Author: Luigi Guarino

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Frankincense and disharmonic energy fields

One of the more amazing travel experiences I had when I was working in the Middle East was to drive from Muscat through most of Oman to Salalah, the capital of the province of Dhofar, in the south of the country. You drive on and on for ten and more hours through desert, mile after mile of barren sand and rock. Then you go over a slight rise, and suddenly drop down an escarpment into a lush landscape of thickly forested slopes: the crescent-shaped mountains of Dhofar block the rain-laden clouds of the monsoon for months.

The leaward lip of that escarpment is the home of the frankincense tree, Boswellia sacra, the start of famous trade routes to the Mediterranean and India. And such pleasant recollections were prompted by an article in the NY Times on how frankincense “has the ability to generate this really powerful force field that has been shown to be able to neutralize and transmute what we call disharmonic energy fields.” Right. Let’s hope that New Yorkers’ demand for such force fields doesn’t lead to overexploitation.

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Turfing out the lawn

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.

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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.

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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.

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Nibbles: Desert garden, Funding, Vegetables, Communication, Ecosystem services, Bees, Native grasses, Soil, Raspberries, Ancient ag trade, Soybeans, Ag origins