Practical Conservation

Another article about the Slow Food movement in Detroit and elsewhere.  Having lived in Michigan for a long time, I think this has exciting promise for revitalizing the state’s hurting urban areas.  As a wildlife biologist, I can’t help thinking about the potential for urban farming for conserving wildlife diversity.  Can it alleviate the pressure to convert natural habitats to farmland?  Can it help support biodiveristy in urban areas?  Pollinators?  Birds even?   My research (and lifestyle) are outside the urban farming realm, but I hope someone answers these questions.

Here is another link to Vertical Farming.  Below is a video from Urban Farming about this phenomenon.

Lands around airports represent valuable land that can be managed to support agriculture and/or conservation.  Two examples below:

The “Garden Boys” farm plots around a major airport – from CNN.

Butterflies protected and thriving at LAX – from the Epoch Times.

Urban agriculture goes high tech. CNN.

Food safety concerns (like the e. coli – spinach scare) are influencing the amount of natural habitat in some agricultural areas.

From the article ” That translates into ripping out trees and bushes to create sterile buffer zones, up to 100 metres wide, to keep deer and other animals out of “crop blocks.” Not only does this strategy do little to impede the wildlife – which in any case is highly unlikely to carry E. coli – but it also destroys habitat for insects that pollinate plants or eat pests. The buffers also promote erosion and allow pollutants into streams.“

I am all for food safety, but grassland buffers may reduce E. coli in runoff containing cattle feces,  {which are being ‘scorched’ -Sam Riffell}.

How this plays out for wildlife will worth watching.

{Thanks to Ralph Maughan’s Wildlife News for putting me on to this}