Weed cookbook

Found on Ebay, if the postage wasn't so prohibitive (22+dollars) I would make a bid.

Vestal Fire

Am reading Stephen J. Pyne's book 'Vestal Fire, An Environmental History, Told through Fire, of Europe and Europe's Encounter with the World' (1997). It is what the title says: a history of fire, fire practises and the history of slash and burn as the cooking of Europe, as the way to prepare the land for colonization and agriculture. The book made me see the world in a different way, with fire at its centre. What is Pyne saying? 1) Fire is part of life, the consequence of biology 2) Everything must burn in the end.     

The first chapter is one of the best pieces of text that I have ever read. If the exact meandering through Europe's fire history seems a bit much you can zap yourself to the website of the NYT which has an excerpt from the the fist chapter. There is also a review by David Quammen who dismisses the book as long-winding but I agree more with William Cronon who calls the book a masterpiece in his foreword. Who do you agree with: the hack or the esteemed environmental historian?

Here is how it begins:

Whatever its larger mysteries, fire is a physical process. It is a chemical reaction, not an object. It has no existence apart from the fuel and oxygen that feed it, and the heat that kindles and sustains it. The story of fire is the story of how each of those elements came to be, and how it is they have combined. 

There is not one fire but many. Each has its habitat, its traits, its behavior, its ecology. To call something "fire" is like calling an organism a tree or an insect. Because fire depends on life for its existence, it shares in the diversity, complexity, and subtlety of the living world. Oxygen is a by-product of photosynthesis. Fuels are the hydrocarbon hardcopies of living or dead plants. A field guide to fire would distinguish between combustion that smolders in organic soils, flames that soar through long-needled conifers, fires that crackle through brush and stubble. So symbiotic is the alliance that many prescientific peoples considered fire as itself living. Today it might still be regarded as metaorganic. Certainly in any ecological inventory, fire remains elemental. 

Fire is exclusively a product of its environment. The history of fire--the explanation of why particular kinds of fires exist in particular places at particular times--is the history of how that environment evolved. How geologic forces created the lithic landscape. How evolution and ecology fashioned a biotic milieu. How climates organized winds, wet and dry seasons, and lightning-laden storms to prepare fuels for burning and to kindle them at appropriate times.

In all this, Europe was exceedingly complex. No single fire could claim dominion over all the habitats of the continent. Distinctive fires clustered, just as field mice and grasses did, into ecological blocs: fire provinces roughly defined by their geologically arranged hearthstones, the size and opaqueness of their climatic flues, and the density and magnitude of the biotic kindling and the available logs. Whatever cultural compositions humans might impose in recent centuries, that primordial order would endure, and would ensure that fire had a genealogy as ancient as Europe's stones, shrubs, and siroccos.

Mapping Raymond Blanc with Map Your Recipe [more recepimatics]

In the last post I ran 21 recipes of BBC's James Martin through Map your Recipe and exclaimed how surprised I was with the variety of ingredients and their original source. 

This evoked the comment from a reader that UK food is not so much 'open minded' as I said but the result of an imperialist heritage which was anything but open-minded.     

I do not necessarily disagree with pointing to British colonialism as a source of current food diversity in the UK as presented on TV, but I do doubt that imperialism is the only or the most important reason. 

Instead I think that the diversity of the ingredients in Martin's set of 21 recipes is the result of contemporary food culture and its ingrained values of curiosity, experimentalism and, practically, the fact that virtually every ingredient from any place and any cuisine in the world is now for sale everywhere. 

We could argue about this until the microwave explodes but I have come up with an experiment to verify the colonialist-hypothesis. France was one of the great imperialist nations of Europe with colonies in Africa, the Americas, South-East Asia and Oceania. But French cuisine is not known for its eclecticism and the French themselves have never taken up a food habit similar to the UK's fondness for Indian food. 

So I have taken 21 recipes from Raymond Blanc, Frenchman in the UK, presenter of my favourite BBC cooking program. Surely this will show that culture (French chauvinism) not imperialism (England's dreaming) is the defining factor.

Well.... there goes my theory. I still believe that culture not landgrabbing is the key but Raymond Blanc is incorporating the produce of the world with even more enthusiasm than Martin does.

Martin uses 32 ingredients from 9 centres of origin. 

Blanc uses 37 ingredients from 11 centres.
  
Interestingly, ingredients from Ethiopia (sesame, barley) are entirely absent.

Needless to say this a random selection of recipes and Blanc's nor Martin's food can stand for the general cooking in their respective countries.  

Food Map of Britain in Map your Recipe [Meta-recipematics]

More Meta-recipematics with Map your Recipe. 

James Martin, tv-chef and presenter of BBc's Saturday Kitchen Live, has a new program called "Food Map of Britain". I haven't seen it but I have taken the ingredients of all 21 recipes given at the website and fed them into Map your Recipe. 

It helps that the list includes mains and desserts but the range of ingredients is really quite spectacular. I think it is a good illustration of the open-minded attitude of contemporary British food and its willingness to incorporate ingredients and flavours from all known cuisines. 

The only major area missing is the Brazil-Paraguay centre from which things like manioc, peanuts and pineapple originate. 

I wonder if a list of recipes from someone like Heston Blumenthal would show an equal amount of diversity. 

Native trees have more insects.

The above table compiled by the Offwell Woodland and Wildlife Trust shows clearly that native trees in park bring with them a higher level of biodiversity in comparsion to introduced species. I have been going on and on recently about the joys of the anthropocene. Here is a reminder of the downsides of the great species bonanza. Found via Monbiots Return of the Native.
 

A Derive in the Cryptoforest of the Anthropocene [A Transcript]

Further transcripts from a Derive, acquired by Time Travel.

Slotervaart Fashion Centre UpComing.

An important academic paper, authored by some of the most important names in the drive for the recognition of the Anthropocene as a proper geological era, mentions the Kmer Temple Ta Prohm in Angkor. Once a triving centre of humanity it has now been eaten up alive by nature. Better examples of reclaimed urbanity abound: the lost cities of Meso-America, the even more obscure lost cities of the Amazon. The last are an interesting example: these cities once housed large numbers of people, organized in what must have been politically advanced societies, have completely vanished from sights. Local myths (Viti-Viti) and the occasional observant traveller/anthropologist did mention them but to deaf ears. Concentrated study of the cities of Amazon is at best only a decade old. 

To return to the paper just mentioned (it's called the 'the new world of the Anthropocene' 2010) point its readers to the overgrown Cambodian temple to show that cities may now be the most obvious source of the anthropocene, they may well be only transient. 

I have a special way of enjoying this insight. For a few years now I have been exploring cryptoforests and I have been trying to turn what I have learned from them into a discipline: Cryptoforestry. The central tenet of which is that cities must at all times fight the onslaught of nature trying to supersede it. The hegemony of the urban, a hegemony which often stands for the integrity of society itself, is always under threat as treeroots and wild plants are wobbling the pivot. (And yes that is a very bad reference to Ezra Pound referencing Confucius Kung).

By visiting places where the urban order is breached, cryptoforests, the city is reveals its vulnerability. 

Practically cryptoforestry means finding the most difficult path between A & B. Follwoing the pavement is easy, taking an elephant path (or desire path as they are better known) to me is a form of social conformity. I prefer the untrodden. I prefer the places where the mosquitoes are.

Map your Recipe Meta Studies

Here is an interesting thing you can do with Map Your Recipe. 

I have taken 10 recipes from the veritable Mr Cool Ken Hom, the well known Chinese cook who got the west wokking.

I could have taken 3 recipes but the image would be the same.

Note that Chinese cuisine uses absolutely nothing from the Mediterranean. Also notice that only thing the application finds of Chinese origin is Soy. There are plenty of other things originating from China, but these are less obvious.

One thing to do with it to make a list of commonly-used ingredients and their places and map that. The application could offer a prediction of where the recipe came from and how much it deviates.     

Anthropocene < - * - * - >Cryptoforest

In "The new world of the Anthropocene (2010)", an important paper written by a who-is-who of the term and its official bid for making it a bona fide geological epoch, you can find the above image with this caption below: 

Left - Skyscrapers on the east bank of the Huangpu River in Shanghai, China, photographed from the viewing platform of the Oriental Pearl Tower. Shanghai now has a population approaching 20 million inhabitants. Right - Ta Prohm, Angkor, Cambodia. Stones of this Buddhist monastery built in the late 12th century are held in a grip by Kapok trees. Angkor may have been the world’s first ‘million city’ long before London.

Illustration for the statement made in the paper that cities may be the most visible aspect of the anthropocene but also its most transient. One thinks of Richard Jefferies 'After London'. One thinks of CRYPTOFORESTRY. 

The most plainly visible physical effects of this on the landscape—the growth of the world’s megacities, for instance—may in some ways be the most transient. In such “terraforming”, humans have brought about a roughly order-of-magnitude increase in the long-term rate of erosion and sedimentation (8, 9). This is a remarkable, though perhaps short-lived, sedimentary signal. If construction stops or slows, for whatever reason, then natural geomorphologic processes will rapidly re-establish themselves, as shown by the fate of “lost” cities such as Angkor in Cambodia.

and

The Anthropocene represents a new phase in the history of both humankind and of the Earth, when natural forces and human forces became intertwined, so that the fate of one determines the fate of the other. Geologically, this is a remarkable episode in the history of this planet.

A derive in the Anthropocene [A transcript] [edited]

Ladies & Gentleman,

I thank you all for joining me on this walk titled: "A derive in the Anthropocene". I hope to explain both the term Derive and the term Anthropocene in a short while but right now I would like to focus your attention to our immediate environment. It's an urban environment, made from wood, metal, glass, bricks and concrete, and long after we are gone the environmental consequences of the mountains that were levelled, the pits that were dug, the forests that were cut, the stuff that was sucked out of the ground and the stuff pumped into the air to built it all will still be there.
The anthropocene is the proposed name given for to our era, the era in which mankind became so dominant that it became possible for a lowely species of primates to influence the history of the earth itself. The rise of the human population is the main factor that creates our planetary influence and the city is the most visible result of that.

We are going on a walk, perhaps you are familiar with the neighbourhood, and I want you to look around it and think of us living our own Vinland Saga. The Vinland Saga is, as you might remember, the story of a small number of Viking sailors colonizing first Greenland, then Baffin island, Labrador and finally New Foundland.

The need for the Athropocene comes from the recognition that the continents and ecosystems that have been brought in contact, the goods that have travelled around the world and the climate, soil and trace element balances that that have been changed, are irreversible actions. And like for Eirik the Red and his people, the overbearing sentiment we bring to Vinland is one of loss. Landscapes, pristine nature (so far it exists) are forever altered, extinction rates are up dramatically. What is happening now will never go away. But it IS a new world, with unexpected sides. Despite mass-extinctions overall biodiversity in many places is rising.  


There are differences too of course. Eirik travelled with family and clan from Norway and reached new shore in Greenland. We are not travelling in isolation, we are legion. We have no solitude but crowds. The anthropocene has no places of departure and of arrival. The anthropocene is a mess and in that it is entirely suitable for an age that takes not the clock or the grid but the network as its dominant model. 

Another difference is that the Vinland Saga is a tale. The Anthropocene is a grand narrative.


How often will you witness the beginning of a new geological age? This is a time of exploration.

The derive, the drift, known from the past and defined for us by the Situationists in the 1950ties, has lost almost all of its intended radical meaning. In a leisure society where time for sports and play, fun and games is a billion dollar industry the drift is a sanctioned way of approaching places perfectly understandable to consulting agencies and NLP-frauds. But instead of using it to get an insight in the hidden patterns of our surrounding, we might as well use it to reveal the mundane and the sameness of it. It doesn't matter how extreme your psychogeographical techniques (triangulating a route to the Northpole with a .walk in Brainfuck) the anthropocene is everywhere.

Now let's go and I'll tell you more as we proceed.

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.

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