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I’ve been on the road all week with a group of scientists who are visiting pear growers in an effort to understand what they need in the way of research to bolster the pear market. My role has been as photographer and videographer, but I’ve also been helping the group maintain a blog. Here is a short clip I shot of a black lab in an orchard playing with a pear.

Honey bee (Apis mellifera) collecting pollen. Photo: Jon Sullivan

The disastrous decline in bees that pollinate most of the world’s food crops will continue unless humans profoundly change their ways, warns a United Nations report released today. More than a dozen factors are linked to the worldwide loss of bees, from the disappearance of flowering plants and the use of memory-damaging insecticides to the global spread of pests, air pollution and climate change.

New kinds of virulent fungal pathogens that can be deadly to bees and other pollinators are now showing up worldwide, migrating from one region to another due to shipments linked to globalization and rapidly growing international trade, the report finds. Read the rest of this entry »

Open Source Ecology is developing and testing the Global Village Construction Set, a set of tools to build replicable, open source, modern, off-grid resilient communities. By weaving open source permacultural and technological cycles together, we intend to provide basic human needs while being good stewards of the land, using resources sustainably, and pursuing right livelihood.

With the gift of openly shared information, we can produce industrial products locally using open source design and digital fabrication. This frees us from the need to participate in the wasteful resource flows of the larger economy by letting us produce our own materials and components for the technologies we use. We see small, independent, land-based economies as means to transform societies, address pressing world issues, and evolve to freedom.

via Open Source Ecology – Open Source Ecology.

Here’s a pictorial how-to for making seed starter boxes out of origami’d newspaper. You can plunk ‘em right in the ground when it’s time. Makes sense to me, especially if you have a lot of fish wrapper but no fish (maybe because you’re a vegetarian).

Catastrophic drought is on the near-term horizon for the capital city of Bolivia, according to new research into the historical ecology of the Andes. If temperatures rise more than 1.5 to 2 degrees Celsius (3 to 5 degrees Fahrenheit) above those of modern times, parts of Peru and Bolivia will become a desert-like setting.

Climatologist Mark Bush of the Florida Institute of Technology led a research team investigating a 370,000-year record of climate and vegetation change in Andean ecosystems.

The scientists used fossilized pollen trapped in the sediments of Lake Titicaca, which sits on the border of Peru and Bolivia.

They found that during two of the last three interglacial periods, which occurred between 130,000-115,0000 years ago and 330,000-320,000 years ago, Lake Titicaca shrank by as much as 85 percent.

Adjacent shrubby grasslands were replaced by desert.

In each case, a steady warming occurred that caused trees to migrate upslope, just as they are doing today.

However, as the climate kept warming, the system suddenly flipped from woodland to desert.

“The evidence is clear that there was a sudden change to a much drier state,” said Bush.

via Catastrophic drought looms for capital city of Bolivia.

Naidu Rayapati examines some suspeciously colored grape leaves.

WINO Magazine just published my article on why leaves turn colors and, more interestingly, why some grape plants’ leaves turn colors. You might think, How lovely, as you’re driving through wine country but, to growers, it’s bad news.

WSU plant pathologist Naidu Rayapati and his colleagues are carefully unraveling the intricate biochemistry and molecular biology of grapevine leafroll disease.

Grapevine leafroll is a complex viral disease that can cause a marked decline in grapevine vigor, grape quality, and fruit productivity, according to Rayapati. The disease can reduce yields as much as 50 percent or even more, depending on the severity of infection. A few years ago, it was estimated that nearly 10 percent of Washington’s vineyards have grapevine leafroll disease. Anecdotal evidence suggests that the disease is more wide spread than previously thought, raising alarm among industry stakeholders. Grapevine leafroll disease accounts for about 60 percent of the production losses of grapes worldwide, Rayapati said.

via Wino Magazine – Experience Washington Wine.

Interested in what makes wine tick? Subscribe to Voice of the Vine, perhaps the world’s only publication focused on exploring the science of wine in terms us lay folk can understand.

I’m late to the news here, but back in June,

the Buckminster Fuller Institute announced the winner of its 2010 Challenge: Allan Savory, who has spent the last 50 years refining and evangelizing for a method of reversing desertification that he calls “holistic management.” The African Center for Holistic Management International, an NGO he helped found, will take home a $100,000 grant.

Savory’s prescription seems shockingly simple–and it’s taken him 50 years of work to convince others that he’s not crazy. The core of Holistic Management is simply grazing local livestock in super dense herds that mimic the grazing patterns of big-game (which have since disappeared). Those livestock in turn till the soil with their hooves and fertilize it with their dung–thus preparing the land for new vegetation in a cycle that was evolved over millions of years.

via Method That Turns Wastelands Green Wins 2010 Buckminster Fuller Challenge | Fast Company. Read the rest of this entry »

I gotz methane comin out both enz, LOL.

This is weird; a U.S. dairy “sustainability” study says that production of fluid milk contributes a mere two percent to the total of U.S. emissions. That’s a good thing? That seems shockingly high to me, considering that all the cars in the world contribute less than 20 percent.

Dairy farmers have focused on sustainable practices on their farms for many generations because it makes good economic sense, and now a new fluid milk carbon footprint study shows those efforts have been effective.

The carbon footprint study measured the greenhouse gas emissions associated with a gallon of milk in the U.S. It showed the total U.S. dairy greenhouse gas emissions are 2 percent of the total U.S. emissions.

The report says efforts at sustainability have been effective but there is no mention of what the impact of fluid milk production was at any time in the past. In other words, no effort at a comparison is made.

Indeed, the news release (link below) resorts to the human interest angle in lieu of actual information:

“My dad started the dairy in the ‘50s, and now the next generation is continuing it,” Clauss noted.

via AgriNews – Livestock – Livestock.

Doing a little background research on an upcoming event at WSU, I found this paper by University of Wisconsin rural sociologist Jack Kloppenburg called “Impeding Dispossession, Enabling Repossession: Biological Open Source and the Recovery of Seed Sovereignty.” The abstract is so interesting I thought I’d post it here:

Corporate appropriation of genetic resources, development and deployment of transgenic varieties, and the global imposition of intellectual property rights are now widely recognized as moments of accumulation by dispossession. Though robust and globally distributed, opposition to such processes have been largely defensive in orientation, and even accommodationist in demands for the development of market mechanisms for compensating those from whom germplasm is being collected. A more radical stance founded on legal and operational mechanisms drawn from the open-source software movement could not only function to impede processes of dispossession, but might actually facilitate the repossession of ‘seed sovereignty’. Implementation of ‘biological open-source’ arrangements could plausibly undergird the creation of a protected commons populated by farmers and plant breeders whose materials would be freely available and widely exchanged, but would be protected from appropriation by those who would monopolize them.

The article is published in the Journal of Agrarian Change, July, 2010. Dr. Kloppenburg will be taking part in a forum at WSU on Oct. 22 on future directions in agricultural sustainability. For more on that, keep an eye on my work website.

Andrew Revkin has been writing about environmentalism’s elephant in the room — population:

Discussions of food policy, climate change, international security and many other global issues often take place in isolation, cut off from consideration of other factors delineating the pinch points as humanity’s population and appetites crest in the next couple of generations.

via Feeding Fewer Than 9 Billion – Dot Earth Blog – NYTimes.com.