Author: Luigi Guarino

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Women’s Institute saves the apple

All this musing about worlds and grains of sand lately actually goes back to a discussion I had with Jeremy a few days back about whether or not it was worth nibbling a little piece on the apple fair which will take place this Sunday in the Millennium Orchard at Beverley Parks Nature Reserve in Long Lane, somewhere in East Yorkshire.

More than 40 varieties of apple are growing on more than 100 trees in East Riding Council’s 50-acre countryside attraction.

Unusual East Yorkshire varieties include the Hornsea Herring and Fillingham Pippin, which was found only in the Swanland area.

The council’s countryside access officers and members of the East Yorkshire Federation of Women’s Institutes (WI) joined forces to develop the orchard as a millennium project.

Worthy enough, but too parochial, Jeremy said. (Although he did in fact relent in the end.) And he’s quite right. English apples, for all their diversity, are not going to save the world like ones from Kazakhstan just might. And East Riding Council is hardly at the forefront of agricultural biodiversity conservation science. Fair enough. But I wonder if the Talgar Pomological Gardens in Kazakhstan and the Garrygalla Research Center in Turkmenistan might not have something to learn from the humble efforts of the East Yorkshire Federation of Women’s Institutes.

And vice versa, of course.

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Nibbles: Worms, Cowpeas, Vavilov, Asian carp, Genebanks, Cassava

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Compare and contrast

Sure, we live in a globalized world, a global village. Recent events in the financial markets are somewhat painful reminders of that. But that doesn’t mean things are the same everywhere, or even going in the same direction. High(er) altitude farming is alive and well in Nepal, as Jeremy just noted. But on its way to extinction in England. Better irrigation is boosting rice yields in Cambodia. While karez wells are being abandoned in Afghanistan. That’s one reason why I don’t believe the genetic erosion meta-narrative. There is always an exception. And although you can sometimes see the world in a grain of sand, it’s better to look at the beach.

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Reflections on Barcelona

Danny Hunter has some thoughts on whether IUCN takes agricultural biodiversity seriously over at his Rurality blog. IUCN has been meeting in Barcelona, and Danny was there telling everyone about the Crop Wild Relative Global Portal. The money quote:

There still appears to be a massive disconnect between the global conservation and agrobiodiversity communities.

LATER: There is, of course, no consideration of agriculture in the latest work on Key Biodiversity Areas, apart, that is, from seeing it as a threat.

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The forest: back to the future

I’ve blogged before about the myth of the pristine forest, at least as it applies to the Amazon, and a long feature in the University of Chicago Magazine entitled Can’t See the Forest for the Trees does a good job of summarizing that argument. But it does a lot more by putting it in a global context. I hadn’t realized that researchers that see the Amazon as a “working landscape” are increasingly finding kindred thinkers in other parts of the world: in the “secret forests” of El Salvador, the greening Sahel, the tea forests of China. There’s a lot of talk nowadays in such circles of the “social life of forests” ((That’s in fact the title of a conference organized in May by the University of Chicago’s Program on the Global Environment.)) and about local communities taking back control, and becoming “gardners of the forests,” in the words of Peter Crane, formerly Director at Kew. Says Chris Reij of the Centre for International Cooperation at the VU University Amsterdam:

“The foresters have the idea that they have to protect trees from farmers. Our own view is that forests have to be protected from foresters.”