From the global to the local, I’m getting increasingly fed up with people who jump on the biodiversity bandwagon with not even a nod to agriculture. It’s what feeds us, for goodness sake. And yet neither a comment on how the world should respond to the latest report on climate change nor the plans for a little biodiversity fair in a little area of Yorkshire in England make any mention of it. Bah!
The same seems to be true of a symposium called Shades of Green: Exploring biodiversity, human values and urban planning. It is at the University of Guelph in Canada, on 8 March. If you’re in the neighbourhood, with nothing better to do, why not pop along and report here on whether anyone uses the dreaded four-letter f-word: food.
Agriculture is the principal cause of global biodiversity loss. If your prime interest is biodiversity conservation, you are probably looking at agriculture to contain it, not to study the sale of heirlooms at country fairs, fun as this may be for its own sake. Obviously ag biodiversity can be used to breed high yielding varieties, probably the most important weapon we have against the environmental devastation caused by agriculture. While I think there is more to this question of balancing nature and nurture, I do not think there will be much benefit in discussing the conservation of purple tomato varieties when trying to address the current global biodiversity crisis.
Well, one possible response might be that without purple tomato varieties and their like, would anyone be around to worry about global biodiversity loss?