After four days away from the intertubes, I’m astonished to be sent from a beer blog in Philadelphia, via a very local paper in that town, to a brew roundup in Burkina Faso, where sorghum is the starting material of choice. It’s a good, colourful write-up that makes it clear how important beer is in the everyday life of Zogore. And Philly. And yes, I know I need to get over it, but the sheer range of stuff out there continues to delight.
Nibbles: Barcoding, forests, social networking
- Trees to be barcoded. Including cultivated ones?
- This would be a good place to start.
- Nature Conservancy to relaunch ConserveOnline.org, a free online community for conservation practitioners.
Behind the behind the high food prices stories story
This is important. We’ve blogged a little about high food prices, and we’re keeping an eye on the subject ourselves, especially where it gives us the chance to bang on again about the role of agricultural biodiversty. But it isn’t a mainstream theme here, not least because there are so many other sources. Still, good though those resources may be, many are not able to give the long-term background to why things, notably subsidies, are the way they are. So, here’s a guest post at the ever-informative Gristmill, which lays bare some of the reasons that lie behind the distorted market for commodity crops.
[H]ow did we get here? How did our modern, abundant, and affordable food system run aground? In a sector that is global in reach, absolutely essential (we must eat, after all), and includes the politics of saving family farms and ending hunger, there is no simple, singular answer. A lot of it has to do with economics and politics. Most of it has to do with what goes into making a box of cereal, and why we even have boxed cereal.
Resilient scientists
I don’t know enough about resilience science, only that I would like to know more. A large body of knowledge has built up around the ideas associated with C.S. “Buzz” Holling that, as far as I can tell, focuses on the system in ecosystems. There’s a Resilience Alliance blog that we have linked to before, and where I learned about the launch of a wiki version of the key document Assessing and Managing Resilience in Social-Ecological Systems: A Practitioner’s Handbook.
The practitioners in question do indeed discuss agricultural systems from time to time, but I have neither the time nor the practical experience to know whether the workbook would be any use to people whose main focus is agricultural ecosystems. I have a feeling that it would be, so I’m putting out a plea:
Can anyone out there enlighten the rest of us as to the ways in which resilience assessment might be put to work to understand farming systems? As a corollary, has resilience science learned anything from agricultural systems?
Nibbles: Donkeys, Aquaculture, Protected areas, Vegetables
- Social networking for livestock. Not as silly as it sounds.
- Fish in the Tea. Dr Seuss unavailable for comment. Via.
- Natura 2000 network expands. Good for wild relatives? Does anybody know? Care?
- Brits flocking back to their allotments? I spot an opportunity for seed savers and heirloom varieties.