The New Yorker has a brilliant long article on the bee shortage.
Farming butterflies conserves forests
East African farmers are making good money — and conserving their local surroundings — by going after butterflies. The Manila Times picks up a story from Agence France Presse reporting from the villages in Kenya and Tanzania where locals have learned how to trade in butterflies. The article is built on the words of the farmers themselves, and it makes for uplifting reading. A sample:
“I would be foolish to cut trees,†says Suleiman Kachuma, a 42-year-old villager, who earns between 15 and 23 dollars a month from his work with Kipepeo, double what he used to make selling timber.
“Before, people had a few chickens and goats… Now there is a big change. Farmers have more chickens, some even have some cattle. The project really changed our lives,†he says.
I thought I’d seen this somewhere before, and I had.
Turning biofuels on its head
So here’s the situation. The world of industrialized food feeds corn to cattle, and then works to stop the cattle burping because it is worried about global warming. And the world of biofuels holds out the promise of endless ethanol from a feedstock of cellulose in grasses. What if we fed the corn to the ethanol plants and let the cows convert the cellulose into meat (and methane)? A neat conceit from Tom Konrad, whose post A Modest Proposal For the Future of Ethanol: Cellulosic Beef is full of interesting facts on the whole biofuels farrago. Hat-tip: Gristmill.
Small forest enterprises are big
From IIED, a report on the International Conference on Community Forest Management and Enterprises, held in Acre, Brazil in mid July. Most of the item is about IIED’s own contribution, about small forest enterprises, which are more dependent on, and better for, forest biodiversity. But there is a summary of conference outcomes and links to fuller reports and other useful organizations.
Tree domestication a huge success
There’s a heart-warming tale over at the Rural Poverty Portal (nice site, too) of the International Fund for Agricultural Development. A tree domestication project in west Africa has brought higher incomes and improved status for women, which has translated into schooling and better nutrition. Women are running their own tree nurseries, selecting which species to grow and nurturing them for market. So far the number of species is limited, perhaps that will improve. The project was implemented by the World Agroforestry Centre.