- More than you’ve ever wanted to know about bison.
- Why can we all just get along? An effort to save The River Jordan. Via.
- Looking for the universe in a grain of sand? Apple diversity in East Yorkshire.
- The pros and cons of legalizing opium in Afghanistan.
The forest: back to the future
I’ve blogged before about the myth of the pristine forest, at least as it applies to the Amazon, and a long feature in the University of Chicago Magazine entitled Can’t See the Forest for the Trees does a good job of summarizing that argument. But it does a lot more by putting it in a global context. I hadn’t realized that researchers that see the Amazon as a “working landscape” are increasingly finding kindred thinkers in other parts of the world: in the “secret forests” of El Salvador, the greening Sahel, the tea forests of China. There’s a lot of talk nowadays in such circles of the “social life of forests” ((That’s in fact the title of a conference organized in May by the University of Chicago’s Program on the Global Environment.)) and about local communities taking back control, and becoming “gardners of the forests,” in the words of Peter Crane, formerly Director at Kew. Says Chris Reij of the Centre for International Cooperation at the VU University Amsterdam:
“The foresters have the idea that they have to protect trees from farmers. Our own view is that forests have to be protected from foresters.â€
Big Men seek your attention
Following the terminology popularized by the puncuated equilibrium vs gradualist argument in evolution, one could, I suppose, characterize the two positions as collecting by jerks and collecting by creeps.
Way, way too good to be left languishing in a comment to a post that is almost a year old, I take the liberty of promoting Luigi’s remark to where it might amuse a few more people. What is he talking about? Sir Walter Raleigh, Peter the Great, Captain Bligh and Thomas Jefferson. Big Men, all of them, and stock figures in what Luigi calls the Big Man meta-narrative of plant introductions. Are there others? You tell us.
Website on agaves in Tequila
We’ve been contacted by Dr Ana Valenzuela, an expert on agaves and tequila who has a website dedicated to the diffusion of information on sustainable agave agriculture, and to the conservation of diversity in this crop. We’re happy to add “Agaves Tequileros” to our blogroll. If you read Spanish, check out Ana’s blog.
Honeybees no longer pampered on the Pampas
Ranching in South America tends to get a bad press because it is often associated with Amazonian deforestation, but of course there are vast swathes of the continent where it makes good environmental sense, as well as economic. ((For a discussion of the related question of the bad press that pastoralism gets, see this post in CABI’s blog, which coincidentally came out just a few hours after I posted this.)) The Pampas grasslands of Argentina are a case in point. The home of gaucho culture ((Which, incidentally, is not as homogeneous and predictable as one might think.)), the Pampas are undergoing drastic change. The soybean boom is not just having an effect on the livestock industry, but also, perhaps surprisingly, on honeymaking. Much smaller in value, no doubt, than either soybeans or livestock, but these are not times to pass up on diversification.