The World Tomorrow

Despite (or perhaps because of) how adaptable humans are, we tend to have a hard time planing for the future.  This hinders our ability to grapple with issues that have no or few immediate impacts, but that potentially have big long term ones.  Climate change is one of these issues.  Even climate scientists and policy makers who are thinking about the long term impacts of climate change tend to have a short frame of reference relative to the history of life on the planet.  A paper that just came out in Nature Climate Change, tries to broaden our time horizon a bit.  It summarizes some of the predictions for what a warmer world (caused by us now) will look like 10,000 years from now.  You can read the actual article here: http://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nclimate2923.html

and a news summary from the Washington Post here:

http://wpo.st/JBGA1

That story has a cool video from NASA showing actual data on the more recent sea level changes that have already happened over the last 23 years.

Age of the Humans?

As the class readings this week show, there is a lot of evidence that humans have profoundly altered the planet.  This BBC article:

http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-35259194
reports on the scientific panel of experts that is trying to decide if these changes are profound enough to officially declare a new geologic epoch called the Anthropocene.  The panel is also trying to settle details like when exactly the Anthropocene should be defined as starting.
 The Panel's interim findings have just been published in Science:
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/351/6269/aad2622

Currently, we are residing in the epoch classified as the Holocene that began about 12,000 years ago, which was preceded by the Pleistocene.

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?

Down the old mill road

Perhaps no other crop exemplifies the commodification, industrialization,and globalization of agriculture more than wheat.  But the seeming growing desire to return to a more regional and diversified food system is even beginning to show up in this poster child commodity.  Check out this recent story from the NYT:

http://nyti.ms/1GM2AlL

It profiles the work of Dr. Stephen Jones, director of the Bread Lab, at the Washington State University campus in Mount Vernon, Wash.  It also provides a brief but fascinating history of wheat growing, milling, and bread making.

A prickly pale gray lawn

Lush green lawns are arguably as much a part of the iconic Southern California landscape as palm trees and swimming pools.  As the state suffers under a historic drought, the appeal of lawns may be waning.  Check out this article from the New York Times: http://nyti.ms/1LQRpF8

Crop Insurance

A part of the world's crop genetic diversity is stored in a network of collections.  We have one right here in Corvallis: a branch of the National Clonal Germplasm Repository.  http://www.ars.usda.gov/main/site_main.htm?modecode=20-72-15-00

The focus of the Corvallis branch (from their website):

This unit was established to collect, maintain, distribute, evaluate, and document germplasm of hazelnut, strawberry, hop, mint, pear, currant, gooseberry, blackberry, raspberry, blueberry, cranberry, and specialty temperate fruit and nut crops and their wild relatives.

Similar repositories exist around the world focusing on different crops.  They act very much like lending libraries.  They store the genetic diversity of crops partly as an archive, but also to make that diversity more accessible to researchers and plant breeders.

One important part of this network is the so called doomsday seed vault that is built into a mountain in Norway's high arctic.  The role of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault is to hold backup copies from the other germplasm repositories around the world in case something horrible happens to one of the nodes of the germplasm network.  The frigid and dry arctic location was chosen to make it less susceptible to day to day mishaps like power cuts.  Now, just ten years after the seed bank was established, they have had a request for a withdrawal.  The Syrian civil war has damaged the seed bank housed in Aleppo, and put the collection there in serious jeopardy.  The seed bank is relocating to Beirut, Lebanon and they want to restock the new location with seeds from the Svalbard vault.  Check out this Reuters story here: http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/09/21/us-mideast-crisis-seeds-idUSKCN0RL1KA20150921