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Biofuels backlash

Despite the lack of recent posts on the topic, I haven’t lost interest in biofuels and the food vs fuel dimension of that tussle. But there has been so much blather out there that it has been hard to make any sense of it. Focus is needed, and that’s something we find it hard to do as we flit from topic to diverse topic. Fortunately, others are less easily distracted.

The Low-input High Diversity Biofuels blog — which seems to be based at Oklahoma State University in the US, is one such. As the name suggests, it is not exactly enamoured of the alternative High Input Low Diversity approach. Several recent postings give more details. There’s one pointing out that HILD may yet gain traction: “Despite the documented social and environmental costs of biofuels, the vested agricultural interests are politically too strong. The momentum for biofuels is far too great.” Others address the recent OECD report on biofuels, making biodiversity preservation part of biofuels policy and so on. One to watch.

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Gardening by stealth

Here’s an intriguing idea: guerrilla gardening, “gardening in public urban spaces with or without permission.” It includes

fly-by-night plantings in urban wastelands, lobbing “seed grenades” into fenced-off empty lots, planting trees in the middle of nowhere, covering traffic circles with native ground cover, sowing edible plants in school-yards, draping lamp posts with decorative creepers, developing community gardens and empowering disaffected youth by reintroducing them to the joys of dirtying one’s hands in the soil.

It’s all described in the book Guerrilla Gardening: A Manualfesto, by David Tracey, which has been getting some good reviews. We’ve blogged before about the many benefits of school food gardens. They’re great ways of teaching kids about agrobiodiversity, as well as providing healthy, nutritious food for their snacks. We just recently passed the point where 50% of the world’s population lives in cities. I imagine we’ll become increasingly familiar with — and thankful for — the activities of urban guerrilla gardeners.

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Grapes of concord

Grape breeders in the US are making hybrids between Vitis labrusca, a species native to the eastern US best known for the Concord variety, and Vitis vinifera, the European grape, in an effort to get the best of both worlds:

By putting in up to 28,000 seedlings yearly, however, Mr. Cain said he hopes to find marketable varieties, maybe from vines planted last year. He also wants varieties that look distinctive, like elongated grapes, to let consumers know they’re something special. “Combining Eastern and Western grapes in California is like bringing some of the best musicians in the world together on the stage,” Mr. Clark said. “Now let’s see what they’re going to play.”

Offhand, I can’t think of another example of an important crop with easily crossable congeneric species endemic to the Old and New Worlds, as is the case with Vitis. But I could be wrong…

LATER: What an idiot, there’s cotton, strawberry, lupins…

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Enclavism

This has very little to do with agrobiodiversity, but I couldn’t resist mentioning it. I got an email from my friend Robert Hijmans at IRRI pointing me to this little-known fact:

West Bengal has many small exclaves within the Rajshahi division of Bangladesh, and vice versa. According to Brendan Whyte’s thesis, there are 106 of them. For the height of complexity, a part of Dahala Khagrabari, India is surrounded by Bangladeshi territory (part of Upanchowki Bhajni, Bangladesh), which is itself surrounded by Balapara Khagrabari, India, which in turn is surrounded by Bangladesh. This is the world’s only counter-counter-enclave.

Robert and his team are trying to map this in GADM, not without a little difficulty. GADM is part of the BioGeoMancer project, about which I blogged way back.

GADM is a database of the location of the world’s administrative areas (boundaries). Administrative areas in this database are countries and lower level subdivisions such as provinces, departments, bibhag, bundeslander, daerah istimewa, fivondronana, krong, landsvæðun, opština, sous-préfectures, counties, and thana. GADM describes where these administrative areas are (the “spatial features”), and for each area it provides some attributes, foremost being the name and variant names.