You Are What You Eat

The invention and global spread of agriculture is one of the most profound events in the history of the earth.  It  dramatically altered the distribution and abundance of plants and animals as well as the fundamental bio-geochemical cycles that regulate the planet.  There is now evidence that it also changed the genetic makeup of humans.  Check out this NYT article that describes a recently published study that has for the first time linked human genomic changes (i.e. evolution) with agriculture: http://nyti.ms/1jgdzZC
The actual scientific paper is here: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature16152.html

The Least Deadliest Catch

Almost all the food that we consume is the product of domestication, cultivation, and husbandry.  The last great exception to this is seafood, much of which is still harvested directly from oceans, lakes and streams just like our hunter gatherer ancestors did.  Well, actually not very much like they did at all.  We now catch ocean and freshwater species on a scale and intensity that threatens  not only of the existence of the species we catch, but also the ecosystems of which they are part. One potential solution is to make our use of marine resources more like terrestrial food production, i.e. farming.  Of course, whether farming can help solve solutions or create new ones depends on the details of design and implementation. 

Check out this blog post by Liz Camuti of the American Society of Landscape Architects that describes the work of Greenwave: http://dirt.asla.org/2015/11/03/ocean-farm-wins-2015-buckminster-fuller-challenge/

They recently won the Buckminster Fuller Institute Challenge.  Greenwave’s winning project was the “world’s first multi-species 3-D ocean farm". Do you think that this setup is a problem solver?