It doesn’t get any more straightforward than that.
Why is biodiversity important?
People from the Stockholm Resilience Centre and Albaeco interviewed researchers to get usable answers to important questions. They asked Professor Gretchen Daily, of Stanford University, to tackle “Why is biodiversity important?”. Watch her reply here. She gets going at about 1’15”. Could you do better?
Carnival time, again
Berry Go Round No. 5 is up at A Neotropical Savanna. There’s a lot celebrating the birthday of Linnaeus on 23 May in the Gregorian calendar. ((If we’d known that last week, we might have made more of it.)) But there are also some dandy posts on food and agriculture, to whit: My Asparagus Adventure, Best Fruit Ever? (the pomegranate), and Drought for Thought.
Berry Go Round is fast becoming a don’t miss carnival; Mary Farmer (no jokes, please) did a great job putting this month’s edition together.
Put another shrimp on the barbie
Old cookbooks are a great way of documenting changes in taste, eating habits and diets, but I wonder if they’ve ever been used in a systematic way to track changes in biodiversity in a country’s landscape, or agricultural biodiversity — either at species or genetic level — on its farms. Such thoughts are prompted by news of an exhibition of historic Australian cookbooks, with their recipes for things like parrots and kangaroo brains. Beer is a crucial complement to much Aussie grub, of course, and I hope the hop procurement problems being encountered by the brewing industry in the US are not being experienced Down Under.
Farming and tourism
You may remember my recent post from Lima bemoaning the lost opportunity of linking agrobiodiversity education with tours of an archaeological site. Here’s an example of such an opportunity emphatically grasped. An historic farmhouse in Rhode Island is offering “visitors, particularly children, a glimpse into the lost world of small-scale farming in New England, when the distance between the chicken coop and the dinner plate was much shorter.” And that includes heirloom varieties, for example of tomatoes, of which the staff grow 30. They also keep some local ((Later: Ok, Jeremy, how about “locally important”?)) livestock breeds, including Red Devon cattle, famous for pulling settlers’ wagon trains West.
“One of the things we’ve worked on since we’ve been here is constantly trying to cultivate in people’s minds and hearts a preservation ethic, not just about preserving an old house,” he said, “but preserving landscapes.”