From TED: Cary Fowler on Crop Biodiversity

I recall just over a year ago, Kristen and I were at a green living festival in Newmarket, Ontario, and passed by a number of activism booths.  Somewhere in between the Green Party of Canada and several climate change petitioners, there was a lone man asking for signatures to support crop biodiversity.  At the time, we didn't understand the problem, and wrote him off as extreme.  Perhaps we thought he should be focussing on bigger issues like climate change, organics, or renewable energy.

Fast forward a year.  I have experienced a little bit more, read a whole lot more, and grown in my appreciation for the breadth of environmental issues facing us.  I have tasted beautiful, meaty heirloom tomatoes and learned about the risks that come with loss of biodiversity.  So recently, when I saw Cary Fowler's lecture on crop biodiversity, I was able to appreciate why his work is so important.

What Fowler really delves into at the end of his lecture is that -not unlike many other environmental issues- we canot solve any of our major problems without dealing with biodiversity.  Climate change, the water crisis, species extinction, deforestation, renewable energy, and all other similar problems are not easily solved, are require a holistic solution.  That is, we cannot solve any of them properly without dealing with all of them.  Even a superficial evaluation yields that deforestation causes both species extinction and climate change (as does the mining of non-renewables).  Our current farming practices lead to loss of biodiversity, soil errosion, deforestation, greenhouse gases, and the cycle goes on.

The good news is that Fowler, along with his colleagues and the government of Norway, are doing something about it.  I won't ruin the ending for you, so check out the video for yourself.  You can also do something yourself, watching out for Heirloom vegetables, and explore all the varieties that you can find in stores and on farms.  What I suspect you will find is that many of the rarer varieties are not so because they are worse than the grocery store variety.  In many cases, they are much, much, more flavourful and tastier (the best sandwich making tomatoes I have ever had were a big, red, meaty type of Heirloom)

Check it out!