3 ms·

I don't think it's necesarily one or the other. Climate change is a stressor, and monoculture makes crops less reseilient to stress. Crops undergo massive fail

by blix 7y ago

I don't think it's necesarily one or the other. Climate change is a stressor, and monoculture makes crops less reseilient to stress. Crops undergo massive failures relatively frequently. Bananas are headed towards their second extinction this half-century. As stresses perhaps become more acute due to a rapidly changing climate and environment, this lack of resliliency may prove quite harmful, more so than the damage that can be reliably attributed to any individual stressor.

throwaway5752 7y ago
I don't know, I actually don't know enough about olive farming practices to know if monoculture is a factor? I assume this is a factor and you are correct. I did find a Nature article about it https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-45365-y https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-45365-y that was pretty useful. Seems to suggest it was a factor and may expand the effected range, but it is also an introduced disease and doesn't require climate change to impact large parts of the Mediterranean coast. edit: You may be interested to know bananas didn't go extinct, per se. Mass market US bananas are propagated clones. We have bred the seeds out of bananas (with rare exceptions), so most large scale agricultural plants are tissue culture or cutting clones. The mass market variety was the Gros Michel/Big Mike, which you can still buy online easily. Panama Rust is adapting to the Cavendish, which was resistant when it became the new US mass market variety after the Cavendish. Greater availability of other varieties would be great. Neither of those are the best bananas out there (Nam Wah, Pisang Raja, and Blue Java are all great).
- blix 7y ago
  Thanks for the paper :) This seems ominious for olives at large, and points to globalization as a larger culprit than climate change. Global trade seems even less likely to disappear than fossile fuels. The history of bananas is quite interesting, and the future looks to be as well. While it did fall short of true extinction, I'm hopeful we can learn from past mistakes. Perhaps I'll have the opportunity to try one of the other cultivars someday.

by blix 7y ago

throwaway5752 7y ago

I don't know, I actually don't know enough about olive farming practices to know if monoculture is a factor? I assume this is a factor and you are correct. I did find a Nature article about it https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-45365-y https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-45365-y that was pretty useful. Seems to suggest it was a factor and may expand the effected range, but it is also an introduced disease and doesn't require climate change to impact large parts of the Mediterranean coast. edit: You may be interested to know bananas didn't go extinct, per se. Mass market US bananas are propagated clones. We have bred the seeds out of bananas (with rare exceptions), so most large scale agricultural plants are tissue culture or cutting clones. The mass market variety was the Gros Michel/Big Mike, which you can still buy online easily. Panama Rust is adapting to the Cavendish, which was resistant when it became the new US mass market variety after the Cavendish. Greater availability of other varieties would be great. Neither of those are the best bananas out there (Nam Wah, Pisang Raja, and Blue Java are all great).

blix 7y ago
Thanks for the paper :) This seems ominious for olives at large, and points to globalization as a larger culprit than climate change. Global trade seems even less likely to disappear than fossile fuels. The history of bananas is quite interesting, and the future looks to be as well. While it did fall short of true extinction, I'm hopeful we can learn from past mistakes. Perhaps I'll have the opportunity to try one of the other cultivars someday.