Author: Luigi Guarino

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Hiroshima trees live on

Today is the anniversary of the Hiroshima atomic bomb. It is amazing to think that some trees survived the explosion — the so-called hibaku trees. Hibaku means “something that has experienced a nuclear bomb.”

Dr. Riki Horiguchi, Hiroshima’s resident caregiver to all Hibaku trees in the city, maintains and nurtures the specimens that are still standing 64 years later. So many of the trees in The Hiroshima Botanical Garden and in the surrounding vicinity of the blast were irrevocably altered in appearance, and yet new life continued to spring forth from them. With Horiguchi’s dedication to the seed collecting and cultivation of authentic Hibaku trees, he has managed to safeguard the existence of second and third generation Hibaku trees.

Artist Hiroshi Sunairi, a professor at NYU’s Department of Art and Art Professions, and a native of the Hiroshima region, “shares Horiguchi’s hand-collected Hibaku tree seeds with anyone in the world who is sincerely interested in honoring their collective vision and intent.” He has second and third generation round leaf holly, persimmon, chinaberry, Firmiana simplex, Japanese hackberry and jujube trees.

Whether you live in New York or New Delhi, Sunari will happily provide you with a Hibaku seed (depending on what variety will thrive in your planting zone) as long as you cover the expense of shipping via FedEx.

You can join his Facebook group. Via.

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Nestlé Prize in Creating Shared Value

Do you have an idea which “has high promise of improving rural development, improving nutrition, improving access to clean water, or having a significant impact on water management”? You do? It better involve the use of agrobiodiversity. Anyway, Nestlé would like to hear from you.

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Anthropologists and geneticists see the origin of agriculture in different ways

Dorian Fuller has answered Paul Gepts’ comment on Dorian’s post at The Archaeobotanist on the multiple origin of agriculture, which I originally blogged about a few days ago. Let’s remind ourselves of the argument.

This was Dorian’s parting statement on the original post:

…agriculture, like modern human behaviour, was not a one time great invention, but the product of social and environmental circumstances to which human groups with the same cognitive potential responded in parallel ways.

Paul Gepts countered with this:

As a geneticist, I am somewhat surprised that the issue of parallel inventions of agriculture is still an issue… biochemical and molecular data also show distinct, and likely, independent domestication in different geographical areas, not among only among different crops, but also within a crop gene pool.

And now Dorian again:

My sense is that most of the genetics community has shifted towards seeing multiple areas of independent origin, but within archaeology there is still a penchant for reducing historical complexities to as few origins as possible — often focusing on where more archaeological research has taken place rather than considering other forms of evidence (biogeography, genetics) that should encourage us to take up research in the less-explored or unexplored areas.

Read the full exchange.

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The latest on the results of the Egyptian pig cull

The BBC has done a follow-up to the story of the Egyptian pig cull. It’s been a disaster for many. Here’s one of the rubbish collectors — zabaleen — who were Cairo’s pig keepers:

I sold pigs twice a year. To pay for mending the car and the school fees for our three young children. There is no way I can replace that income.

There have also been health consequences, especially for children, and some people blame a rat infestation on the accumulating garbage that used to be fed to the pigs.

The government says farmers can restock – but only if the pigs are reared in a more modern farming environment on the outskirts of the city: where pigs are kept in isolation, where they can be slaughtered in a proper way and the meat cooled ready for market.

But the zabaleen say they cannot afford that.

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