| Title | Sharing Seeds | |
| Date | Saturday March 28 2015, @09:11AM | |
| Author | janrinok | |
| Topic | ||
| from the pop-a-poppy dept. | ||
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?
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printed from SoylentNews, Sharing Seeds on 2024-04-18 14:00:59