Human Flower Project

Ecology

Tuesday, March 02, 2010

Who’s Protecting Lake Naivasha?

Lake Naivasha is at the center of Kenya’s flower production, but now, despite a self-regulating flower council, the lake’s fish are dying. Can the industry adequately police itself?

Workers at one of the flower farms of the Lake Naivasha region of Kenya: horticulture employs half a million Kenyan people.
Photo: The East African

Kenya’s flower industry, after years of success that have induced many other African nations to jump into floral production, took a big hit last year. According to the East African, income in this sector was down a third last year. Flower council chief Jane Ngige reports that for “the first time in close to 20 years, the flower industry has registered negative growth.”

In the past month there’s been more bad news, the mysterious die-off of more than 1000 fish in Lake Naivasha, where the flower farms are concentrated. Both Kenyan environmentalists and now the national authorities are focussing their investigation on several flower farms, which many say have been flouting standards and polluting the lake.

From what we can tell, the flower industry is completely self-regulated in Kenya, an arrangement that has served many law-abiding farms—and their employees—well. Most Kenyan flowers sell in Europe, where there’s strong demand for produce—including flowers—that’s responsibly grown and traded. But Europe’s flower sales have steeply declined during the 18+month global economic downturn: this blotch on the reputation of Kenyan flowers couldn’t come at a worse time. As well as the health of the lake, there are a reported 500,000 jobs at stake in Kenya’s horticulture sector.

The Kenyan growers association hopes to protect its system of self-regulation (see Ngige’s editorial), but that system seems to have failed. As a native Kentuckian who’s seen what happened when coal operators policed mining, we have to ask, could the Kenyan government—or some other more independent authority—do better? Would it do better?

Saturday, February 27, 2010

Down on the Digital-Dirt Divide

For plantsman Allen Bush, it all began by getting shooed out of the house. After digging holes to an imaginary China, he’s actually gone there, collecting rare species and befriending rarer horticulturalists from across the world.

A youth spent in the woods leads to self-esteem, and in some cases, to a career and schanpps, also
Photo: Jonathan Prescott

By Allen Bush

I wish children could experience the same simple pleasures I enjoyed over fifty years ago. They should try to dig a hole to China.  My big adventure was slowed by summer heat and hard clay, but I finally busted through, on a plant hunting trip in 2001. Memories of abandoned, shallow craters from childhood expeditions in Louisville are nearly as good as Sichuan itself turned out to be.

Back in those early years, I imagined I could poke through by noon and be home by dark. But the only way kids are going to dig to China now is if they hack into Chinese cyberspace. American youngsters can’t be bothered with a spade. And they’re certainly not spending much time outside, unless you count a precious few minutes misspent with older brothers and sisters who stand shivering at the back door catching a smoke.
 
The digital-dirt divide worries me. Edward O. Wilson understands outdoor lessons: “The Secret Places of childhood, whether a product of instinct or not, at the very least predispose us to acquire certain preferences and undertake practices of later value in survival. The hideaways bond us with place and they nourish our individuality and self-esteem,” Wilson writes in The Future of Life. ”If played out in the natural environment, they also bring us close to the earth and nature in ways than can engender a lifelong love of both.”
 
Generation Z may learn again how to dirty their mitts and swing on a wild grape vine across a skinny creek, but it doesn’t look promising.

Among American children, ages eight to eighteen, more than seven and half hours are spent each day wired to smartphones, music/video devices, computers and televisions – sometimes multitasking several digital gizmos at once—according to a study conducted by the Kaiser Family Foundation. And there’s no “Thank God It’s Friday” for this demographic. Bleary eyes are focused 24/7 all week long—which amounts to a whopping fifty-three hours —barely seeing the light of day. Stop and smell the roses? Doubtful.
 

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Tuesday, February 23, 2010

The Plants of Avatar

Following through on a filmmaker’s vision, a botanist hypothesizes plants with darts of poison and roots that grow upward—the flora of Pandora.

Exploring the plant and animal and ?? life on Pandora, in James Cameron’s movie Avatar
Image: via Scifi Scoop

By James H. Wandersee and Renee M. Clary
EarthScholars™ Research Group

Avatar, the current 3-D blockbuster film written and directed by James Cameron, is the first movie ever to gross $2 billion globally. You’ve probably seen it, or at least talked to someone who has. Considered a rare breakthrough in cinematic technology for its advances in 3-D viewing and stereoscopic filmmaking, Avatar was made with cameras specially designed for the film’s production.

This science fiction film takes place in the year 2154, on Pandora, a moon of Polyphemus, a giant gas planet orbiting a star beyond Earth’s neighborhood, Alpha Centauri. Pandora is inhabited by the Na’vi, a ten-foot-tall, blue-skinned species of wise humanoids, who are linked in equilibrium with all of the moon’s nature, worshiping an ecological goddess called Eywa—the tree-nexus of the moon’s wireless “biological internet.” The film’s title points to the genetically engineered Na’vi bodies used by several of the story’s human characters to interact with the natives of Pandora. In Cameron’s future vision, technology can inject human intelligence into a remote biological body and activate it.

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Wednesday, December 30, 2009

Unseasonably

Allen Bush describes a late fall and early winter of surprises in the garden, and then the inexorable turn.

Arum italicum
Nov. 28, 2009
Louisville, KY, unorthodox holiday greenery
Photo: Allen Bush

By Allen Bush

You can’t fool Mother Nature but you could have fooled me. A few early spring flowering perennials got tricked into late autumn bloom this year. I was delighted with violet colored clusters on Tradescantia virginiana, the Trinity flower (Father, Son and Holy Smoke!). The pink mallow-like blooms of Callirhoe involucrata were nearby. They both popped-out near the back alley, in late November, as the half moon shone bright and the nighttime temperatures hovered in the fifties.

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