Global Swarming Honeybees: On Seeds and "Human Error"

2.29.2008

On Seeds and "Human Error"

With fully three-quarters of crop biodiversity "extinctified" in the last 100 years through the infinite wisdom of you-know-who, humankind is hedging its bets with a Global Seed Vault near the arctic.

Buried deep in the permafrost (which global warming may ultimately render not-so-perma), with a bomb-proof entrance, the vault is a repository for crop seeds from all over the world, a kind of biological Plan B in case a natural disaster or "human error" (talk about euphemisms!) wipes out all the seeds on earth.

For more info, check out the New York Times slideshow, or read the article, or see Andrew Revkin's DotEarth blog.

1. Patterns of seeds..., 2. The Seeds of Our Bones, 3. Seeds of Change, 4. Seeds

1 comment:

Anonymous said...: You should consider getting a hive scale and taking daily measurements of the weight. There is an interesting article this month in American Bee Journal about how changes in hive weight can tell scientists all sorts of things about climate change. NASA even has a program you can contribute data to. Learn more here.; March 2, 2008 at 5:11 PM

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)

Quotes of Note

"The cynicism that you have is not your real soul."—Yoko Ono
"The country that elected George Bush — sort of — because he seemed like he’d be more fun to have a beer with than Al Gore or John Kerry is really getting its comeuppance."—Gail Collins
"How do you inherit the earth? By being awake."—Joni Mitchell
Causing the right amount of trouble is an art form.”—Judith Coche
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away."—Philip K. Dick
"A meddling beekeeper is said to be the bees' worst enemy, and this may be true."—Ormond Aebi, The Art and Adventure of Beekeeping
"For too long we have been locked in an old fashioned, reductionist approach, dealing with bees as if they were mere machines created solely for our benefit, instead of highly evolved, wild creatures, with which we are privileged to work."—Phil Chandler, The Barefoot Beekeeper
"Neither among the bees nor any other animals that have a ray of our intellect, do things happen with the precision our books record. Too many circumstances remain unknown to us."—Maurice Maeterlinck
"In these times, acceleration spoils everything."—Heinz-Klaus Metzger, Musicologist
"Whatever lofty things you might accomplish today, you will do them only because you first ate something that grew out of dirt."—Barbara Kingsolver
"Healthy, happy bees don't need any additives."—Dee A. Lusby
"When the bird and the book disagree, always believe the bird."—Audubon
"There is a certain valid moment for every cloud."—Paul Strand

"For the bee, honey is the ultimate reality. It represents the fulfillment of her life mission, the triumph over her enemies, the continuity of the hive, the justification for working herself to death. Honey is to bees what money in the bank is to people—a measure of prosperity and well-being. But there is nothing abstract or symbolic about honey, as there is about money, which has no intrinsic value. There is more real wealth in a pound of honey, or a load of manure for that matter, than all the currency in the world. We often destroy the world's real wealth to create an illusion of wealth, confusing symbol and substance."—Wm. Longgood, The Queen Must Die