
Where Our Food Comes From: Retracing Nikolay Vavilov's Quest to End Famine by Gary Paul Nabhan Island Press: 2008. 266 pp. $24.95, £21.50 Back to the roots of crop farming
In 1941, when German and Finnish troops threatened to besiege the Russian city of Leningrad (now St Petersburg), Soviet leaders hurried to authorize the evacuation of the art collection from the city's Hermitage museum. Another extraordinary treasure, then the world's largest collection of more than 380,000 food crop samples housed at Leningrad's All-Union Institute of Agricultural Sciences, did not receive such privileged treatment; it survived the 1941-44 Leningrad blockade only through the virtue of committed individuals. Clearly, society places different values on the heritage content of the art museum and the seed bank.
In Where Our Food Comes From, Gary Paul Nabhan, a conservationist and research social scientist at the University of Arizona, spotlights crop diversity as a neglected but vital cultural resource. He does so by chronicling the journeys of Nikolay Vavilov, Russia's famous geneticist and botanist, and creator of the Leningrad seed bank. Vavilov was the first to identify the world's centres of crop diversity -a concept that, decades later, was developed by conservation biologists into what we now call bio diversity hotspots or conservation targets. Based on narratives from Vavilov's expeditions in the 1920s and 1930s and the author's own travels to retrace Vavilov's steps, Nabhan looks at changes in agricultural biodiversity.
The journeys cover nine regions of the globe. Each chapter highlights a specific land-use system, such as the wild apple forests of Kazakhstan; the diverse date cultivation in the oases of the Maghreb in north Africa; the traditional milpa cropping system in Mexico, based on maize (corn) and beans; or the forest gardens of the Amazon basin in South America. Nabhan observes that, almost everywhere, crop diversity has strongly and rapidly declined during the time between Vavilov's and his own visits. Both global-and regional-scale processes are held responsible for the homogenization of crops. For example, melting glaciers account for a depletion of hydrological sources in Tajikistan's Pamir mountains, which damages traditional cropping systems. In northern Italy's Po valley, wasteful irrigation practices and mechanized high-performance agriculture have displaced traditional land uses. In the Middle East, political unrest and the legacy of colonialism have disrupted ancient farming systems. In Kazakhstan, economic growth has driven urban sprawl, threatening agricultural land close to cities. Yet Nabhan's perspective is positive. He stresses the value of diverse crop varieties and the cultural traditions of land use and food preparation -for pragmatic reasons and as a cultural heritage that provides humankind with pleasure. He presents promising initiatives to recover crop diversity, from the rehabilitation of farmers' markets in Lebanon to efforts to renew local Hopi food systems in Arizona. And he shows how rich crop diversity and traditional seed selection and distribution support adaptation to changing environmental or societal conditions. I was fascinated by the story of how Colombian peasants have selected varieties of coca plants -the leaves of which contain cocaine alkaloids -that are resistant to the aerially sprayed herbicide used in the war on drugs. These resistant varieties have arisen through farmer-based selection, adaptation and informal dissemination of coca cuttings, all without any genetic engineering.
Where Our Food Comes From is a marked critique of the worldwide simplification of agricultural systems. It pins its hopes on local, traditional agriculture and is sceptical of topdown approaches to increasing food production, such as calls for another 'green revolution' . Many of its conclusions coincide with those reached by the International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development, which concluded that the focus on maximum agricultural commodity production was responsible for the depletion of natural capital.
There are two opposing sides in the debate on how to increase food security. One side, which includes Nabhan, endorses the support of small-scale, low-output agriculture that is highly diverse. Among other examples, Nabhan uses the case of Ethiopian wheat varieties, which proved invaluable in the fight against Amazon agriculture benefits from crop diversity.
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Writing popular science and writing about popular science are very different endeavours. The former is at least as old as John Newbery's Newtonian System of Philosophy (1761), with its star Tom Telescope, and has been practised in every medium in turn: lectures, books, news papers, magazines, cinema, radio, television and the Internet. But analysing it is a recent pursuit, tied to the growth of university sciencestudies departments concerned with science's social dimensions. Although now established, the field is not so overpopulated that there is agreement about how to do it, or for whom.
Marcel Chotkowski LaFollette has written on the history of popular science for more than 25 years, and is best known for Making Science our Own: Public Images of Science, 1910 -1955 (Univ. Chicago Press, 1990 . In her new book, Science on the Air, she reveals from primary sources the story of the first 20 years of science broadcasting on US radio. We meet the Smithsonian Institution's Austin Hobart Clark, who initiated a series of scientists' radio lectures in 1923, and Thornton Burgess, who transferred from writing children's nature books to radio programmes. Science on the Air has an academic level of detail. But LaFollette writes in a narrative style, with occasional touches of whimsy -"microphones trembled during atomic bomb tests and rattled with impassioned debate", for example. This choice has consequences; after reading it, you will know what happened to US science radio and early television, but you may wonder why you need to know it. A more the virulent leaf rust fungus, to show that traditional, allegedly outmoded forms of land use may help to solve modern environmental problems. The opposing side advocates modern, technology-intensive, high-performance forms of agriculture that safeguard large parts of the world's food supply today, but are not resilient and depend on significant inputs of fossil fuels that may become expensive in the future.
Nabhan notes the often overlooked contributions of traditional ecological knowledge to sustainable food production. After reading the book, major questions arise. Do locally domesticated plants have an archival function that provides genetic varieties for modern plant breeding, and should they thus be conserved in their remote centres of origin? Or can they be used on a larger scale in intensive agricultural landscapes? The integration of traditional and modern practices into agricultural systems that are productive yet sustainable, consideration of the needs of small-scale farmers and maintenance of diverse ecosystems will all remain conflict-laden -but they represent crucial challenges in the quest to feed the world. The relationship of science to people and to the broader culture was, in the period she describes, gaining importance as the sciences began to have a significant impact on ordinary lives. The possibility that scientists might have a negative impact, through their perceived responsibility for new weapons and mass-production machinery, was a live issue. More historical studies of the vehicles of science communication are needed so that we can understand the interplay between science and society; but this requires more than narrative.
So little is published in this area that it would be unfair to ask LaFollette to draw international comparisons. With a myriad of local commercial stations to follow and many potential stories to tell, she has a more difficult job than scholars of British science radio, for example, where for the same period there was one monopoly broadcaster, the BBC. LaFollette describes how in the United States scientists preferred a lecture format, but were put under pressure to make their programmes more entertaining or risk marginalization. In Britain, producers remained deferential and accepted that information should be conveyed directly from the authority to the viewer -"public men personally discussing events in the news", as one producer put it. Unlike in the United States, elite scientific organizations such as the Royal Society and the British Association repeatedly sought control over broadcasts. A common element was the growing importance of the skilled intermediary, and mediation by a presenter was the norm on tele vision by the late 1950s. Today the media market is global. Producers work in a multichannel world, where no country's output can afford to limit itself to national concerns. Single broadcasters can rarely afford the cost of ambitious science shows and so seek to collaborate. Co-production has led to a homogenization of style, moving closer to the US entertainment model and away from the earnest, deferential treatment LaFollette describes in 1920s radio. Some commentators fear that the science in science programming is reaching homeopathic concentration. The continuing presence of science in the schedules, evidently vulnerable to broadcasting fashions, demands investigation. This book shows it can be done. Scientists conveyed information directly to the public in early radio broadcasts.

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