It is more apparent every day that we are entering a new era of food sustainability, not just for ourselves personally, but for the planet. When I read articles like the one that follows, I am encouraged in my own home gardening ethic. I think it is going to be imperative that we each grow our own garden, for lower cost food, for organic food that tastes better and is better for you, and for the sheer joy of getting out there and relishing the sunshine and all growing things. Most individuals in small European towns have for decades grown their own vegetables, herbs and flowers. It's a fact of life, and makes a great deal of sense. We here in the US have become jaded in our ability to get what we want fast at the nearest supermarket. But for the most part, all those packaged and processed foods in the center aisles are either bad for us because they contain chemicals we can't identify as good for us, and corn syrup or other variants of corn sugars that are big culprits in the obesity epidemic. If you look at the labels, corn sugars are in everything, and they change the name at various times to offset our reactions to it. But marketing has us hoodwinked and we begin to believe that because the packaging says its great, it must be.
We recently bought some non-organic apples, because they were selling at a lower price. When I bit into one at home, I put it down, looked at it, and wondered what was wrong with it. It tasted like cardboard. Then I remembered....it just couldn't replace that wonderful crispy natural sweetness of an organic apple...what apples are supposed to taste like....what I remember them tasting like on the farm. At one time there were over 800 varieties of apples. Now we have the few that you see on the supermarket shelves, unless you are growing heritage varieties yourself. And those few varieties in the supermarket are denatured with chemicals. So how do we know they are still good for us? Try organic. Better yet, get your own columnar apple trees and plant them in pots on your deck or in your yard. In a couple of years you will have an easy to care for dwarf apple "tree" which bears abundant, large, sweet and juicy apples.
And think about biodiversity. We need to save our plant species. It is healthier for us, for the planet, and for the future of food.
From The Scientific American by David Biello
California-meadow BIODIVERSITY: Native wildflowers add diversity to
this prairie-like California grassland.
In 1994 biologists seeded patches of grassland in Cedar Creek, Minn.
Some plots got as many as 16 species of grasses and other plants—and
some as few as one. In the first few years plots with eight or more
species fared about as well as those with fewer species, suggesting
that a complex mix of species—what is known as biodiversity—didn't
affect the amount of a plot's leaf, blade, stem and root (or biomass,
as scientists call it). But when measured over a longer span—more than
a decade—those plots with the most species produced the greatest
abundance of plant life.
"Different species differ in how, when and where they acquire water,
nutrients and carbon, and maintain them in the ecosystem. Thus, when
many species grow together, they have a wider set of traits that allow
them to gain the resources needed," explains ecologist Peter Reich of
the University of Minnesota, who led this research to be published in
Science on May 4. This result suggests "no level of diversity loss can
occur without adverse effects on ecosystem functioning." That is the
reverse of what numerous studies had previously found, largely because
those studies only looked at short-term outcomes.
The planet as a whole is on the cusp of what some researchers have
termed the sixth mass extinction event in the planet's history: the
wiping out of plants, animals and all other forms of life due to human
activity. The global impact of such biodiversity loss is detailed in a
meta-analysis led by biologist David Hooper of Western Washington
University. His team examined 192 studies that looked at species
richness and its effect on ecosystems. "The primary drivers of
biodiversity loss are, in rough order of impact to date: habitat loss,
overharvesting, invasive species, pollution and climate change,"
Hooper explains. Perhaps unsurprisingly, "biodiversity loss in the
21st century could rank among the major drivers of ecosystem change,"
Hooper and his colleagues wrote in Nature on May 3. (Scientific
American is part of Nature Publishing Group.)
Losing just 21 percent of the species in a given ecosystem can reduce
the total amount of biomass in that ecosystem by as much as 10
percent—and that's likely to be a conservative estimate. And when more
than 40 percent of an ecosystem's species disappear—whether plant,
animal, insect, fungi or microbe—the effects can be as significant as
those caused by a major drought. Nor does this analysis take into
account how species extinction can both be driven by and act in
concert with other changes—whether warmer average temperatures or
nitrogen pollution. In the real world environmental and biological
changes "are likely to be happening at the same time," Hooper admits.
"This is a critical need for future research."
The major driver of human impacts on the rest of life on this
planet—whether through clearing forests or dumping excess fertilizer
on fields—is our need for food. Maintaining high biomass from farming
ecosystems, which often emphasize monocultures (single species) while
also preserving biodiversity—some species now appear only on
farmland—has become a "key issue for sustainability," Hooper notes,
"if we're going to grow food for nine billion people on the planet in
the next 40 to 50 years."
Over the long term, maintaining soil fertility may require nurturing,
creating and sparing plant and microbial diversity. After all,
biodiversity itself appears to control the elemental cycles—carbon,
nitrogen, water—that allow the planet to support life. Only by acting
in conjunction with one another, for example, can a set of grassland
plant species maintain healthy levels of nitrogen in both soil and
leaf. "As soil fertility increases, this directly boosts biomass
production," just as in agriculture, Reich notes. "When we reduce
diversity in the landscape—think of a cornfield or a pine plantation
or a suburban lawn—we are failing to capitalize on the valuable
natural services that biodiversity provides."
At least one of those services is largely unaffected, however,
according to Hooper's study—decomposition. Which means the bacteria
and fungi will still happily break down whatever plants are left after
this sixth extinction. But thousands of unique species have already
been lost, most unknown even to science—a rate that could halve the
total number of species on the planet by 2100, according to
entomologist E. O. Wilson of Harvard University. Ghosts of species
past haunt ecosystems worldwide, which have already lost not just one
or another type of grass or roundworm but also some of their strength
at sustaining life as a whole.
