Posts by author:

Gary Paul Nabhan

The cosmopolitan weeds of the horticultural world

February 12, 2010

Globalization of the Siwan food economy certainly began some time ago, but it appears that the homogenization of Siwan horticulture with that of the rest of the Mediterranean has lagged far behind that of other desert oases. Indeed, when Vavilov visited the French horticulturist Louis Trabut in Algiers in the summer of 1926, Trabut had [...]

Read the full article →

A measure of resilience

February 10, 2010

With Vavilov poised to enter Abyssinia, we rejoin Gary Paul Nabhan, at Siwa Oasis because Vavilov couldn’t be.
One key factor [in fostering the conservation of agricultural diversity in the oasis] is that the traditional mix of crops grown within a multi-storied oasis garden offers Siwans a measure of resilience that industrial monoiculture of grains or [...]

Read the full article →

Commercial cultivars come to Siwa oasis — and increase agricultural biodiversity

February 3, 2010

Next to dates, olives have long been the second-most important perennial crop in Siwa. The Hamed olive from Siwa is world-renowned, and yet in recent years, European investors have introduced into Siwa many Kalamata trees from Greece and other cultivars from Spain. Because Egyptian labor costs far less than that in Southern Europe, these investors [...]

Read the full article →

Dates from Siwa oasis

February 1, 2010

The oasis of Siwa … leaves a strange impression, but perhaps one that is different and more paradoxical than that which Vavilov sensed in oases further west. There is at once a sense of uninterrupted continuity with the Berber oases of antiquity, with the mud walls of the Shali village compound rising high above thousands [...]

Read the full article →

Gary Nabhan visits the oasis of Siwa

January 29, 2010

Unlike Vavilov — who had to content himself with sending the Italian student Gudzoni — Gary Nabhan was able to visit Egypt himself. Drawing on previous expeditions by the plant explorer Robert Humphrey Forbes, Nabhan found that much was the same, and much had changed. This is the first of his posts on Siwa.
Eighty years [...]

Read the full article →

The relevance of Vavilov in 2010

January 20, 2010

Gary Nabhan was in Russia last week to receive the Vavilov Memorial Medal at the Vavilov Institute of General Genetics in Moscow. He is only the second foreign scientist to receive this honour. In addition to delivering a lecture on Origins, Dispersal and Conservation of Domesticated Plants and Animals in Moscow and, later, St Petersburg, [...]

Read the full article →

From breadbasket to basket case

May 29, 2009

It was dawning on Vavilov that he had arrived in Lebanon in the absolute worst of times. Over the previous two decades, these lands had suffered from wars, locust plagues, economic disruptions, and out-migrations that had reduced the pre-1900 population by more than 60 percent. But the worst problem facing the Arabian farmers and herders [...]

Read the full article →

Wheat in Lebanon

May 13, 2009

The cultivated variety that Vavilov described near the village of Hawran is still grown to some extent, as are a few varieties such as Salamouni, which is ideally suited for making bulgur, a cracked cereal used in tabbouleh. However, while the locally adapted varieties suited to bulgur and another traditional dish, kishk, have persisted in [...]

Read the full article →

I created twenty-seven new varieties from wild apples

April 20, 2009

Less than 30% of the original stands of apples in the forests of Kazakhstan remain. Instead of accepting such losses and assuming that protecting the forest remnants is enough, Aimak Dzangaliev has another future in mind for the apples of Kazakhstan. He has proposed forest restoration in the best remaining habitats, employing some twenty-seven clones [...]

Read the full article →

An abyss of genetic loss among apples

April 17, 2009

When Vavilov came back to Leningrad in November of 1929, he worked for another year and a half on a monograph entitled, The wild relatives of fruit trees of the Asian part of the USSR and Caucasus, and the problem of the origin of fruit trees. Three-quarters of a century later, Professor Dzangaliev, his wife [...]

Read the full article →

← Previous Entries