25 April 06
Seeds Of Resistance
I just heard Vandana Shiva give a wonderful talk about sustainable agriculture and globalization in a presentation organized by the California Student Sustainability Coalition. She is a sustainability activist and ecofeminist who has been working on agricultural issues in India for over 25 years, her original field being physics. She described two waves of industrialization in India, the first being the Green Revolution, which left much violence in its wake due to people’s loss of empowerment, particularly in the Punjab, and the second being globalization, exemplified by a recent US-India bilateral agreement rather frighteningly entitled the “Knowledge Initiative On Agriculture”.
Not surprisingly, such knowledge refers mainly to intellectual property (a term, she notes, only came into use after WTO; before then patents, trademarks, copyrights, etc. were quite separate concepts) and the most egregious misappropriation here being the patenting of seeds. It is simply morally wrong and ontologically suspect for thousands of years worth of human creativity that has gone into crop selection to be sequestered away in a corporate patent, leading to the absurdity of it being a crime for farmers to save their own seeds.
But such an absurdity has within it an obvious path of resistance. She is the founder of a movement called Navdanya which aims to promote biological and cultural diversity through nonviolent agriculture. One major project of this movement has been saving seeds, and they have established 34 seed banks in 13 different states across the country. Next year, in commemoration of the 150th anniversary of the Revolt of 1857, they will be burning Bt cotton seeds and distributing seeds from their own banks! (She told an enlightening anecdote from the time of the British: it’s curious how all the English names for the pulses of India have to have an animal in them—why, there’s chick peas, pigeon peas, horse gram…The English just couldn’t get their brain around the idea of diverse vegetarian protein crops.)
At the end she quoted Wendell Berry—eating is a political act. My favorite question response concerned how do you keep up hope? By engaging, she said. Be less concerned with brutal dominating power structures, but more with the creative power within each of us.
18 April 06
Good Year for Beavers
We went for a walk this evening. The wind had died down and the sun was setting over the coast range—such a pleasantness after all the rain we’ve been getting.
The creek is still well over its banks, making the eucalyptus trees wonder whether they’re mangroves. The water is turbid and fast, and there were a few lads fishing as we walked across the bridge.
Just before the railway undercrossing, we spotted a beaver swimming around an “island” of willows—normally well up on the bank. There’s so much for them to eat this year. I hope they do well. It’s a splendid thing to see almost in your yard…
16 April 06
Flu Symposium Day
Thanks to the efforts of Pica and many others, the avian flu symposium that the Yolo Audubon Society organized for today was a great success. Over two hundred people packed the Davis Senior Center for five hours worth of presentations and discussions. We can all use education in risk evaluation: even without a human pandemic, people will be reevaluating their interactions with birds, both domestic and wild. It seems quite likely that the high pathogenicity strain of avian flu H5N1 (not as yet mutated into a form capable of causing a pandemic) will arrive in North America shortly, perhaps this summer. Once this virus establishes itself in local bird populations, people will be reacting in sensible (washing hands more thoroughly) and not-so-sensible (in Italy, tens of thousands of poultry farmers are now out of work because people scared of avian flu have stopped eating chicken.)
The last speaker, who spoke about planning in the private sector, provided a link to an excellent mailing list that gives day-by-day reports on avian flu and other infectious diseases. This is ProMED-mail, sponsored by the International Society for Infectious Diseases. There’s a pretty high volume of messages on this list, but it’s fascinating stuff.
11 April 06
Prairie Dog Companion
My workshop has been at the Denver Federal Center, which is a 670-acre site in Lakewood, very spread out, with lots of open space between the buildings (one of which is 19 acres in size!). Walking back to the hotel yesterday, I saw my first prairie dogs! I’m not sure which species they were, of the three in Colorado, but I’m now quite a fan of the genus. On the way back today, I sketched several, along with an extremely cooperative rabbit: I’ll post a sketch or two when I return.
8 April 06
More Packing
Got back from the coast this afternoon having delivered another carload of things from my mother’s house to various points. We had a good time: managed to watch some video in the “toss” pile of Northanger Abbey, which was a good silly gothic thing to do among the rubble. I managed not to forget the iPod this time so I sang all the way there and all the way home. I’m tired but singing is good for the soul and it reminds me I should do this more.
In Davis we were able to catch up with Ron of Toad in the Hole and Joe and a friend of theirs who had come up for the UC Davis Arboretum plant sale. Some good Swainson’s hawk sightings with them, including two copulations. Ron is encouraging me to plant in half-barrels… out of the reach of gophers, and easy to tent against spraying.
3 April 06
Isn't There Supposed To Be A La Niña?
Or that’s what NOAA tells us. You’d never know it from the weather these past few days. I paddled my way to work this morning, and we’ve had 0.80 inches of rain in the past day. It all evens out though—we’re not that much over normal for the season (as of yesterday, 0.40 inches over the normal to date of 17.47 inches).
2 April 06
Cold Canyon Watercoloring
We got a quick trip in before the rain arrived this afternoon. I find I’m a very impatient person and will never manage this fiendishly difficult medium, but it was a good time…
31 March 06
Moving On
I’m at my mother’s on the Northern California coast. There are boxes everywhere. This afternoon I went through twelve photo albums cataloging my youth. And my brother’s and sister’s. Choose what you want, she said. The rest’s going in the trash.
She’s moving to Maine to be near my sister and the grandkids. It’s the right time to move, while she can still make friends, start a new life.
I’m thinking not having her around’s going to leave a little hole in mine, though…
26 March 06
Our Solano County Bird Square
The Napa-Solano Audubon Society recently put out a call for volunteers for their project to develop a breeding bird atlas for Solano County. In these atlases, the study region is broken up into grid cells that are searched for bird species that breed therein. I have been interested in participating in such a survey for some time now, and since we live in Solano County (though the extreme northeastern corner of the county), this is a good chance.
We have been assigned a 5 km by 5 km grid block directly south of us, in easy bicycling range of here. This block is a uniformly flat stretch of farmland. Today was our first real outing into the grid block (I took a look yesterday, but it was too windy and starting to sprinkle). It’s not sufficient just to record the presence of a bird species: instead we need to find actual evidence that the species is breeding, such as sighting them at or around a nest. We had no confirmed breeding species today, but did have three probable species, the best sighting being a pair of white-tailed kites displaying near a farmhouse. The season is just beginning, and we’ll have many more forays to come.
25 March 06
Gobblers in our Field
They don’t belong here. They have been introduced by Fish & Game for hunters. They are wreaking havoc on oak woodland ecosystems. But I do love to see them…