Our ancestors practiced a sort of genetic engineering through millennia of selective breeding of plants and animals, cultivating thousands of species and creating hundreds of thousands of distinct varieties.
That barnyard biodiversity has been getting hammered for a couple centuries now, but in the last forty years, the onslaught has become intense, as government subsidies, international trade pressures and corporate self-interest have combined to make our fields and farms increasingly sterile places, genetically, where the locally-adapted, distinct varieties that once made up a successful farming community are replaced by fewer and fewer often genetically-indentical species. As a result, many of those rare breeds and heirloom varieties have gone extinct. This is the biodiversity crisis we often forget about.
But that may be changing. Beyond those who advocate for replacing our "shrinking food basket" with a wider variety of traditional crops grown in traditional ways, there is increasing recognition that a smart breeding approach to reconceptualizing agriculture will demand access not only to as wide a variety of genetically-distinct crops as possible, but also their wild cousins.
We write a lot about food issues here on Worldchanging. And we track a lot of stories about agricultural biodiversity.
One great resource for doing that is the Swedish-based Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog, which I recently added to my blog diet. Many of the stories you'll find there have been written up elsewhere (often on Worldchanging), but I don't know of any other news-aggregator-style blog that covers the subject so well. If you're into this subject, you should be reading it.
