Wednesday, August 13, 2008

Perspective

This morning one of the blogs I subscribe, Envirovore , to had an article about seed banks that included:

For example, farmers grew more than 7,000 varieties of apples in the 1800s, yet by the end of the 1900s, only 300 had survived extinction.
And I found myself annoyed. The implication is that humans are devastating thousands of plants species and that global warming is threatening native species. FOLKS, get a gripe. When it comes to agriculture, almost everything we grow was selectively breed from native plants and is NO LONGER the same plant. They are all man made! So if they go away, the Earth has lost NOTHING. I responded thusly:

I completely support these seed banks and grow heirloom crops as much as I can. I would like to see us return to diets more in line with our ancient ancestors. And I would like to point out that those 7,000 varieties of apple were NOT . . . well, natural, for want of a better word. They were all varieties achieved through selective breeding over a mere few thousand years and, therefore, man made. The ancestor of all apples is still alive and well and in no danger of becoming extinct in the near future.

Just trying to put things in perspective. It hurts the environmental movement, I believe, to bewail the loss of an artificial crop growing far from it's natural habitat.