“'This concept that gardening puts you in harmony with nature is a big lie,' says Peter Del Tredici, a botanist at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. 'Gardening is really about preventing nature from doing what it wants to do, which is to destroy your landscape, and gardeners know this at their core. Climate change is just another challenge.'”- "A Garden for all Climates"/ Emma Marris Nature 450, 937-939 (2007)
Also from Nature, a review on the evolutionary diversification of mammals. Instead of a straightforward linear series of progression as it was presented in older books, the actual phylogeny is more like a bush with many 'dead ends' and branches. Which is precisely what Stephen Jay Gould was talking about in his essay "Bushes and Ladders" (Ever Since Darwin: Reflections in Natural History, New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1977, pp. 61-62), and a theme that he came to again and again (and which indeed does show up again and again as we get a better idea of the fossil record and early history of many groups of organisms).
Finally, the New York Times article that Prof. Holbrook mentioned in class: how Malawi 'ignored the experts' and went ahead to subsidize fertilizers for its farmers, and in conjunction with good rainfall that year managed to produce a surplus for the first time in years. Interesting intersection of economics, politics, and biology, and quite alarming really how little we know even about the economics of agriculture and food supply.
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