Property Rights, Collective Action, and Local Conservation of Genetic Resources.
Disappearing languages, disappearing agrobiodiversity
There are about 7,000 languages currently spoken around the world. By 2100, there will half that, if we’re lucky. That’s according to Harrison and Gregory Anderson of the Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages in Oregon, who “traveled the world to interview the last speakers of critically endangered languages as part of the National Geographic Society’s Enduring Voices Project.” Here’s a telling quote from Harrison Anderson:
Most of what we know about species and ecosystems is not written down anywhere, it’s only in people’s heads.
Just compare the map of hotspots of language loss with those of centres of crop origin and diversity. When the last native speakers of those 3,500 doomed languages go in the next century or so, they’ll be taking with them irreplaceable knowledge of agricultural biodiversity. Knowledge which we’ll need to make the most of that agrobiodiversity, and indeed to conserve it in situ (should we wish to) ((Or, indeed, should we be able to, given what climate change is going to do. Anyway, thanks to Ola for pointing out the article.)).
Studying wild sunflowers
Rare wild sunflower gets the treatment.
Traditional rice cultivation at risk
Saving the Ifugao rice terraces, and their agrobiodiversity.
UNESCO World Heritage Sites and agricultural biodiversity
Two of the newly-inscribed sites in the UNESCO World Heritage List caught my eye because of their agricultural biodiversity connections: both, interestingly, are in Europe. The first is the Lavaux vineyard terraces, 30 km of 1000-year-old agricultural landscape around Lake Geneva. The second is the primeval beech forest of the Carpathians, in Slovakia and Ukraine. However, I must admit that this second one only caught me eye by mistake, as it were. I thought it was in these forests that the last aurochs lived, but that was ignorance, pure ignorance on my part. It is the wisent that lives there, still. The last recorded aurochs died in 1627 in the royal forest of Jaktorow in Masovia, central Poland. Somewhere else entirely. But I wonder if there are any other wild relatives — of either livestock or crops — in the primeval Carpathian beech forest.