"Near Arctic, Seed Vault Is a Fort Knox of Food", in the New York Times last week, discussed the efforts to create a seed repository as a backup of our seed supply. Claire Hope Cummings, in her new book, Uncertain Peril: Genetic Engineering and the Future of Seeds, discusses the "Doomsday Vault" in more depth, and ties its mission to the struggles to maintain genetic diversity in agriculture despite the increasing privatization of seeds by agribusiness. You can hear Cummings on NPR's OnPoint tomorrow. [UPDATE: Here's the link to the segment.]
Check out Nancy Polikoff, author of Beyond (Straight and Gay) Marriage, at the Washington Post, the Washington Blade, the Los Angeles Times, and on her new blog, where Polikoff, an expert on gay and lesbian family law, highlights issues in the news that affect the legal rights of all families.
Mark Winne, author of Closing the Food Gap, appeared on WUWM's Lake Effect radio show. Listen here.
Kathryn Joyce, whose book Quiverfull: Inside the Christian Patriarchy Movement, is forthcoming from Beacon Press in 2009, wrote in the Nation about the real motives behind worries that there's a looming European "demographic disaster." The piece was cross-posted at RHRealityCheck, where Kathryn has previously posted about Quiverfull, an anti-birth control movement that urges Christian families to "leave the number of children they have entirely in the hands of God."
Glenn Branch sent us an update to his post on the evolution debate in Florida (also added as an update to the post):
It happened. On February 29, state senator Ronda Storms (R–Valrico) introduced a bill, SB 2692 [pdf], styled “The Academic Freedom Act.” Purporting to protect the right of teachers to “objectively present scientific information relevant to the full range of scientific views regarding biological and chemical evolution in connection with teaching any prescribed curriculum regarding chemical or biological origins” and the right of students not to be “penalized in any way because he or she subscribes to a particular position or view regarding biological or chemical evolution,” the bill would not affect the content of the standards, although it is clear that it was introduced at the behest at those who opposed their excellent treatment of evolution. A string of similar bills in Alabama—HB 391 and SB 336 in 2004; HB 352, SB 240, and HB 716 in 2005; HB 106 and SB 45 in 2006—failed. With only sixty days in the regular legislative session, perhaps the Florida legislature will be able to find something useful to do, instead of wasting its time mollifying creationists.
That Nation story is long but worth a look-- if you click through to its second page you will be rewarded with the awesome anecdote in which the right-wing Italian government of then-PM Berlusconi promises money to families that give birth to second children, and then has to ask for the money back when the families of nonwhite immigrants apply for it.
There may come a day, hundreds of years in the future, when human beings have to worry about falling birthrates. (That day may come sooner if there's an environmental disaster.) Today, however, and tomorrow, worries about demographic decline in developed nations ought to lead to worries about how to be nice to immigrants-- how to get them to come to your country, to acquire the skills they need there, and to feel at home there; when those worries lead instead to "baby bonuses," and to attempts to get women to stay home longer in order to have more children, you are looking not at economic worries, but at racial-- indeed, at racist-- ones.
Posted by: Steve | March 05, 2008 at 01:16 PM