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Zoos in trouble

The financial mess is wreaking havoc with the funding of zoos in the US. Conservation of globally important fauna, you say?

When you’re the mayor of Philadelphia or governor of New York or Minnesota House minority leader, and you’re trying to keep libraries open and children insured and state troopers paid, the preservation of, say, South African’s Humboldt penguin can seem a little less pressing.

Entertainment and education?

…the first is a no-brainer for financial paring, and the second has already been pruned through the elimination of after-school programs and cuts to state college budgets, among others. In this way, the multiple purposes of zoos — a trifecta once highly valued — have today made the institutions a target on government balance sheets.

Are botanical gardens in the same boat? And are genebanks next?

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Top tomatoes totted up

This is a bit old but still worth noting. Mother Earth News came up last year with America’s Top Twenty Tomatoes. They did it by asking “people like Carolyn Male of Salem, N.Y., who has personally grown and tasted more than 2,000 varieties, and Robbins Hail, who tends 600 tomato varieties each season at Bear Creek Farms in Osceola, Mo.” And no doubt Amy Goldman too. Serious tomato people, in other words. I want to know how many of these Jeremy has grown.

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How IR8 was born

Henry M. “Hank” Beachell shared the World Food Prize in 1996 with Gurdev Khush. Both IRRI rice breeders, they were responsible for breeding the first Green Revolution dwarf rice variety, IR8. IRRI’s channel on youtube has just posted an excerpt from a USDA-National Agricultural Library (NAL) video project called Precious Seeds which tells his story. The money quote: “…cooking quality was secondary, milling quality was secondary, the main thing was rice production.”

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Visionary carp farming

The Ecologist has nominated its “10 visionaries with 10 big ideas for a better world.” The full article is behind a paywall, but the names are there, and Jimmie Hepburn gets the nod in agriculture.

That was a new name on me, but he and his wife Penny turn out to have become celebrities of a sort in the UK for running an organic aquaculture business in Devon.

“There’s great interest in the fish,” said Jimmie. “The truth is that we have forgotten how to eat fish like carp. In medieval times they were very popular. Now they are usually grown to huge proportions for anglers who take a photo of them and throw them back. Hardly anyone thinks of them as food.”

Congratulations to the Hepburns.

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Barking up the right tree

The new NWFP-Digest is out. That’s only if you get it by email, however. It’ll be on the website 1 in a couple of days. As ever, lots of interesting links, but the one that really caught my eye was an article on the success of Ugandan bark cloth on the international fashion scene. It was named a “masterpiece of the oral and intangible heritage of humanity” by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in 2005. Called lubugu, it is made from the bark of Ficus natalensis. Interestingly, this species is an invasive in Hawaii. Elsewhere in the Pacific, they make bark cloth — tapa — from Broussonetia papyrifera, but the dyes come from a Ficus, among other species.