- Catha edulis bad for Yemen economy. Having been waved a gun at by a qat-chewing Somali teenager, I can testify it’s bad for other things as well.
- Amy Goldman on the heirloom tomato.
- Biology Letters special feature on climate change and biodiversity.
- And more on climate change, this time its likely effect on livelihoods.
- All you ever wanted to know about plant genetic resources conservation in Germany.
- “Isn’t it crazy to think that everything we eat or use that comes from plants at one time grew completely wild?” Well, not so much.
- Africa: Atlas of Our Changing Environment. (Watch out, very large file.)
- Another reason not to drink sugary soft drinks: gout. Coconut water anyone?
- Pre-Columbian Chilean chickens could have come from anywhere, not just Polynesia.
- Mapping diseases.
- A 12th century olive genebank in Morocco.
- Traditional Ethiopian barley/wheat mixtures (hanfets) have some advantages over pure stands.
Nibbles: Food, Organic, Halophyte, Aromatic, Botanical garden, Coffee, Verroa mite, Pastoralists
- What’s good here? I love globalization.
- An organic oasis in Egypt.
- Today’s crop of the future: Salicornia.
- English lavender?
- Florida botanical garden collects plants threatened by climate change.
- “Los Delirios is a blend of Caturra, Typica, and Bourbon beans grown near Esteli, Nicaragua.”
- Fungus to help honey bees fight mites.
- “During our grandfathers’ time there were different types of grasses here, some for the cows and others for the goats and sheep. Now there’s no grass, the land has become barren.”
Nibbles: Health, Figs, Biocontrol, Small, Tomato
- US to spend $2.25 million to find out whether preserving biodiversity could reduce disease. We say “what, no ag? Again?”
- Fancy a fig?
- Mud pot formulation brings unbelievable benefits.
- More small is beautiful: artisanal weed. Via.
- Meet the Tom-Anto.
Deciding what to grow
It seems that high food prices have reached Bolivia, but not Saratoga, CA.
Frankincense and disharmonic energy fields
One of the more amazing travel experiences I had when I was working in the Middle East was to drive from Muscat through most of Oman to Salalah, the capital of the province of Dhofar, in the south of the country. You drive on and on for ten and more hours through desert, mile after mile of barren sand and rock. Then you go over a slight rise, and suddenly drop down an escarpment into a lush landscape of thickly forested slopes: the crescent-shaped mountains of Dhofar block the rain-laden clouds of the monsoon for months.
The leaward lip of that escarpment is the home of the frankincense tree, Boswellia sacra, the start of famous trade routes to the Mediterranean and India. And such pleasant recollections were prompted by an article in the NY Times on how frankincense “has the ability to generate this really powerful force field that has been shown to be able to neutralize and transmute what we call disharmonic energy fields.” Right. Let’s hope that New Yorkers’ demand for such force fields doesn’t lead to overexploitation.