When a team of researchers set loose a buzzing horde of Hessian flies on 20,000 seedlings in a Kansas greenhouse, they made a discovery that continues to ripple from Midwestern wheat fields to the rolling hills that surround the battered Syrian city of Aleppo. The seeds once stored in a seed bank outside of that now largely destroyed city could end up saving United States wheat from the disruptions triggered by climate change — and look likely to, soon enough, make their way into the foods that Americans eat.

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One of the world’s most important seed banks used to be located in Syria, about 25 miles west of Aleppo in the town of Tal Hadya, and was run by the International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA). That UN-affiliated center specializes in preserving and researching seeds in hot, dry areas — conditions now being faced by many of the earth’s food-growing regions.

It’s also the place of origin of today’s domesticated wheat, and thus the seeds that were stored there benefit from germplasm embedded with survival strategies developed over thousands of years of changing conditions and evolving pathogens. Now, diseases and pests long familiar to Middle and Near Eastern farmers are moving north from the southern U.S. and Mexico and are surging across Kansas and surrounding states — Oklahoma, Texas, Colorado, and Nebraska and in some instances up to Illinois and the Dakotas.

The Hessian fly has been around for more than two centuries — since, in fact, the birth of the U.S.. It’s thought by entomologists to have come to North America with the straw bedding of Hessian mercenaries who fought on behalf of the British during the Revolutionary War, hence the name. It’s been a menace ever since, but mostly in warmer climates in the South.

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Ming-Shun Chen, a professor of molecular entomology at KSU, explained that the flies’ larvae used to be killed off by the cold of winter. But that cold is coming later in the season, and the larvae survive to turn into flies. Their devouring of wheat seems drawn from science fiction: The flies don’t have teeth, so they inject a protein-based substance into the plant which transforms it into a kind of nutritious slurry they can suck up and digest. “They transform the leaf into something they can eat,” explained Chen. The substance has the effect of stunting the plant’s growth and accelerating the metabolization of chlorophyll — an infested plant becomes more green, a surefire sign of the presence of the fly. “The plant’s metabolic pathway is changed,” said Chen. “It no longer produces nutrients for its own growth, but produces nutrients for the insects.” Darkening green in a field of golden wheat is now a scary color in Kansas.

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An ironic twist to the saga of wheat’s wild relations is that the [US] agriculture [Syria's ancient wild strains of wheat] are intended to save could be partially responsible for destroying entire communities of wild relatives that are critical to their future and that of other crops in the turbulent times ahead. “If Midwestern monoculture farming practices are ever adopted in Syria, Iraq, or wherever in the Fertile Crescent,” says Brummer, “that will push more of those wild relatives off the land. Then we have a problem. Another source of variation, and all the traits of selective advantage, will be lost… Germplasm banks are just a sampling of the wild. If the wild goes away, we can’t go back and get another sample.”

The U.S. has been losing diversity at an alarming rate for more than three decades: An assessment by scientists at Kansas State and North Dakota State, in collaboration with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, found that after three decades of consolidation in the seed industry, and the steadily expanding size of farms, diversity in seed varieties has dropped in almost every region of the country, most dramatically in the lower Midwest. Globally, the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization has declared that three-quarters of all the world’s crop varieties that were around in the early 1900s had become extinct by 2015. “You may be using wild crop relatives to boost industrial agriculture, while industrial agriculture itself is one of the greatest pressures on their existence,” commented Maywa Montenegro. “They’re threatened from the usual pressures — pollution, land-cover changes — but also from turning diverse fields into monoculture plantations.”

seeds stolen from syria will save amerikan agribusiness, imperialism works!

also if we can turn Syria into a client state and infect its farming with our own rapacious practices, we'll wipe out that very same bounty of millennia. and we know all this in advance and we won't. bat. an eye.

Edited by Constantignoble (May 15, 2018 02:01:48)

Dimashq posted:

That was just an arbitrary example, tunneling through buildings has been a urban warfare tactic for awhile and they don't need no rhizomes to figure that out.

it's not arbitrary at all imo... the Soviets did what they did to advance in spite of advanced enemy materiel, while the Israelis did what they did in spite of its lack. it's probably not a coincidence which group's manual thought it needed to get grad school to justify the tactic, nor which army intended to hold the cities it entered against the foe and which intended to simply do as much damage as possible while its acts could still be supported by a flimsy, recurring excuse. no one is blaming Deleuze for what the IDF did, of course, but Deleuze freely admitted elliptical expression as a facet of his writing and knew it could be abused

THREAD on what appears to be British government complicity in small arms/millions of rounds of ammunition getting into the hands of Islamists in Syria.

— Lloyd Russell-Moyle (@lloyd_rm) June 7, 2018

tears posted:

i dont think seeing us imperialism as the plot of dune is very helpful

roseweird posted:

ilmdge posted:

"Impartial" #WhiteHelmets are witholding water fr 5 million people in #Damascus unless their demands are met (#SAA stop #WadiBarad attack) pic.twitter.com/D30qTLrCxz

— Ian Grant (@Gjoene) January 3, 2017

the circled part is signature of 'mohamed diab', probably not the egyptian filmmaker, some random person on the internet says it's a legal signer for civil defense in barada (white helmets)

cars posted:

exclusive photo of "mohammed diab" at the signing