Map your Recipe [new website][updated]

Map your Recipe does a simple thing: enter the ingredients of a recipe and it will show you where the vegetables that went into it were first domesticated.

Map your Recipe shows that we are firmly after the Columbian Exchange and that no national cuisine relies only on truly local ingredients. But with interesting local patterns of usage and borrowing.

Map your Recipe will ignore those ingredients that can not be pinpointed to a specific centre of origin. 

Mail questions and/or suggestions to wilfriedhoujebek who has a yahoo account.

whatever you say - say nothing

In a few weeks I hope to show a class of media history students that real hard-headed politics in contested zones won't be influenced by feel-good-media & like-it-on-facebook optimism. Instead I will tell about Gerry Adams masterminding secret negotiations with the UK government while being simultaneously on the board of the Provisional IRA's army command and representing his district as a Sinn Feinn MP. A dark shadowy tale of secretive, wartime power politics that, in the history or Irish Journalist Moloney, Adams was able to play with unmatched strategic skill. 

Doing some additional research I found the Provisional IRA's "Long War" objectives:

A war of attrition against enemy personnel based on causing as many deaths as possible so as to create a demand from their people at home for their withdrawal.

A bombing campaign aimed at making the enemy's financial interests in our country unprofitable while at the same time curbing long term investment in our country.
 
To make the Six Counties... ungovernable except by colonial military rule.
 
To sustain the war and gain support for its ends by National and International propaganda and publicity campaigns.
 
By defending the war of liberation by punishing criminals, collaborators and informers.

It's grim, scare-mongering and demented like everything else about the IRA. Turning the Six Counties in a kind Azkaban prison. But behind it was Adams, playing poker and winning.

The history if peace in N-Ireland, as brokered by Adams, was never in the news, beyond the media, undemocratically achieved, forced through the throat of IRA hawks, shadowy even now, but with real results and consequences. 

There is nothing in this story that will make you feel good, but the violence came to an end. 

Overpopulation is a sentiment not a fact.

Ever since the 1980ties right-wing anti-emigration parties have campaigned with some form of the slogan that the Netherlands are "full". The main argument made against it has always been that it is an empty slogan. 
 A bucket can be said to be full but for a country to be full you need additional criteria.

Long before the arrival of labour immigrants from Southern Europe and North-Africa there were people complaining that overpopulation was rendering the country inhabitable. All the while the population kept growing and yet the country remained housed, well-fed and well-behaved.

Population pressure on 'nature' is undeniably there. Though I tend to think that it is mostly on the political right that it is taken for granted that those areas designated as 'nature' should be developed. But mostly new housing developments eats up former agricultural land and not nature. 

I like to think I have digested the central points of historical ecology (many landscapes now and in the past that were always thought of as undisturbed and pristine are actually the result of human interference), the anthropocene (human activity has turned our species into a geological force) and novel ecosystems (new ecosystems composed from native and invading species can be productive and healthy). We are living in a man-made world.   

One my favourite books is 'Something New Under the Sun' by J.R. Macneill, an understated book that ends with a brilliant analysis of what causes environmental destruction. Population pressure he concludes is never the sole reason for degradation of the natural world. He cites the lack of the right local ecological knowledge and the absence of an expected long term relation with the land as the main factors of pollution in the broadest sense of the word. Read it.

As said Dutch population is still increasing but cleaner cars, cleaner factories, and tighter environmental regulation has cleaned up air and rivers and the return of many animal species after long absences are the result. 

I have always taken for granted that there is enough food on the planet but that it is unequally distributed. 

Now, with all this in the back of my head I am well prepared to read Erle Ellis' NYT op-ed "Overpopulation is not the problem" (make sure to read this as well) and understand what he is trying to say: horror scenarios of overpopulation are overstated and the concern of 7.2 billion people eradicating the last bit of 'real' nature in our lifetime is a fallacy. Real nature as most people understand it does no longer exist anyway.
 
Overpopulation is a sentiment not a fact.  

There is no environmental reason for people to go hungry now or in the future. There is no need to use any more land to sustain humanity — increasing land productivity using existing technologies can boost global supplies and even leave more land for nature — a goal that is both more popular and more possible than ever. 

The only limits to creating a planet that future generations will be proud of are our imaginations and our social systems. In moving toward a better Anthropocene, the environment will be what we make it.

This is the most important paragraph:

The science of human sustenance is inherently a social science. Neither physics nor chemistry nor even biology is adequate to understand how it has been possible for one species to reshape both its own future and the destiny of an entire planet. This is the science of the Anthropocene. 

I think I agree with Ellis central claims but I knew where he is coming from.
I know (and like) Erle Ellis' work on Anthropogenic Biomes as you can see here. 

But for most people the idea of an anthropocene and novel ecoystems are unknown and they are dangerous, contra-intuitive ideas that in the wrong hands could easily lead to a kind of environmental defeatism: "nature does no longer exist, let the Amazon rot." As was to be expected hundreds of comments deride Ellis without sparking the debate op-eds are intended to do.

It is not hard to see why: Ellis is making a big statement (even though the title is not his own) but he sounds awfully as if he is speaking down from the ivory tower: there are the big ideas of the anthropocene, there is personal journey of changing views (the confession the great American art) and it closes with a bold statement that asks nearly everyone to revise their deep held believes without giving any specification of how the 'better anthropocene' would look like. It needs more gentleness and better arguments. Where is the data, where are the citations? What is the vision? How do we get there? Does it for instance include gen-tech, a planned economy? is democracy a prerequisite or could North-Korea be anthropocene's best friend?

I think that we should be reconsidering easy notions on overpopulation and I do think Ellis is trying to address something important here but I hope he continues his argument elsewhere with more rigour. 
We need a discussion about the validity of the 'overpopulation' without ever forgetting that we need to take drastically better care of our natural resources. Because people are never surplus, because positive action (protecting the environment for all of us) is always more efficient and more engaging than negative action (birth control for others).
 

The beautiful anthropocene

From The Age of Man is not a Disaster (Dec. 2011), well worth quoting and also read this bit on the fallacy of overpopulation:

We defend the term “Anthropocene,” and we do not accept the argument that the concept opens the floodgates of unrestricted development. To assert that without the ideal of pristine wilderness, humanity will inevitably go on ruining our best-loved landscapes is analogous to Dostoyevsky’s dictum that without God, everything is permitted. 

Yes, we live in the Anthropocene — but that does not mean we inhabit an ecological hell. Our management and care of natural places and the millions of other species with which we share the planet could and should be improved. But we must do far more than just hold back the tide of change and build higher and stronger fences around the Arctic, the Himalayas and the other “relatively intact ecosystems,” as the scientists put it in their article. 

...

The Anthropocene does not represent the failure of environmentalism. It is the stage on which a new, more positive and forward-looking environmentalism can be built. This is the Earth we have created, and we have a duty, as a species, to protect it and manage it with love and intelligence. It is not ruined. It is beautiful still, and can be even more beautiful, if we work together and care for it. 

Earthquakes & tectonic plates on Selborne

The latest addition to Selborne is earthquake data. To be frankly honest: the relevance of this to a personal environmental data annotation website is only partly there but the data is out there, reliable, and easy to use. There are links in the menu that will add all earthquakes from the last hour, day, week & month. 

There are plenty of websites where said earthquake data can be watched. What I never recall seeing with it is data on plate tectonics. These I have also added. There are links for ridges, trenches, transforms and a link for all of them together. There is also a link to view all earthquakes of past week with plates. 

Another tiny addition is a link to show Vavilov's 'centres of origin', the regions where crop domestication is thought to have originated. I created this by drawing copying it on the map from a map provided by Wikipedia. You can do nice things like view these with the Steppe data from the terestrial ecoregion data and watch a historical pattern in action.

When viewed on its own you can see what each ridge, trench & transform is called.

quakes & plates

Agriculture & Steppe

Anthropocene plant biodiversity data added to Selborne

Recently I added some data on terrestrial ecoregions to Selborne. It was a valuable addition but the information it conveys is not instinctively recognizable from the ground. For instance: it groups The Netherlands into one ecoregion with large parts of Denmark, Germany, Belgium and France. I wouldn't dare to argue with its justness as a concept but, from the point of view of an individual mapping his personal environment, ecoregions are an abstraction to the point of uselessness. Especially from a Dutch perspective where the 'Mixed Atlantic Forest' that it is supposed to contain simply does not exist.

A welcome addition to Selborne therefore is the 'Plant Biodiversity in the Anthropocene' data provided by Erle Ellis & colleagues at the Laboratory for Anthropogenic Landscape Ecology. I blogged about this earlier.

The original shapefile converted to a 12.8Mb GeoJSON file which I divided in 6 separate files each containing the data for each of the ecozones that the file provides (Palearctic, Nearctic, Neotropics, Afrotropics, Indo-Malay, Australasia). I had to split the Paleartic file again into North and South to keep file-size modest. Each file is between 1 and 3 Mb and is loaded as a layer on top of the standard map. Find the links in the menu under the logo under the datasets header. Give your browser time to parse.

What is nice about the data is that a lot of information is given for each area/cell/hexagon. When you load the data it will not give you the immediate visual buzz that makes maps attractive, but once you hover over a cell 13 different types of information are displayed.


There is information on main land use, land cover and population density. But the real meat of the thing is in the data on native species richness, species loss, and invasive/introduced species. By comparing data for each cells you can get a good view on where the human hand has been most effective in changing the native plant composition. 

The best source for detailed information on the data is the original paper.

This is data that to me appears to describe the world in a way that would be clearly visible if you were at a given area. 

It is possible to look at this data using the different maps Selborne offers under the layer-menu. Sudden jumps in numbers (be they for population density, urbanity or species richness) between adjacent cells can sometimes be understood by viewing it with a  topographic or relief map at the background.


My personal motivation for doing Selborne was the desire for a tool that would allow me to track invasive plants in my own neighbourhood and novel ecosystem/anthropocene work was what inspired me. So I am very happy with the inclusion of this data.   

Citation: Ellis, E. C., E. C. Antill, and H. Kreft. 2012. All is not loss: plant biodiversity in the Anthropocene. PLoS ONE 7:e30535. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0030535.

Visit Selborne here, more info about Selborne here.

Terrestial Ecoregions on Selborne

Selborne is a website that allows users to log backyard observations of the natural world. But it also aims to couple these annotations with large scale environmental datasets on for instance ecology, land type, land use and pollution. The first addition to Selborne of such data is information on 'terrestial ecoregions' taken from data found on the website of the Nature Conservancy. You can find it in the menu that appears when you hover over the logo on the top-right of the screen.

Terrestrial: Pertaining to land.

Ecoregion: "Ecoregions cover relatively large areas of land or water, and contain characteristic, geographically distinct assemblages of natural communities and species. The biodiversity of flora, fauna and ecosystems that characterise an ecoregion tends to be distinct from that of other ecoregions."

There are a few caveats of a technical nature. The data covers the entire globe and this translates 108Mb of GeoJson (the dataformat used). A bit much for an online service and the obvious solution is to turn this data into tiles as has been done elsewhere. It is the sensible approach but I will leave it for another time. 

Instead I have opted to select data for a few areas: Europe, Scandinavia, Madagascar, the Steppes, Papua New Guinea/New Zealand and Ecuador. The smallest of these files is 400Kb (Madagascar), the largest over 4.5Mb (Ecuador). I have more files on my computer but load-time and bandwidth are issues that worry me. 

The approach of loading raw data has its downsides, but it also has its upsides: it has a lot of contour (it looks cool) and it is possible to convey more information. Hover over an area to see 3 different types of information. That is two types more than the data translated to tiles (read images) ever could.    

Let's look a few things of interest.

Iceland: the first image shows how it looks on the standard black and white map in Selborne. I was wondering if I was missing a bit of data but when selecting a different map I saw why data seemed to be missing: there was nothing there, just snow and ice. For all datasets applies that viewing them with different maps adds information. 


Ecuador is a small country with high mountains and high biodiversity. The map shows it but what shows it even more is file size: there is more MB needed for Europe then for the Europe and Scandinavia files combined. That in itself says something about biological and geographical richness. 

 The Netherlands has the same habitat types as large parts of Denmark, France, Belgium and Germany.  The next goal is to add data that is more fine-grained. 

Plants in Park Bloeyendael.

In an effort to further hone my plant recognition skills I have taken on a new "project": Park Bloeyendael. This is a volunteer-run wilderness park very near to my house. What's nice about Bloeyendael is that it is relatively obscure: there is hardly anyone and one can bike on the foothpaths without disturbing anybody. HA!

The park is home to many interesting plants that you will not find very often in the rest of town so I have high hopes. 

See the full list in Selborne.
 
Here are few pictures of plants that deserve special notice, some are still nameless. Can u help?? 

Only one found: must be rare?!

Blaassilene / bladder campion

Adder wortel

All of these were marked as shown, so my powerful faculties of deduction say: it must be rare.

Engelwortel/angelica (everyone agrees?)

5-star plant ??

Nothing in that drawer. [repetitive poem that does not repeat itself.]

Nothing in that drawer.
Nothing in that drawer.
Nothing in that drawer.
Nothing in that drawer.
Nothing in that drawer.
Nothing in that drawer.
Nothing in that drawer.
Nothing in that drawer.
Nothing in that drawer.
Nothing in that drawer.
Nothing in that drawer.
Nothing in that drawer.
Nothing in that drawer.
Nothing in that drawer.

Ron Padgett (1975 or earlier)

Now this is a remarkable clever find: it is the same sentence 14 times over, yet each time it speaks of a unique event. And also: everybody knows that the sensation of opening drawers in some forgotten cupboard in an old house. I would have found the poem more realistic of furniture design if it has less drawers. 

Found this on the CD that accompanies "All Poets welcome", a book on the poetry scene of the Lower East Side in 1960ties written by Daniel Kane. The book itself is sometimes interesting but mostly drowns the good bits in academic hyperjargon that fails to explain.  

The discovery of America in 3 strange maps.

Included in the Penguin edition of the Vinland Sagas (two medieval Viking tales about the discovery and settlement of Greenland and further exploration into the Americas) is a map based on the sagas first created in 1590 by Icelandic teacher Sigurdur Stefansson. There is England, Ireland and islands on the right and Helleland (Baffin Island), Markland (New Foundland) and Skraeling land (Red Indian land, Labrador?) on the left. Greenland is shown as continues with it (pack ice?). It is clearly recognizable from the point of view of present cartographic knowledge.

Now take a look at these two books from the Zorzi codex reproduced in Carl Sauer's excellent book about the first years of Spanish expansion, "The New Spanish Main". They were made in 1525 at the latest and show the way Columbus' brother Bartholomew (and by extension Columbus himself) imagined their discoveries as part of the new cartography. Never able to come to terms with their landing on a new continent, they needed to account for it as outlying islands at the extreme perimeter of East Asia. A passage to the heart of it was only a matter of time. Sauer notes that observers at the Spanish court understood the fallacy at an early point and even at the time these maps were anachronistic.

For a decade I have kept a record of the wild plant on two diverse areas

I had completely forgotten about this until I reread it recently. It's from Aldo Leopolds 'Sand County Almanac' (1949). Neighbourhood ecology at its best and the impetus behind my own weeds in my street surveys. 

[O]n week ends my floristic standard of living is that of the backwoods, while on week days I subsist as best as I can on the flora of university farms, the university campus, and the adjoining suburbs. For a decade I have kept, for a pastime, a record of the wild plant species in first bloom on these two diverse areas:

Species First Blooming in	Suburb and Campus	Backward Farm
April	14	26
May	29	59
June	43	70
July	25	56
August	9	14
September	0	1
Total visual diet	120	226

It is apparent that the backward farmer's eye is nearly twice as well fed as the eye of the university student or businessman. Of course neither sees his flora as yet, so we are confronted by the two alternatives already mentioned: either insure the continued blindness of the populace, or examine the question whether we cannot have both progress and plants.

Strange duck in the park [edited]

I went to the park to feed my old bread to the ducks and coots in the park. It was then that we saw the stranger above. I think it is a large duck but it might be a small goose. (?). I have never seen it before and I was looking for it two days later but no it wasn't there anymore. Gone forever. I am not surprise because it was clearly no competition in the bread run to the ferocious competition of the coots. Let alone to the savage wild ducks, the crows and the gulls. It walked very high on its legs and it lacked the agility to move its neck with any kind of speed. Goodbye friendly passenger, we enjoyed your brief presence.

Have studied duck websites but no name.  

Note: Two people rightly suggested this bird as the Egyptian goose. A bird that was introduced as a pet but escaped. For a good entry on the bird, in Dutch read this.

How to live on Planet Earth: Nanao Sakaki

Most people will know about Nanao Sakaki (1923-2008) through Gary Snyder who lived with Sakaki's tribe on the Japanese island of Kyushu in 67/67. From 1969 onwards Sakaki lived in the United States for ten years and published four poetry books. He fought in the second world war and I wonder if behind the seemingly chaotic contours of his life lies an untreated case of post-traumatic stress, ala Robert Graves whose White Goddess is sometimes understood as a kind of sublimated shell shock. The man, in any case, deserves a biography but the publication of his collected poems "How to live on the Planet Earth" (2013, Blackberry books) is even more important. It's a beautiful book with really nice typesetting. I was barely acquainted with his work and am very happy to get the chance to savour it now in it's entirety. 

I haven't digested all of it but the things that immediately strikes me is that there is little 'progress' in his writing throughout his life. Maybe at first he uses slightly more 'poetic' language before becoming ever more sharper, clearer and cleaner. His hallmarks are a disgust with consumer culture and environmental degradation, a proclaiming of the pleasures of a simple life. 

A Big Day

Getting water at the spring

Carrying firewood

Chattering with a neighbor

The sun goes down.

A big day.

Sakaki has a few 'tricks': he lists things, he chants, he calculates, he lives with the weather and the stars. A happy day is when a rare animal shows him/herself. There seems to be little creative development and the work is consistent in tone and content from the first to the last poem. As he gets older he writes more obituaries and their underlying sentiment is one Buddhist acceptation of inevitable suffering. Sakaki wrote down his poetry as it came to him, without doubt and without editing, like a bird singing. Or so it seems. The poems are tribal, he studied the language and literature of the old societies, at times his poems recall forms known from Rothenberg's anthologies of EthnoPoetics. He had a sardonic humour all his own.

Go Walk Mathematics

Suppose you walk 3 kms a day for 40 years.
3 kms x 365 days = 1,095 kms.
forget the 95 kms.
1,000 kms x 40 years = 40,000 kms
40,000 kms = the length of the terrestrial equator
Therefore
Walking 3 kms a day for 40 years
You complete the circuit of the earth.

Suppose you walk 30 kms a day for 36 years.
30 kms x 365 days = 10,950 kms.
10,950 kms x 36 years = 394,200 kms
This figure goes beyond the average distance
Between the earth & the moon 384,400 kms.
Therefore
Walking 30 kms a day for 36 years
You reach the moon.

Nanao Sakaki was a man who lived his life according to his own plans. He was not a sophisticate, maybe the universities will hate him. He was primal, a true original and his poetry reflects that. His style looks simple and easy to copy but I don't think you can fake it. It could be that Buddhist tradition has models for such a man, but if I had to compare him to anyone it would have to be William Blake. Cultish, but only long after his death.

Autobiography

Born of a humble & poor family,
Received minimum education,
Learnt how to live by himself at fourteen,
Survived storms, one after another.
Bullets, starvation & concrete wastelands.

A day's fare - a cup of brown rice, vegetables,
Small fish, a little water, & a lot of wind.
Delighted by children and women,
Sharing beads of sweat with farmers,
Fishermen, carpenters & blacksmiths,
Paying no attention to soap, shampoo,
Toilet paper & newspapers.

Now & again
Loves to suck the nectar of honeysuckle,
To flutter with dragonflies & butterflies,
To chatter with winter wrens,
To sing song with coyotes,
To swim with humpback whales,
And to hug a rock in which dinosaurs sleep.

Feels at home in Alaskan glaciers,
Mexican desert, virgin forest of Tanzania,
Valley of Danube, grasslands of Mongolia,
Vulcanoes in Hokkaido & Okinawan coral reeds.

And - one sunny summer morning
He will disappear on foot.
Leaving no shadow behind.

De-domesticated plants

 "Looking for Ways to Beat the Weeds" is a recent article in the NYT by Carl Zimmer that looks at the way agricultural plants can evolve weediness. 

Scientists have documented three different ways that plants evolve into weeds. Many species, such as barnyardgrass, evolved from wild ancestors. Biologists have found that certain traits make it easier for wild species to become weeds. They already grow fast, for example, and make lots of seeds. 

Parasitic plants are especially well-suited to the weedy life. They wrap around other plants and send their roots into their hosts’ tissues. Rather than making their own food, parasitic plants steal nutrients from their hosts. The parasitic weeds that invade farm fields have not evolved major differences from the ones that attack wild plants.

In other cases, weeds evolved from the union of wild plants and crops. In the 1970s, for example, wild beets in Europe released pollen that fertilized sugar beets growing on farms miles away.

Crops can even turn into weeds. “We domesticated a plant from the wild, and somehow it de-domesticated itself — which I think is pretty exciting,” Dr. Caicedo said.

Among these crops gone wild is a weed known as red rice. A key step in the domestication of rice was breeding plants that held onto their seeds when farmers harvested them. Red rice evolved fragile seeds that broke off and fell to the ground.

The name red rice comes from the russet tinge that the plant evolves as it becomes a weed. Dr. Caicedo and her colleagues suspect the color is produced from a pigment that helps the seeds go dormant — a trait that’s good for a weed but bad for a crop.

“If you’re a farmer, you want your seed to start growing when you plant it,” Dr. Caicedo explained. When weeds produce seeds, on the other hand, some sprout quickly while others go into suspended animation. Those dormant weeds create a seed bank that can sprout later, when conditions may be better for them. “It’s a fantastic trait for a weed to have. You’re hedging your bets,” Dr. Caicedo said.

These de-domesticated weeds don’t simply go back in time to regain the same DNA as their wild ancestors, scientists are finding. 

Once plants become weeds, they keep evolving. New mutations allow some of them to have more offspring than others. Foxtail, for example, evolved to crawl along the ground, where it wouldn’t be destroyed by combine blades. 

A foraging poem by Gary Snyder + commentary

Here is a poem by Gary Snyder from his book Turtle Island (1975).

ETHNOBOTANY

In June two oak fell,
rot in the roots

Chainsaw in September
in three days one tree
bucked and quartered in the shed

sour fresh inner oak-wood smell
the main trunk splits
"like opening a book" (J. Tecklin)
And slightly humping oak leaves
deer muzzle and kick it,
Boletus.
one sort, Alice Eastwood
pink and poison; 

Two yellow, edulus
"edible and choice."
only I got just so slightly sick --

Taste all, and hand the knowledge down.

Commentary 

* The entire poem is an allusion to Ezra Pound's "The flavors of the peach and the apricot are not lost from generation to generation. Neither are they transmitted by book learning."

* Quoting Snyder from the same volume: "Know the flowers." 

* Know the flowers, by what name? And which system?

* Can there exist a botany without books & book learning?   

* Foragers only trust other foragers who have tried things for themselves. Who know the where and the what and the how of plants.

* All foragers all moralists.

* All botany is ethnobotany / all botany is culture. 

* Find your own flavours and hand them down to the next generation.

* "I must create a system or be enslaved by another man's." - William Blake