Actually, I didn’t even know there was a Plant Conservation Day. BCGI put me on to it. And it does seem to be a celebration very much focused on botanic gardens. But why shouldn’t genebanks and heirloom gardeners and others interested in agrobiodiversity get in on the act too? We’ve got a couple of months to think up things to do…
Neat rum
There’s only one rum that can put Appellation d’Origine Contrôlée (AOC) on its label, apparently. It is Martinique’s Rhum Agricole, and it has a fascinating history. Via.
Department of Silver Linings, part 387
Yes, sure, climate change will cause sea level rise, which is going to be bad for places like Bangladesh and its rice and shrimp farmers, who will all end up in Dhaka. But. Yep, there might actually be a but. The same climate change is also causing increased flows of water — and, crucially, suspended sediment — from Himalayan glaciers. All you have to do is damn up the water and the silt will build up the land, counteracting the rise in sea level. With any luck, the net result will be stasis. And farmers can keep farming. Until the glaciers run out, that is.
Browsing Princeton’s image library
A short note in Global Voices sent me to the Princeton Digital Library of Islamic Manuscripts in search of anything vaguely botanical or agricultural. I found a treatise on botany with charming watercolours of many different plants, some cultivated. Perhaps someone out there who can read classical Arabic can tell us the gist.
Roaming a little further around the Princeton Digital Collections I also came across the Western Americana Photographs Collection, which has some really fascinating stuff. I had no idea that Indians stored acorns in specially constructed caches, for example. But it seems to have been a common practice in the Yosemite Valley.
A temple to a lost way of life
Did people start farming because of religion? That’s the claim being made by Klaus Schmidt, the excavator of the beautiful, 12,000-year-old, T-shaped megaliths of Gobekli Tepe in Turkey. He calls the site “a temple in Eden” and suggests that the hunter-gatherers that congregated to build it in order to venerate the dead with shamanistic rituals then
…found that they couldn’t feed so many people with regular hunting and gathering. So I think they began cultivating the wild grasses on the hills. Religion motivated people to take up farming.
There was a popular, somewhat sensationalist account of the excavations in the Daily Mail a few days ago. And somewhat more measured pieces in the Smithsonian Magazine and Archaeology last year. But the gist is the same:
Gobekli Tepe is, indeed, a ‘temple in Eden’, built by our leisured and fortunate ancestors — people who had time to cultivate art, architecture and complex ritual, before the traumas of agriculture ruined their lifestyle, and devastated their paradise.
There would certainly have been lots of wild relatives around:
The world’s first farmyard pigs were domesticated at Cayonu, just 60 miles away. Sheep, cattle and goats were also first domesticated in eastern Turkey. Worldwide wheat species descend from einkorn wheat – first cultivated on the hills near Gobekli. Other domestic cereals — such as rye and oats — also started here.
The idea of farming originating to feed the otherwise nomadic people building a temple to the dead may be a little far-fetched, but I suppose weirder hypotheses have been put forward for the origin of agriculture. In any case, it seems to me the biggest mystery is why people buried the whole shebang under tons of soil 8,000 years ago.