Smaller American Lawns Today. Edible Estates. Freedom Lawns. Recent thinking about the American suburban lawn sounds like a microcosm of the debate about diversity and sustainability in agriculture in general. Read all about it in The New Yorker.
A few seeds held in a muddy hand
A review of The Oxford Book of Modern Science Writing by Richard Dawkins included a beautifully poetic rumination on agrobiodiversity:
The great Ice Age herds were destined to vanish. When they did so, another hand, like the hand that grasped the stone by the river long ago, would pluck a handful of grass seed and hold it contemplatively. In that moment, the golden towers of man, his turning wheels, the vast learning of his packed libraries would glimmer dimly there in the ancestor of wheat, a few seeds held in a muddy hand. Without the gift of flowers and the infinite diversity of their fruits, man and bird, if they had continued to exist at all, would be today unrecognizable. Archaeopteryx, the lizard-bird, might still be snapping at beetles on a sequoia limb; man might still be a nocturnal insectivore gnawing a roach in the dark. The weight of a petal has changed the face of the world and made it ours.
You can get the full thing online. It’s from How Flowers Changed the World by Loren Eiseley.
The deep history of dogs and horses
And talking of horses. It’s kinda amazing to think that the dog and the horse, eventually domesticated at different times and in different places in Eurasia, can trace their lineages back to ancestors which co-evolved as hunter and prey on the grasslands of a continent — North America — which was at the time completely cut off from the rest of the world, and to which they were re-introduced, again quite independently, millions of years later.
Nibbles: Desert garden, Funding, Vegetables, Communication, Ecosystem services, Bees, Native grasses, Soil, Raspberries, Ancient ag trade, Soybeans, Ag origins
- “See how beautiful you can make with small water!”
- IRRI redux.
- The problems of vegetable production in Africa, in microcosm.
- “This is a local production, storage and distribution system, a huge exhibit of biodiversity.’’
- PNAS special issue on ecosystem services.
- Bee books.
- Switch to switchgrass.
- More than you probably want to know about earthworms.
- Evil Fruit Lord questions Scotland-China raspberry deal.
- Ancient crop DNA recovered from underwater amphorae. Totally amazing.
- Nutritionist introduces soybeans to Afghanistan.
- Early PNG agricultural site added to UNESCO World Heritage list.
The miombo woodlands on Google Earth
A video on capturing, sharing and interacting with spatial information on the miombo woodlands of Malawi. Via.