Category: Tourism

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Farmers’ market fails to market diversity

Wandering around London on Friday, we came across the Pimlico Road Farmers’ Market. A couple of dozen stall selling everything from fruits and vegetables to cheese to all kinds of meat products, mostly sourced locally, meaning within 100 miles of the M25, the motorway that goes all the way around London. Friendly people. Beautiful produce, beautifully displayed. All impeccably organically certified — signs to that effect were everywhere. Made artisanally, naturally, according to traditions which no doubt trace their origins back to the mist-shrouded times of, well, the last Tory government, probably. And yet, and yet…

Apart from one stall selling tomatoes

tomato

and another one selling apples and apple products

apple

there was really no indication that agrobiodiversity was in any way valued, either by the sellers or buyers.

None of the stalls had more than one or two varieties of any of the fruits and vegetables on display. Ok, I thought, fair enough, we’re not dealing with a huge catchment area. But there was not even any mention of variety names on the labels. Maybe they’re all rather boring commercial cultivars and breeds, and the stall owners don’t want to draw attention to that fact. The European Union doesn’t make it particularly easy to grow heirlooms, as we’ve pointed out here before. And indeed a brief chat with a couple of stall holders did in fact reveal that none of the veggies on display were particularly noteworthy local varieties. Pity. It seems that the fact that produce is organically grown is an immeasurably more important selling point than its status as an ancient landrace, at least in this market in an affluent part of London, which I found surprising. I wonder if some enterprising student is making a study of all such markets across London.

Excellent pork pies though.

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“A man is related to all nature”

Mark Easton, the BBC’s home editor, starts a blog post today with this quotation from Ralph Waldo Emerson as an introduction to making the point that the protected area of Wicken Fen in Lincolnshire is… ((Thanks to Indrani for the tipoff.))

…the product of complex interaction between plants, birds and animals. And fundamental to its existence were the apparently destructive activities of one animal in particular: man.

Well, that could be said of a lot of landscapes around the world. Even, possibly, as is increasingly argued, places like the Amazon, which until recently was generally regarded as nature in its most pristine state.

But to go back to Wicken Fen, which, incidentally, I remember very fondly, having done a certain amount of fieldwork there as an undergraduate. It seems “the [UK] government, anxious to protect another fragile habitat, the peat bog, wants 90% of composts and soil improvers to be peat-free by next year.” So peat digging was banned at Wicken Fen. Good, you say? Well, not so much. This change in a practice that has been going on for centuries has contributed to the local extinction of the rare fen orchid. And not only that, the fen violet too, probably:

The rural culture – which had cut the sedge for roofing and animal bedding – disappeared and the fen violet along with it. Its seeds may still survive in the peaty soil and occasionally a rare plant will push through the surface if the land has been disturbed, but the violet has not been seen at Wicken for more than a decade.

And the swallowtail butterfly and Montagu’s harrier as well, due to past changes in management practices.

So what to do. As Mark Easton says, nowadays “conservationists ape the principles of the ancient harvesters to protect what is left of the fen.” But not all agree. “Instead of trying to counteract nature, man should work with it.”

This is a much less predictable approach to conservation but, it seems to me, it is a philosophy more in tune with an acceptance that man is not god. We are part of nature too.

Fair enough, but what if you are managing a protected area specifically for a particular species of value? Say an important crop wild relative. I can imagine a situation where you might want to be a bit more intensive in your intervention, and a bit more predictable. Which is one of the reasons why I don’t think that “conventional” protected areas such as your average national park will ever be much use for CWR conservation, except by chance.

Incidentally, there’s a couple of CWRs at Wicken Fen, according to the great mapping facility on its website. Here’s where you can find Asparagus officinalis, for example: it’s that red square right at the top.

fen

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Nibbes: Nettles, Rivers, Rare species, Library, Afghanistan protected area, Nordic-Baltic-Russian collaboration, Photos, Disease

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Another place where the buffalo roam

The post I did yesterday about a small chunk of prairie still to be found in Calvary Cemetery, within the confines of metropolitan St Louis, ((Ah, but is it a remnant? Check out the comments on the original Economist piece.)) prompted Jeremy to tell me about his own favorite prairie remnant.

That would be the one inside the accelerator ring at Fermilab near Batavia, Illinois. Where they do indeed have a herd of bison contributing to the management of the ecosystem, as I — facetiously, I thought — suggested they should in St Louis. Too bad the beasts can’t be seen on Google Earth.

It looks like the Fermilab prairie is used as a resource by local schools, which seems like a great idea. I don’t know whether the teachers make anything in particular of the fact that at least one crop wild relative is to be found at the site. Helianthus mollis is not what I would call a star among crop wild relatives. For a start, it’s pretty difficult to cross with domesticated sunflower. And I don’t think it’s endangered or anything (or not yet). But it could be useful in illustrating to school kids an ecosystem service that is often overlooked — provision of genetic diversity for crop improvement.

Another thing it may well help illustrate is climate change. It looks like there’s really detailed data on many species, and it will be interesting to see what will happen — is already happening? — to their abundance and distribution. Maybe H. mollis will disappear from the Fermilab prairie in due course. Will it be able to go elsewhere? Or will we need to manage its relocation? To Canada…?