Anthony Calacino - 8-9 minutes est. reading time
Not to reader: Originally, I volunteered to review this book for an academic journal. For rather silly reasons, this review has instead ended up on my website.In Saving a Rainforest and Losing the World: Conservation and Displacement in the Global Tropics, Gregory Thaler offers two contributions. The first is an in-depth examination of “land-sparing” which proponents define as the preservation of land such that “agricultural productivity could avoid agricultural expansion and spare land for nature” (p. viii). Thaler identifies land-sparing as within an eco-modernist worldview. The goals of this land-sparing are to decouple economic growth from environmental harm by increasing productivity of existing agricultural land. Proponents of land-sparing also hope such policies will create incentives for commodity producing economies to become more industrial, value-added goods exporters as opposed to only commodities exporting. As Thaler later notes, the logic of land-sparing is airy and how it is meant to aid industrialization remains opaque.
Thaler’s second contribution is a “dialectical geography” account of the outcome of land-sparing success in three countries: Indonesia, Brazil, and Bolivia. The author argues “this success was a mirage: the land-sparing hypothesis is false. Land sparing saves forests locally by displacing deforestation elsewhere trading local conservation for global destruction” (p. 3). The logic of Thaler’s argument, as described by the author, builds on world systems theory and a Marxist critique of capitalist production. In each chapter of the book, Thaler takes the reader on a close analysis of the political geography of deforestation in these tropical contexts. These accounts are highly enriched with the author’s own extensive fieldwork in the front lines of global deforestation. Thaler’s aim with the three country comparison is to demonstrate the interconnected drivers of deforestation, which is mostly succesful.
The book takes each country in turn, starting with Indonesia. Thaler provides a detailed history of deforestation dynamics in the country and a separate chapter with insights from fieldwork. The drivers of deforestation in Indonesia are largely agricultural expansion, which Thaler argues come from beyond its own borders aided by its own political regime. The deforestation in Indonesian Borneo, or Kalimantan, in the early 2000s is linked to deforestation dynamics in Brazil and Bolivia through a web of multi-national corporations and global capital’s unrelenting hunger for new resources to extract. Domestically, Thaler argues that officials from the President down to regional leaders like East Kalimantan’s governor, Awang Faroek Ishak (in office in fr2008-2018), all ultimately governed forests in a similar manner that complemented and accelerated external deforestation pressures. Thaler likens the governance of natural resources in Indonesia to an “extractive regime” focused on promoting the exploration of Indonesia’s forests and minerals at most social and environmental costs despite deep local opposition. Despite the extractive regime succeeding most of the time, Thaler also documents the work of civil society actors who contested the government’s actions, especially with regards to palm plantations (p. 66). Critics of the government lamented alarming rates of deforestation despite the government’s “green” propaganda and alliances with international not-for-profits that promoted land-sparing practices. Both the national and local government emphasized local forest reserves and programs meant to reduce deforestation like ‘reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation in developing countries’ (REDD), meanwhile rates of overall deforestation skyrocketed from 2000 to 2015. Thaler introduces the account of displacement, or the process by which forest preserved in one area tend to lead to extraction elsewhere, with the study of Indonesia. For example, the author argues that Japan’s home construction boom in the 2010s and resulting demand for logging led to intense pressures on Indonesia's forests.
The displacement dynamic in Indonesia is followed by Thaler’s account of deforestation dynamics in Brazil, though these two country studies could be better connected. Much of the book’s argument rests on the land-sparing experience of Brazil, which in the early 2000s, led a successful campaign to reduce deforestation in the Brazilian portion of the Amazon rainforest. Between 2004 and 2012, deforestation decreased substantially while agricultural productivity and the country’s GDP increased. Brazil was heralded as a success story thanks to programs like the Action Plan for the Prevention and Control of Deforestation in the Legal Amazon (PPCDAm, the abbreviation in Brazilian Portuguese) in 2004 and blacklisting of high deforestation municipalities in 2008. The PPCDAm is a multi-pronged program consisting of both top-down enforcement efforts with use of satellite monitoring as well as local forestry education and several programs related to sustainable extractivism. The blacklisting was a more aggressive program that saw farmers and ranchers in municipalities who were put on the list be refused access to credit and some forms of financing for agricultural purposes.
Despite Brazil’s successes, Thaler argues that the reduction in deforestation likely fueled the increase in deforestation across the border in Bolivia, the third case in the book. In Chapters 8 and 9, Thaler provides a sound argument that the assault of Bolivia’s forests after 2004 was driven largely by displacement from Brazil during the former country's aggressive campaign against domestic deforestation. After regulations were tightened at home, Brazilian actors are portrayed as seeking cheap land, affordable labor, and low regulations in Bolivia. These actors primarily consisted of firms with large landholdings in Brazil. Other actors include Brazil’s banking sector, and even the former Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff, who pressured her Bolivian counterpart to make it easier for Brazilian agriculture to do business in Bolivia. Thaler provides a zoomed in account of this spillover. For instance, the author recounts an interview with representatives with BFC Slaughterhouse Complex in San Ignacio, Bolivia, where to the author’s surprise, they conducted an interview not in Spanish but in Portuguese (p. 203). The takeaway being that even though one might not be able to precisely measure deforestation spillover, you know it when you see it.
Thaler uses chapter 8 and 9 to document in great detail the physical displacement of Brazilian ranchers, businesses, and the cross-border flows of information, capital, and political influence all aimed at opening up Bolivian forests to Brazilian ranching. Thaler reveals that as Brazilian deforestation slowed, Brazilian businesses set up cattle breeding businesses in Bolivia. Demand for cattle raising is considered a primary driver of deforestation, yet few are likely aware of just how interconnected and complex the cattle business now is in the Amazon. Thanks to Brazil’s efforts to open up Bolivia to ranching and globally increasing demand for beef, the two country’s have built a cross-border cattle breeding complex (featuring astonishing trade in amounts of embryos, bovine semen, and now live cattle).
Thaler’s argument of displacement is especially convincing here, and should be a warning to anyone celebrating unilateral policies to reduce deforestation within a country’s borders. Recently, Brazil's efforts to combat deforestation ahead of the upcoming UNFCCC COP meeting in Belém, Pará in November 2025 have been locally successful. Thanks to the government's policies, there has been a substantial decrease in deforestation in 2024. However, contrary to Brazil's forest loss slowdown, 2024 was Bolivia’s worst year of deforestation in over twenty years.
Overall, the argument of the book is believable and insightful. Though, as Thaler themself acknowledges, the argument is not new per se. Those familiar with world systems theory will certainly recognize the main contours. However, Thaler’s contribution is to provide a critique of land sparing with clear case studies and the novelty of not limiting fieldwork to within one country’s borders. This book provides one of the few cross cross-border studies of the political geography of deforestation. Thaler’s excellent fieldwork makes this book a great contribution, as the book provides detailed case studies rather than an extensive quantitative analysis of the argument. Upon reading, one feels transported to to the dusty roads in the agricultural frontier of the Brazilian Amazon, Bolivia, and East Kalimantan.
There are some elements of the book which deserve scrutiny. The central argument is ambitious and applied broadly, and therefore, somewhat thin at times. To Thaler, nearly every policy about deforestation seems to fall under the land-sparing umbrella. This approach glosses over renewable forest extractive policies (like cacao agroforestry in São Félix de Xingu, Brazil) that readers would rightly argue have different motivating principles and function according to different logics. For instance, Brazil’s PPCDAm has three arms, 1) land planning, 2) monitoring and control, and 3) sustainable development, and each part contains dozens of unique instruments and tools. To group this complex and far-reaching policy under the single concept of land-sparing feels somewhat crude in the analysis. Such an approach makes it difficult to learn from local success that could be applied to limit displacement regionally or internationally.
Other minor parts of the argument sit uncomfortably together in the book. For instance, when Thaler presents data on deforestation in Bolivia and Brazil, the actual trajectories are bumpier than Thaler’s prose suggests. We do see an increase in Bolivia after Brazil implemented the PPCDAm in 2004, but then deforestation in Bolivia also declines from 2010 to 2015, before increasing rapidly again. This period is quite significant for land-sparing in Brazil, so it is not entirely clear what explains the small discrepancy between this decline and the author’s interpretation. Another issue is that the history of soy plantations in Bolivia suggest an even earlier history of Brazilian influence in agriculture. It is widely recognized that genetically modified soy was smuggled into Bolivia from Brazil prior to being made legal in 2005, and such pressures likely predate Brazil’s turn toward more deforestation controls.
Lastly, the book could have provided a more thorough treatment of politics. As it is, politics can sometimes feel like a black box. However, we know from the field of political science that the timing of elections, for example, is key to understanding deforestation patterns. Another example of black-boxing politics is how the book discusses the 2012 Forest Code in Brazil. Thaler mentions this code several times, but does not contextualize it and the years long political battle over which led to it. Local politics is better referenced in the work, but again, more substance and analysis of patterns across frontier towns would have been a good addition. Also absent is international politics, and how international bodies have treated trans-boundary deforestation issues.
The issues I identified in the book are well within the normal range for such a bold and timely book. Overall, this is a superb contribution. Readers interested in political science, environmental studies, geography, sociology, and more will find valuable insights. The book is accessible to a wide audience, and I could see this book even being assigned in undergraduate courses as well as graduate seminars.
I thank Kemi Fuentes-George for their comments on this review.