It seems that high food prices have reached Bolivia, but not Saratoga, CA.
Turfing out the lawn
Smaller American Lawns Today. Edible Estates. Freedom Lawns. Recent thinking about the American suburban lawn sounds like a microcosm of the debate about diversity and sustainability in agriculture in general. Read all about it in The New Yorker.
A few seeds held in a muddy hand
A review of The Oxford Book of Modern Science Writing by Richard Dawkins included a beautifully poetic rumination on agrobiodiversity:
The great Ice Age herds were destined to vanish. When they did so, another hand, like the hand that grasped the stone by the river long ago, would pluck a handful of grass seed and hold it contemplatively. In that moment, the golden towers of man, his turning wheels, the vast learning of his packed libraries would glimmer dimly there in the ancestor of wheat, a few seeds held in a muddy hand. Without the gift of flowers and the infinite diversity of their fruits, man and bird, if they had continued to exist at all, would be today unrecognizable. Archaeopteryx, the lizard-bird, might still be snapping at beetles on a sequoia limb; man might still be a nocturnal insectivore gnawing a roach in the dark. The weight of a petal has changed the face of the world and made it ours.
You can get the full thing online. It’s from How Flowers Changed the World by Loren Eiseley.
Catfish blues
Interesting ichthyological juxtaposition today in the old feed reader. While kids scour the few, small remaining pools of water for catfish in a parched Botswana, over in a specially stocked lake in Thailand, sports anglers catch a giant dog-eating catfish. ((And these things can get pretty big.)) I really like the idea of Lake Monster, where anglers can come and pit their wits, and strength, against those of some of the biggest — and rarest — of freshwater fish. Nice way to take pressure off the natural populations, while assembling an artificial fish diversity hotspot for study purposes. I guess a botanical equivalent would be the gardens of medicinal herbs established by and for traditional healers.
Nibbles: Statement, Words, Training, Policy, Auberato, Coconut, GIS, Pacific nutrition, Honey
- Convention on Biological Diversity’s head “Highlights Risks of Agricultural Biodiversity Loss.”
- Cowpooling. Guess what it means.
- Training opportunity: A global view of livestock biodiversity and conservation.
- FAO policy brief on sustainable development and agrobiodiversity. Thanks, Eve.
- The wonders of solanaceous grafting. Thanks, Jules.
- Build a better nutcracker. And then analyze all that data.
- Mapping cyclone damage to crops in Myanmar.
- Quantifying Micronesian diets. Thanks, Lois.
- Things picking up for US bees? Meanwhile, in China, they’re trying breeding.