Rashid's Blog: A Place for Inquisitive Souls

The Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) is working for a food secure and prosperous Africa. Its founders are from the United States. ‘Its programs develop practical solutions to significantly boost farm productivity and incomes for the poor while safeguarding the environment.’

The Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa (AFSA) is a pan African platform. It’s about ‘African driven solutions to problems in Africa and a belief in the richness of ourselves… Food sovereignty is the right of peoples to healthy and culturally appropriate food produced through ecologically sound and sustainable methods, and their right to define their own food and agriculture systems.’

AGRA and AFSA have similar names but they don’t always agree with one another. Food security? Food sovereignty?

Earth Watch Report  –  Flooding

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Flash Flood

Italy

[Statewide]

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Flash Flood in Italy on Saturday, 01 February, 2014 at 05:30 (05:30 AM) UTC.

A sketch, for a future project

Toronto’s Island has provided your Urban Geographer with immense inspiration regarding Urban Ecology and its manifestation in Toronto.

It seems that this deeply wild Island has enabled an equivalently deep urbanity in the city across the Bay. To illustrate this: Chicago is a nearby Great Lakes city that does not have an island. Its water front integrates nature and the city very well. In Toronto on the other hand, we have a waterfront that is a great concrete barrier to the lake, remedied by an extremely natural beach a few kilometres further south.

Of course, the spaces aren’t pure. There’s a little city in the Island and a little Island in the city. (There’s also a little Island in all Torontonians, and a little Toronto in all Islanders).

Remarkably, the geography of the Islands and Toronto provides a clear illustration of this phenomenon…

A sacred forest grove in Kodagu, Western Ghats of India.

How old are sacred forest groves? Why are sacred groves where they are? How did these sites come about? These questions have been bugging me ever since I stepped foot in the tropical forests of South India. Ecologists think that sacred forest groves are fragments of once-continuous forest. Anthropologists think that sacred forest groves are special places in the landscape that have cultural meaning. Local communities talk about sacred forests going back to several of their ancestral generations. But how old sacred forests really are has been an enigma for a long time. But now we have the answer!

Some colleagues and I have been working on the long-term ecology of sacred forest groves in the Indian Western Ghats. We were fortunate to find 1000-year old mud in continuous sequences of sediment from two sacred groves in Kodagu region of the Western Ghats mountains. For long-term ecologists, this…