News from a Changing Planet -- This Week on Earth #9
Fruit explorers, another reason the war in Ukraine is so important, a pause on seabed mining, and more.
TRACKING DOWN LOST FRUIT SO YOU DON’T HAVE TO: Fruit explorers in the U.S. are trying to find and graft fruit and nut trees to preserve them before it’s too late (The Guardian)
I love this story: independent “fruit explorers” are scouring the country to find the last remaining cultivars of ancient, rare and significant plants, particularly fruit and nut trees, in the hope of preserving their genetic diversity.
Many of these trees, which were once widely cultivated by white growers or Indigenous people, now only exist on “remote farms, forests, on state lands, tucked along roads.”
Fruit explorers, like Eliza Greenman and Buzz Ferver (profiled in this article), track down these trees and graft them — this way, they can preserve the genetics that have made these particular plants resilient to weather and change over the centuries. As climate change upends growing seasons, brings more extreme temperatures and precipitation events, and diseases spread, it will be more important than ever to have diversity in our food supply.
Plus, it’s cool to think there are so many different kinds of plants and fruits and nuts whose tastes and smells we can’t even imagine: “‘People realize that they once had great things that reflected the taste of their place and that were marginalized by market forces,’” David Shields, an heirloom foods expert at the University of South Carolina, said, referring to the homogenization of our food system that occured in the mid-20th century. “One example: ‘The limbertwig apples of the south, which have a wild winey flavor that once you’ve tasted it will haunt you.’” Spo0o0oky!
AN UNKNOWN (BY ME) REASON FOR THE WAR IN UKRAINE: it turns out the West is also fighting to secure mineral deposits of lots of the material required for the clean energy transition. (Financial Times)
This, from a Financial Times newsletter, was fascinating. I had no idea that Ukraine has huge untapped stores of many of the metals required for the clean energy transition, especially lithium — it’s estimated that Ukraine has about 500,000 tons of lithium, which would make it Europe’s biggest lithium resource, ahead of Portugal.
According to Foreign Policy, Ukraine also has “commercially relevant deposits of 117 of the 120 most-used industrial minerals,” like titanium, iron, neon, and nickel, but also other important ones, like cobalt, uranium, beryllium and more. Many of these deposits are sitting in territory that Russia illegally annexed, particularly four oblasts in eastern Ukraine. Western diplomats, according to this article, think these reserves are one of the reasons these regions were targeted.
Currently, China is the world’s third-largest producer of lithium, and has been buying up lithium projects around the world, to maintain their dominance in electric vehicle battery production — they currently produce half of all EV batteries, more than Europe and the US put together.
“It’s an incredibly important issue about the war that people don’t understand,” one senior US official told the FT recently. Well, now we do! Tell all your friends!
SPEAKING OF CRITICAL MINERALS…: Seabed mining
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