Waffle gardens. Zuni pottery. Kids getting down and dirty. Filtered honey. And the whole thing self-funding. I just can’t see a downside. Tell me there isn’t one. Please.
Istanbul on the Rhine
Good news for sun-loving Germans. By 2071-2080 parts of their country are going to have the climate that parts of Greece have now. That’s according to a paper in Plant Ecology which ran a bunch of climate change models for Europe. 1 Have a look at the money map.
On the left are today’s Germany-like climates in Europe. On the right is where Germany’s future climates can be found right now. Germany will basically have the climate that France has now, but with significant bits of Spain, Italy, Greece and even Turkey thrown in.
Not surprisingly, the authors go on to suggest that this will have consequences for the country’s flora. They calculate that up to 1300 Spanish and Portuguese plant species not currently growing in Germany could find climatic conditions there to their liking by 2071 (edaphic conditions and the biotic environment are another thing, of course). That would be quite a significant northeasterly migration. It would be interesting to know how many crop wild relatives that might include. It would be even more interesting to know what will happen to individual crops, the olive and grape, for instance.
Today’s young Germans might be able to enjoy Mediterranean holidays at home by the time they retire, with the diet to match, zero-food-miles olive oil included. Who said climate change was going to be all bad?
Featured: A New Hope
Danny is optimistic about the increasing integration of agriculture in biodiversity conservation, as in the new IUCN book, but ends on a note of caution:
Yet still very much open to interpretation. Compatible forms of agriculture? Compatible for who and for what?
Nibbles: Seed Hunter, Seed catalogs, Trees
- Seed Hunter “undaunted.” So that’s all right then.
- Smithsonian puts old seed catalogs online. Very cool.
- By all means plant trees, especially on farms, but a plantation is not a rainforest.
Featured: Protect your local breeder
The Evil Fruit Lord defends the rights of plant breeders:
I think a fair amount of the hostility towards GURTs stems from a general hostility towards plant IPR’s.
And that just ain’t right.