Fun with Web 2.0 and genetic resources

This is awesome. I hate to get all airhead on you, faithful reader, and I know I’m easily impressed, but a little video “tutorial” from the folks at Gramene just blew me away. In less than four minutes — as long as you have a reasonably good internet connection and hardware — they give you a glimpse of what you can get through Gramene. Not merely genetic maps, snips, images, full DNA sequences, access to germplasm, phylogenies and taxonomies and what have you but also — get this — recipes! And nutrition!

The tutorial is well worth watching, to see how advanced these products can be. The site where the tutorial is hosted looks like it might be a very useful resource. And if I didn’t have real work to do, I know I could usefully explore Gramene itself for a day or two.

  • The tutorial is here.
  • Gramene is here.
  • I found the tutorial here.

Like I said, awesome.

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.

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.