Well that was fun. Along with a few others, I live tweeted The Big Nature Debate which took place at the Natural History Museum in London on the afternoon of 7 October. You can get a flavour by checking the naturedb8 hashtag, 1 but I wasn’t very consistent in using it, and neither were the others, so you might need to hunt around for more, untagged tweets. Best point made? Well, apart from the one about weevils being important too (as pollinators of oil palm, among other things), that biodiversity conservation needs to talk to agriculture. I think that came from Professor Jon Hutton, Director of the United Nations Environment Programme World Conservation Monitoring Centre. And vice versa. As pointed out using crop wild relatives as an example by Paul Smith, Director of the Millennium Seed Bank, Kew Royal Botanic Gardens.
When agriculture is one with neither nature nor people
Remember our recent discussion here about the disconnect between the biodiversity conservation and agrobiodiversity communities? 2 Here’s further evidence, not that it is needed. An article from IUCN entitled When nature and people are one, on the link between human and biological diversity. Which entirely fails to mention agriculture. Even as a bad thing.
Eating Your Environment lectures kick off
Quite a lineup for this lecture series on Food: Eating Your Environment at U Washington. Every Thursday from 5 October to 30 November. Anyone going to any of them and would like to tell us about it?
Featured: Genebank funding
Dag lengthens the list of genebanks in some kind of trouble.
Also the Nordic Genetic Resources Center (NordGen, formerly the Nordic Gene Bank, NGB) face a thrilling end of the year balance this year. Even after heavy cuts in the operational costs during 2010 (and 2009) the genebank does not expect to be able to meet the budget for the end of the year financial status.
Where will it end?
A threatened genebanks roundup
It’s clear genebanks around the world are having a hard time. The poster child just at the moment is Pavlovsk, of course. But we’ve heard lately that Australia’s genebanks are also threatened. And we’ve also been following a similar situation over the past several months at Wellesbourne in the UK. Why is this happening? As chance would have it, I think a couple of recent posts here may hold some clues.
I think, for example, that our failure in the genetic resources conservation community to quantify — or at least communicate — costs properly is not, er, helping. And we still have a long way to go in facilitating the process of getting conserved material where it is most needed. So, maybe we’ve also seen in the past few days the answer to genebank funding. But that doesn’t mean we can ease up on getting our costs straight, and getting our material known and out there, which among other things means sorting out Genebank Database Hell.
Well, there’s another thing. We do also need to admit to ourselves that maybe, just maybe, not all genebanks are necessary. I hope Pavlovsk, the Australian genebanks and Wellesbourne survive and thrive. It will set a bad precedent if they go under, a very bad precedent, and in any case a genebank is more than just brick, mortar and seeds. It’s people and expertise, and we should fight for them. But if it’s not to be, I hope at least the unique material they have been conserving so diligently for so long makes its way speedily and safely to some other home, where its long-term conservation and availability will perhaps be better ensured.