Dr Gregory Thaler Wins Sprout Award for Best Book in Environmental Studies
The International Studies Association (ISA) has presented Dr Gregory Thaler with the 2026 Harold & Margaret Sprout Award for his book Saving a Rainforest and Losing the World: Conservation and Displacement in the Global Tropics.
The Sprout Award was established in 1972 and is given annually to the best book in the field of environmental studies. Past recipients include landmark volumes such as Nobel laureate Elinor Ostrom's Governing the Commons and Rob Nixon's Slow Violence.
Saving a Rainforest and Losing the World examines the dominant tropical forest conservation paradigm of “land sparing,” which claims that agricultural intensification can spare land for nature by preventing new agricultural deforestation. Land sparing policies transform landscapes and livelihoods with the promise of reconciling agricultural development with environmental conservation. Thaler’s book shows that the land sparing promise is false.
Based on six years of research on agrarian frontiers in Indonesia, Brazil, and Bolivia, Saving a Rainforest and Losing the World traces where and how land sparing becomes policy and charts the social and ecological effects of these political contests. Thaler explains why land sparing appears successful in some places but not in others, and he reveals that success as an illusion achieved by displacing deforestation to new frontiers. This powerful critique of land sparing exposes how false promises of sustainable development mask the failures of green capitalism.
"I'm thrilled at this recognition for Saving a Rainforest and Losing the World,” says Thaler. “In a time of accelerating ecocide, I hope this book can be a resource for those seeking to understand why forests are being destroyed for profit and how we can move beyond false solutions to build meaningful alternatives."
The Sprout Award was presented on Tuesday, March 24th, 2026 at the ISA Annual Convention in Columbus, Ohio, USA.
Saving a Rainforest and Losing the World was previously awarded the 2024 International Science Prize from the Hans Günter Brauch Foundation for Peace and Ecology in the Anthropocene. The book was published in 2024 by Yale University Press.
Dr Thaler is Associate Professor of Environmental Geography and Latin American Studies in the Oxford School of Global and Area Studies and the School of Geography and the Environment, and a Governing Body Fellow of St Antony’s College.
