- Seeds going home, thanks to the Indigenous Seed Keepers Network and others.
- Matooke gets its first hybrids.
- Avocado gets its first solid cryo protocol.
- The agricultural challenges and opportunities of African urbanization. No word on the fact that more and more ag will be urban ag. Or on what it will all mean for crop diversity.
Nibbles: Taxonomic web, Oz restoration tools, ABS in India, Colombian seeds, Old date, Diverse cereals
- R package for roaming around the web and collating taxonomic information.
- Cool tool for climate matching and tree restoration seed targeting in New South Wales. Probably needs more than a Nibble.
- Results of webinar on ‘Implementation of Access to Plant Genetic Resources and Benefit Sharing (ABS)’ in India. With video goodness.
- The whole Colombian seed conservation network on one annoying website.
- Those really old dates bear fruit at last. Do you remember the paper on the genetic diversity aspects?
- Growing a rye landrace on a Swedish island for organically certified seed. And more.
Nibbles: Horse cloning, Fish genes, Breeding manuals, Capsicum podcast
- Boffins clone Przewalski’s horse.
- Boffins start fish genebank. Cloning next?
- Boffins deconstruct the breeders’ equation. Apply to fish next?
- Boffin (and Jeremy) discusses how the chilli pepper got to China. Goes well with fish. The pepper, not the podcast.
Nibbles: Svalbard deposit, Banana facts, Archaeology vid, Dye plants, Green shoots
- 3000 peas go to Svalbard.
- Bananas 101, courtesy of Prof. Pat Heslop-Harrison.
- Video goodness on Neolithic Greece from the aptly named Flint Dibble.
- Plants to dye for. With. Sorry. Dye with.
- Brands climb awkwardly on the biodiversity bandwagon. Genebanks look on, enviously.
Erasing Native fires
You might remember a couple of entries in a Brainfood from back in February.
- Conservation implications of limited Native American impacts in pre-contact New England. Native Americans didn’t manage woodland by controlled burning after all…
- Global change impacts on forest and fire dynamics using paleoecology and tree census data for eastern North America. …Sure they did. Interesting discussion on this on Twitter.
I only vaguely did, but enough to ring a bell when I happened across a full-throated take-down of that first article a few days ago. The question is to what extent Indigenous Peoples used fire to manage landscapes before European colonization of what is now New England.
If the answer is “not much” — as that first paper suggests, but the second denies — then conservation interventions involving “chainsaws, cattle and sheep grazing, and hay production, rather than fire” might be justified. So it’s not just an argument about the past, but also about what’s best today. The recent rebuttal suggests that the methods used to arrive at that “not much” conclusion were deeply flawed, and resulted in what amounts to “erasure” of Indigenous knowledge and Indigenous Peoples.
Most problematically, they ignore Indigenous sources that describe modifications of the environment, including but not limited to burning, in and near Native settlements and agricultural fields and along the interlaced trails and travel corridors where people sustained economic relationships and kinship networks.
I imagine the fiery debate will continue.