Biodiversity in your garden

In the face of a changing climate, we will need crops which can withstand factors such as drought, warmer temperatures, or increased rainfall, and in the face of dramatically decreasing crop-biodiversity, scientists are turning to backyard gardens for solutions and inspiration.

A New York Times article (Backyard Gardens Shelter Europe’s Orphan Seeds) describes the challenges facing scientists who are trying to catalog unique (and rapidly disappearing) crops, many of which exist only in a particular person’s backyard garden. As these gardeners (typically elderly) die, they take with them their knowledge, experience, and enthusiasm for their crops. With no-one else to care for their gardens, their crop die off and the pool of genetic biodiversity grows increasingly smaller.

Three-quarters of biodiversity in crops has been lost in the last century, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization. In Mexico, only 20 percent of the corn types that existed in the 1930s exist today. In the United States, 95 percent of cabbage varieties and 94 percent of pea types are gone.

What I find interesting are the parallels to the larger issue of climate change, particularly energy. Specifically, while we tend to think in terms of vast, sweeping changes—an all solar/hydrogen/wind/nuclear economy—we should instead be looking for niche solutions that are appropriate to the unique characteristics of a particular location. We cannot expect everyone to drive biodiesel cars, because there simply isn’t enough french fry grease to go around. Rather, biodiesel plays (or should play) an important a role as a component of an alternative fuel ecosystem.

Similarly, we should shift our thinking away from monolithic production models for food (think corn and cows), and embrace regional biodiversity. That means that your corn might not look like the corn that grows around my part of the country, and my tomatoes taste a little different as well, but that’s supposed to be one of the joys of food, isn’t it? Since when should we give in to the McDonald’s notion that a hamburger (or any other food) should taste the same everywhere in the world?