Category: Information

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Restoring degraded land

There’s a new issue of New Agriculturist online. The focus is on restoring degraded land, and there’s something there for everyone.

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Permaculture in Palestine

I have to hand it to ghirbaal. He entitled a recent post that mentions biodiversity Don’t You Quote Hobbes at Me, Nature Boy. That piqued my interest enough to go and take a look, and it proved a fascinating read. ghirbaal seems to be based in Jordan, and was reporting on a permaculture conference that he had been to in Marda, a village in Palestine. Marda is the site of an experimental permaculture farm. That’s interesting in itself, but besides the point.

ghirbaal gives a very clear account of what permaculture offers and the rationale behind most of its design principles.

I appreciate the ease with which permaculturalists acknowledge and celebrate the historical precedence of and continued ability of mankind to productively interact with his environment (while recognizing the destructiveness of some of the later instantiations of this ability). Mankind is likewise bound to the networks of ecological connections, though with a degree of flexibility, which permaculture tries to mobilize. And, personally, I likewise appreciate the sense in which permaculture design tries to break down the boundaries between the house and the garden, and explore ways in which they can fruitfully interact with each other, such that the house can become inseparable from the garden, and vice versa.

It seems to be with the realpolitik of permaculture that he (?) finds the greatest difficulty. The questions of scale and of focus are the big problem. Can permaculture ever supply the amount of food that might sustain a culture rather than a family? Moreover, can permaculture adapt itself to a society in which the individual dwelling, nestling in its carefully designed and tended permcultured acres, is not in fact the way most people want to live?

I’m not going to attempt to summarize the rest of the argument. I’ll just say that there are some thought-provoking ideas (if Israeli settlements were more sustainable, would that increase or decrease international support for them?) that are well worth exposing yourself to.

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Evidence-based conservation

The latest issue of the Cambridge Alumni Magazine has a section on biodiversity conservation. Nothing at all on agrobiodiversity, alas, but a footnote did send me to an interesting video of Prof. William Sutherland talking about “evidence-based conservation.” ((Prof. Sutherland was also behind the article horizon-scanning biodiversity threats which we nibbled a few days back.)) He also says nothing specifically about the importance of conserving agricultural biodiversity — which is ironic given that the opening example in his talk concerns the nutritional importance of the fruit of a cultivated species — but I think his thesis is generally applicable. And that thesis is, paraphrasing somewhat, that there are too many meta-narratives in conservation and not enough data. ((Ok, that is itself a meta-narrative. Or a meta-meta-narrative? My head hurts.)) He’s put together a website where experimental evidence for and against the efficacy of specific interventions aimed at solving specific conservation problems can be documented and discussed.

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Higher food prices

OK, so there’s no direct link with agricultural biodiversity, but if you’re the least bit interested in the subject you will be aware of the flap over higher food prices. A lot of tosh has been written on the subject, so I was pleased to see a fine article on food prices by Paul Krugman ((Yes, I know he’s a pinkie green who eats small babies, but that doesn’t mean he’s necessarily wrong.)) that gives a pretty good overview. I found it through an Economist blog, which had this to say:

What’s needed, of course, is a lender of last resort. An overarching entity–a central bank for grain–could help to solve the collective action problem hindering market function. If everyone participates in the market, then prices will be lower and supplies surer than if individual nations defect.

Unfortunately, it isn’t clear what institutions might be able to step into the current void. And grain isn’t the same as fiat money. Where a central bank can respond to desperate liquidity shortages by printing money, grain must be grown. With stockpiles at 20 year lows, there doesn’t seem to be much room for grain injections. As Mr Krugman says, “[I]t’s not clear how much can be done. Cheap food, like cheap oil, may be a thing of the past.”

Get used to it.