Send us your diversity

Rather than just complaining about how the rest of the natural world fails to give agricultural biodiversity due respect, I decided to bring them all here to see for themselves. My cracking wheeze: host Linnaeus’ Legacy, “A monthly carnival celebrating the diversity of life on this planet, and the methods we use to understand it.” Then, in the onrush of wonderful blog posts about diversity in general, I’ll just slip in a few select agrobiodiversity items to prove that we too have what it takes.

There are many ways to submit posts.

And they don’t have to be your own posts, they can be things that have struck you as interesting and worth sharing.

I plan to publish on Wednesday 10 December, so there’s still time.

Agrobiodiversity and HIV/AIDS

On World AIDS Day, it would be nice to be able to point to how agrobiodiversity can help the more than 40 million people living with HIV around the world. Not easy, alas. There’s an FAO strategy-type document from 2003. And what looks like a project from Wageningen University that’s just about to end. But very little else in the way of concrete examples, at least that I could find in the first few pages of a Google search. There was a piece today reviewing the role of nutrition in dealing with HIV/AIDS, but this mainly dealt with supplements. Can this possibly be it?

Searching for seeds?

Mother Earth News has an online seed finder. It lets you search the “online catalogs of more than 500 mail order seed companies,” mainly in the US, presumably. Test it out and let them know if you could or couldn’t find what you were looking for. We might need to send them our seed list

Access to academic journals

Noodling around Googlespace I’m often brought up short when a published paper is part of JSTOR, because access is restricted to those who can pay for the privilege. ((No matter that your taxes may have already paid for the research.)) Now, via the CAPRi blog, comes news that JSTOR is opening itself up to more developing countries through its Developing Nations Access Initiative. Go ahead and ask, if you may be eligible. Meanwhile, we’ll consider relocating ourselves.