In honor of spring, a story about seed libraries:
The sharing of seed is an ancient practice, ensuring the survival of the human species, the local biodiversity of life, as well as local food security. If one gets philosophical about it, one could even say that the seed embodies a traditional, holistic knowledge of life that is as unbroken as the existence of the seed itself, and that is certainly a beautiful thing to think about.
But informal seed sharing -- a favourite pastime of gardeners everywhere -- may be considered illegal by some American states. According to a recent report by Mother Earth News, a number of states have laws in the books that require getting permits to sell seeds, and requires that they are properly labelled and tested, which makes sense if it's for commercial purposes. But some states actually include "giving away" in their definition of "selling," and that's where problems are arising. For small-time gardeners, informal seed swaps and seed libraries are a way to share in the spirit of cooperation and as a way to preserve the legacy of local plant biodiversity. To apply rules to hobbyists that are designed to regulate commercial operations is a bit mind-boggling, to say in the least.
At the recent, 34th Annual Making Brooklyn Bloom event at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, Onika Abraham, Director of Farm School NYC, gave the keynote address, "Roots of Resilience," in which she talked about how African slaves smuggled the seeds they needed to America, hidden in the braids of their hair. Perhaps people may need to do so again.
It's a situation quite analogous to file sharing, and the sharing economy in general (DRM in video games to prevent second sales is another example). We have a pretty good idea of how it's turned out vis-a-vis the music industry, and more and more with video and movies. Are those results widely applicable? Or is the learning curve for open source, seed sharing, and the like too high? Could it spread far enough to fatally undermine centralized business models?
(Score: 5, Interesting) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Saturday March 28 2015, @09:53AM
Not sharing seeds with your neighbor - it's not illegal to save seeds for yourself. Pakistani farmers are required to purchase them. Let me find you a link [gmwatch.org]:
When the economy collapsed during the depression, my grandfather loaded what he could onto his pickup truck and left Santa Cruz, California for Grass Valley, as he heard there was work as a mine carpenter - building the timbers that prevent the tunnels from collapsing in hardrock gold mines.
My grandparents, my father and my two uncles did well for themselves; by the time I was a boy my grandparents lives on and gardened two acres of land, from which they got all their vegetables and chicken eggs. The only stuff they couldn't grow themselves was their meat - well except for the occasional unlucky chicken.
If we outlaw the use of seed from crops we grow ourselves, we're going to forget how to do that. That could ultimately lead to disaster.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 5, Interesting) by jcross on Saturday March 28 2015, @01:08PM
There's another reason it could lead to disaster. There's a book called Return to Resistance by Raoul Robinson, which a free ebook and well worth a read. The author tells a story about a huge outbreak of maize rust in Kenya that was so bad it was killing the entire crop. He was part of a team of plant scientists working as fast as they could to back-cross the local variety with a resistant wild relative from Mexico in a process that can take many years. Meanwhile, the local farmers were walking their field, finding the few stalks that hadn't succumbed, and saving those seeds, because even in the midst of a famine they were too smart to eat their own seed crops. These were exactly the stalks that could resist the disease best, and the net effect was that the rust was eliminated over a few years while the plant scientists were only just getting started. If the farmers had been buying their seeds from a company that grew them in a rust-free field, the crop would never have the opportunity to evolve that resistance on its own.
Anyway, it's a really interesting book that advocates for Darwinian as opposed to Mendelian breeding, which involves growing large populations of a crop and purposefully inoculating it with pests and diseases, basically an accelerated version of what the Kenyan farmers did.
(Score: 3, Informative) by hemocyanin on Saturday March 28 2015, @04:13PM
Another topical book -- near future dystopian SciFi, where the lead character is a calorieman working for one of the large GM companies (his job is to seek out new or lost genetic material) -- is a book called "The Windup Girl".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Windup_Girl [wikipedia.org]
If you like audio books (that's how I "read" The Windup Girl), the reader is Jonathan Davis who is an excellent narrator. He did an amazing job on Neal Stephenson's book "Snow Crash".
http://www.audible.com/guestauthor/Guest_Editor_Narrator_Davis [audible.com]
(Score: 2) by davester666 on Saturday March 28 2015, @07:56PM
But doing that cost multinational corporations millions and millions in lost profits, so it must be stopped immediately!
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Saturday March 28 2015, @03:13PM
This just shows that it's a obscene power grab. And this is applied to a lot of other countries beside Pakistan. Even industrialized countries get their taste of power bullying.
In the end stealing food from the hungry will end up with people with nothing to loose. And others watching and learning who does what.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 28 2015, @10:06AM
I've mentioned before [soylentnews.org] that folks using that term when there is no source code to download diminishes the FOSS movement as well as their own biology project.
Further down in that thread, captain normal notes that the correct term is Heirloom or Heritage seeds. [soylentnews.org]
-- gewg_
(Score: 2) by janrinok on Saturday March 28 2015, @10:14AM
(Score: 5, Insightful) by sjames on Saturday March 28 2015, @10:42AM
Well, the code is stored in DNA and comes wrapped in it's own runtime environment complete with bootstrap. Not all FOSS is downloaded, it used to be strictly sneakernet and U.S. mail. :-)
Heirloom seeds are older varieties that have been preserved unchanged. They just happen to also be FOSS.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by darkfeline on Saturday March 28 2015, @07:23PM
Maybe we should use the term "free knowledge" instead? Open source, heritage seeds, removal of censorship, cultural exchange, etc. are all the same thing, the idea that knowledge "opportunities" should be available to everyone.
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
(Score: 5, Interesting) by bradley13 on Saturday March 28 2015, @10:19AM
I've read about this, and was just as incensed as anyone else. Just today, however, I came across this article: Setting the Record Straight on the Legality of Seed Libraries [shareable.net], which takes a more careful look at the situation. Even in Pennsylvania, which is where the whole story started, it turns out that the actual regulation does not prohibit seed sharing. In the Pennsylvania case, it looks like the seed library needs to grow a spine and tell the regulators to get stuffed.
That's not to say that government doesn't over-regulate. It does. Laws and regulations accumulate, but are almost never eliminated. We really need to stop this accumulation by having some sort of overarching principle that laws and regulations expire, and cannot simply be extended without debate.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Saturday March 28 2015, @11:28AM
I don't think laws should simply expire, rather I think that there should be a clear demonstration that the law had its intended effect, and if not, then it should expire.
Consider the No Child Left Behind Act. Has a child been left behind? If so, the law should be repealed.
In general, laws are passed with the argument that they will stop something bad from happening, or commence something good. But after the laws are passed there is, in general, little effort to demonstrate that they really had the intended effect.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 28 2015, @01:53PM
> Consider the No Child Left Behind Act. Has a child been left behind? If so, the law should be repealed.
Just one child? Seems like a case of literally throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
As you've just demonstrated, the question would then become what threshold is required to qualify for repeal. Also, what about unintended side-effects? And what about in comparison to alternatives? Do we only compare against the null state or against alternative laws? And then on what sort of time scale?
Ultimately repeal and expiration are the same thing. And while they sound great as a simple abstract idea, the devil is in the details and this particular devil is so enormous that the whole concept becomes impractical as any sort of general principle.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 28 2015, @05:31PM
Just one child? Seems like a case of literally throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
The baby (the education system) was rotten garbage to begin with, and was that way from the beginning. Of course, No Moron Left Behind just made things worse.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by lubricus on Saturday March 28 2015, @12:47PM
As more and more genetic information is captured as proprietary by big companies, this will become a bigger and bigger problem. They are doing this because the analogous "packet inspection" is too expensive, so the easiest way to (legislatively) prevent the sharing of proprietary seeds is outlawing all sharing.
There are people fighting the good fight, trying to establish open source / copyleft licences and open databases for genetic information. In my view, it is the most effective way to fight against this nonsense.
Please check this out, and give your support in a comment if you wish (disclaimer: one of the authors is a friend of mine):
https://gsdr2015.wordpress.com/2015/02/02/thinking-a-global-open-genome-sequence-data-framework-for-sustainable-development/ [wordpress.com]
... sorry about the typos
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Saturday March 28 2015, @01:22PM
All children by IVF; all those with hairy palms [urbandictionary.com] will be punished.
(haha only [gettysburg.edu]... serious [lonestarq.com]?)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 3, Informative) by kaszz on Saturday March 28 2015, @03:08PM
That lonestarq.com link just shows how insane the laws of USA are.
At the border there should be a sign that says: "Warning, insanity ahead beware of the two legged" ;)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 28 2015, @02:53PM
Can't wait until big companies are hacked just so DNA sequences and other bio trade secrets can be leaked.
(Score: 2) by Ellis D. Tripp on Saturday March 28 2015, @03:55PM
http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2015/03/27/pot-seed-giveaway-attracts-huge-crowd-no-cops-in-dc [usnews.com]
"Society is like stew. If you don't keep it stirred up, you end up with a lot of scum on the top!"--Edward Abbey
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 28 2015, @04:02PM
I was going to say, this reminds me of smoking weed with my college roommate, who wasn't the greatest at negotiating with his dealer.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 28 2015, @06:52PM
I've recently 'retired' from running a small university based seed library, and it was a really rewarding experience. We worked occasionally with Rebecca Newburn (from the article), who is a real power house. Glad to see this getting the attention it deserves.
Seed libraries are much more essential than may be realized. The bigger companies can't afford to specialize in local varieties that may produce more, require less energy to grow (manual labor, water, etc), where the local libraries can specialize entirely in many different varieties. Ecologically, it would be disastrous if we outlawed them.
Not that anyone who really understands would obey, that is.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 29 2015, @02:39PM
Plants are restricted for interstate transport largely because of invasive species, which can be things like insects and fungus which CAN hitch a ride on seeds. Licensing for seed sales is probably more of a way of tacking on fines and fees in local jurisdictions than anything else, but there are legitimate reasons for regulating interstate transport of biological materials.
Kudzu is a great example. It is a plant that has a number of outstanding qualities, and was brought to the states specifically for those qualities. But it has done _too_ well, and now is regarded with derision and contempt. It is of course just a vine, and it will be here long after our species has retired. Planting it is a crime in some jurisdictions. Unsurprisingly those jurisdictions are the ones that planted it heavily in the 50's, and so were the ones who brought the plague on everyone else. (Oops) But in those jurisdictions, the ban is pointless because they are already overrun, so the ban just prevents innovation and creative marketing of a product they already have in abundance.
There are current examples of this going on. There is a cooperative doing it's best to drop a new atom bomb of an invasive species on the Southeastern watershed even today. Not surprisingly it is in a state who's state song was written by somebody who was banned from performing... in that state. Sometimes you just have to laugh.