased productivity has limited effectiveness in addressing malnutrition (and thus does not address half of the nominal problem). Concerned ecologists must make it a top priority to integrate our efforts with local communities and to address sociopolitical issues head-on. Doing so may allow us to advance the goals of land-sparing/land-sharing outside of the context of land and productivity altogether. Failing to take such an approach threatens to lead us to the least desirable scenario, where continued biodiversity loss exists alongside continuing, widespread malnutrition.