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Polymotu in practice

On the small islands of the Pacific, it is proposed for the planting of only three coconut varieties: a ‘green tall’ such as niu afa, ‘Malayan red dwarf’, and ‘Tahiti red dwarf’. Subsequently, six new varieties will be produced from this mix without any costly controlled pollination programme. And, farmers will have a diversity of coconut varieties to choose from. It is important to spend time with the people living on the islands to identify existing varieties and to progressively remove existing coconuts once the new palms begin to bear. This is a collective decision that village authorities need to agree on. The long-term benefits are continued biodiversity.

You may remember that from a piece from the Secretariat of the Pacific Community that I think we may have Nibbled, or worse, a couple of years back. Anyway, if that’s the theory, here’s the practice:

“We are not making a coconut plantation, we are landscaping an island, so the important thing is to make it pretty.”

That’s Dr Roland Bourdeix, starting about 4:20 mins in. 1 It’s his idea to plant small Pacific islands to just one or two coconut varieties, rather than bringing lots of different varieties together in a genebank. In what he calls the Polymotu Approach to coconut conservation, you let the coconuts themselves — and isolation — do the hard work of controlled pollination. The coconut conservationist just gets to travel from isolated island paradise to isolated island paradise, making sure that everything is ok, taking the odd measurement, and packing up coconuts for shipment when someone else somewhere else in the world wants that particular accession. Nice gig if you can get it.

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After the storm

Despite Sandy, NPR’s Planet Money, which is made in New York, had a brief podcast on Friday. After The Flood, The Backup Plan examined the different ways in which the US economy speeds recovery after natural disasters. 2 One of those ways is insurance and, even more so, reinsurance.

Those are the guys who insure the insurers, and while the insurance business as a whole is certainly aware of the impact of climate change on their business model, one J. Eric Smith, CEO of Swiss Re Americas, was at pains to point out that their reserves are plenty big enough to pony up for at least a couple of big natural disasters simultaneously. That’s reassuring.

When asked who insures the re-insurers, Smith was forthright:

We’re insured by diversification.

Just sayin’.

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Brainfood: Chinese fermented fish, Yeast diversity, Wild papayas, Milpa nutrition, Rare wild sunflower, Albanian pomegranate, Wheat mixtures, Climate change yield decline

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Magical thinking about olives

Luigi nibbled the ancient olives of Gethsemane a couple of days ago, and I’ve tried to hold my tongue since then. Tried and, now, failed. It is such a crappy article, I’m wondering not only why I’m bothering to link to it but also why it had to be that way. OK, so there are some old olive trees in the garden of Gethsemane. Big deal. There are even older olive trees elsewhere.

And this is just garbage:

“Despite their age, the 900-year-old olive trees were found in excellent health, unaffected by lead pollution and bacteria.

Amazingly, the garden’s earth appears to block insects and bacterial proliferation.”

Amazingly, indeed. Naturally not one of the entirely uncritical news reports I read refers to the original scientific paper reporting the results, although amazingly, nor do any of them repeat the amazing claim. It might have been interesting to see how the DNA of the eight sampled trees — identical in every one, according to the reports — matches up against other olives in the area and further afield. But not sufficiently amazing, I suppose to interest the Vatican’s supported scientists.

So why am I bothering? Because sometimes the crap just gets too much.

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Anglo-Saxon smallholder development

Anglo-Saxon village at West Stow. Image taken from Geograph project collection. Copyright owned by Keith Evans. Image licensed for reuse under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 license.
The BBC has a fascinating series of short talks about Anglo-Saxons. Not the people, mind you, but people. Individual men and women, known by name, names such as Hild and Penda and Eadfrith. Well, for the most part known by name, because Helena Hamerow, Professor of Early Medieval Archaeology and Head of the School of Archaeology at the University of Oxford, devotes her 15 minutes to the average Anglo-Saxon farmer, unnamed but not, as it turns out, unknowable. It’s a very entertaining romp through three hundred years or so of medieval agrarian history, worth listening to in its entirety, but the bit that struck me particularly starts at 5 mins in and is a brief mention that in the latter 7th century Anglo-Saxon farmers left behind subsistence and started to produce a surplus for the market. That made me wonder whether there has been any interaction between historians of that period and students of similar, more recent (and continuing), shifts in places like Africa. One might have thought that there could be interesting things that each might learn from the other. Especially since the 7th century Anglo-Saxon peasant didn’t have IFAD, the CGIAR and the Gates Foundation to help the transition along.