Category: Indigenous knowledge systems

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News from the front: Belize

As far as I know, it has more species of trees, shrubs, bushes, herbs, and grasses than any domestic garden on Earth: 318 species of flowering plants, 250 of which are native to Belize. That’s about 15 percent of the indigenous floristic diversity of the whole country, more species of native plants than live in the forest that surrounds it. Every plant is here for a purpose, used as medicine, food, thatch, fiber, because it attracts butterflies, birds, and mammals, or just because of its beauty.

The garden is Masewal, in western Belize, and the words are from an article in Orion magazine that describes this astonishing place. The vision of one man, who sought to reclaim some of his Mayan heritage and has been doing so for 31 years, using the garden as store-house, teaching aid and demonstration plot. Fascinating.

Belize was my first experience of a tropical forest and I remember the giddiness of it. I wrote something about it back then; I wonder whether I can dig it out.

via Metafilter.

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Farmers save seeds shock

A farm in Massachusetts, US, has launched its own seed bank. Red Gate Farm Seed Bank aims to:

  • provide community access to quality, local seeds.
  • preserve local, heritage and heirloom seed varieties.
  • promote seed saving.
  • develop and distribute seeds that are optimum for our unique New England soils and climate.
  • collect the social histories of our local seeds.

And very worthy that is too. You can do that sort of thing in nasty quasi-dictatorial America. In freedom-loving, liberal ol’ Yurp it would be illegal.

via Grist, which adds that “with a climate on the fritz, indigenous seeds will likely play an increasingly important role in sustaining local agriculture”. Except, of course, that it won’t be indigenous seeds that will support local agriculture. It’ll be agricultural biodiversity from far away, adapted to a different climate.

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The growing fields

From a comment here I found my way to mandevu.net and the latest post there on how farmers in Cambodia cope with unexpected conditions, complete with video. What happened was that the floods came early to the village. That destroyed most of the rice crop. So how did the villagers cope? Well, in many ways, all of which involve the careful management of rice agricultural biodiversity. But I’m not going to steal mandevu’s thunder. Go there and see for yourself.

By the way, mandevu notes he has three readers. Well, we have five or six. And I’m happy to try and send a couple his way for first hand reports from the field. We’d do that for anyone with as much interesting material. Just point it out.