Blogs

Seedless bananas and monocultures: a perfectly bad combination

By Andy Dyer / On March 28th, 2016
The Cavendish banana was truly fortunate to have been discovered by humans. Without our adoption, this sweet and attractive—but seedless—banana would have disappeared into the jungle long ago because, as a genetic mistake, it was doomed to be an asexual and probably short-lived anomaly. Instead, like winning the big lottery, the Cavendish became the most famous of all bananas, despite having no evolutionary future whatsoever. However, the time has come, the course has been run, and the Cavendish is now likely to disappear, but only to be replaced in the grocery display by another genetic anomaly, another as-yet-unknown seedless banana.

Saved by Soils?

By Emily Monosson / On September 3rd, 2015
This post originally appeared at Emily Monosson's blog: Evolution in a Toxic World We live in an age of pesticide and antibiotic overuse. One outcome is resistance, increasing pesticide use and contamination and fears that we are entering the “post-antibiotic era”. We are addicted to all sorts of commercial chemicals.

How Local Food Systems Build Resilience for Turbulent Times

By Laurie Mazur / On July 6th, 2015
Consider, for a moment, that lettuce leaf on your plate. It probably traveled a long way to get there—about 1,500 miles, on average.1 In fact, your dinner has probably seen more of the world than you have: the average American meal contains ingredients from at least five countries outside the United States.2 The complex, globalized system that puts food on our plates is a technical and logistical marvel, delivering unprecedented quantities of food at historically low prices.3,4

Life-changing Chemicals

By Emily Monosson / On March 25th, 2015
Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), in green, with human cell, grey.
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Magical Thinking is Not Conservation

By Meghan Bartels / On March 10th, 2015
Post by David Johns, contributor to Keeping the Wild: Against the Domestication of Earth. When humans started to farm 12,000 years ago, they began to change the earth in basic ways, pushing aside other species to make room for themselves and those they favored, killing creatures they didn’t want and domesticating others, altering soils and water courses to suit themselves, and generally replacing ecological complexity with simplified landscapes.

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