Intellectually, Vavilov’s greatest contribution to science may have been his articulation of the concept of centers of diversity; although he first mapped them as centers of genetic variation with domesticated crops and their wild relatives, he implicitly understood that such cradles of agricultural civilization developed in regions rich in wild plant diversity and in the linguistic diversity of land-based cultures. Although many of these same regions began to be called “hotspots of biodiversity” by prominent conservation biologists after Norman Myers released his own map in 1988, few of them acknowledge that these regions elucidate many of the same places that Vavilov first mapped. Worse yet, some have used the concept of “hotspots” to strategize means of usurping biodiverse lands from their original stewards, or bioprospecting at the expense of indigenous farmers and foragers who have long-managed this diversity. In contrast, Vavilov began to articulate a ground-breaking principle of plant geography that implicitly includes humans rather than ignoring them, which he best articulated in a book published in 1935:
“… the distribution of plant species on earth is not uniform. There are a number of regions in the world which possess exceptionally large numbers of varieties … As far as the crops [concentrated in each of these exceptional regions] are concerned, it is possible to witness the great role played by Man in the selection of the best cultivated forms.”
Vavilov not only paved the way for biogeographers to map the patterns of biological diversity, he was also the first to note that bio-diverse regions also harbored considerable cultural diversity. The individuals participating in these diverse cultures expressed themselves through many indigenous languages and dialects that encoded an enormous wealth of traditional ecological knowledge. Vavilov and Alphonse de Candolle were the first two biogeographers to use linguistic data from diverse cultures as aids in discerned where certain crops originated. In addition, Vavilov proposed that members of various dialect groups sometimes selected their crop varieties for different purposes and environments, and named them differently to encode these distinctions.
Extracted from Where our Food Comes From by Gary Paul Nabhan
and used with permission.
