A press release from University of California at Davis says that seagrasses, which deliver considerable ecosystem services, are vanishing, but because they are generally out of sight they are also out of mind. Susan Williams, a UC Davis marine biologist, is one author of a report on the plight of seagrasses in the journal BioScience; unfortunately the journal is behind a subscription wall, so I cannot tell you more.
Business opportunities in biodiversity
A blog called Conservation Finance draws attention to a report on building biodiversity businesses. The report was prepared by the World Conservation Union (IUCN) and is a draft for discussion, but I cannot do that as I have not yet read it. However, I noted with pleasure that there is a section on agriculture, which is encouraging, and not all that common among mainstream conservationists. By the way, Conservation Finance’s link to the report is pretty much broken; use this one instead.
Season’s greetings from the Kenya highlands
Ok, it looks like I’m online again. Took a bit of doing, but a Kenyan internet provider called Wananchi has an interesting wireless solution based on one of the local mobile networks. I’m writing this from our apartment in Nairobi, but I hope to post next week from my mother-in-law’s tea farm, and include some photographs of the local agriculture.
A tale of three (illicit) crops
Still not online here in Nairobi, but listening to the BBC World Service on the radio, I was struck by two (sort of linked) stories. One said that marijuana is now the biggest cash crop in the USA. The other was about coca in Bolivia and how the new president of that country, Evo Morales, is suggesting that cultivation of the crop should be expanded and new products developed based on the traditional uses of the plant. Then in the Daily Nation this morning there is an article about how miraa (or qat, Catha edulis) farming is taking a hit in northern Kenya after miraa flights to Somalia were banned by the new authorities there. Now livelihoods are threatened and there is apparently an upsurge in crime in miraa growing areas. Anybody out there want to draw some conclusions?
Fermenting the biofuel revolution
Part 2 of my musings on bioenergy is now available. This ramble looks at a novel form of breeding yeast, persuading it to make many more errors as it copies its DNA, and thus throw up lots of mutants for engineers to select among. The result is a yeast of unparalleled potency that would have been all but impossible to produce by tinkering with one gene at a time. And that leads into a consideration of some of the policy aspects of biofuels, such as what poor people will eat when the bioenergy industry is paying more than double today’s price for food in order to turn that food into fuel.