In Defence Of Difference, An Argument For Resilience (Remember Vavilov).

It's gratifying to have been noticed by the New York Times' Week in Review, "highlighting the most interesting writing we’ve come across lately on the Web." I'm also happy to see that Seed Magazine finally got the essay (co-authored with Maywa Montenegro), about the theory and science of resilience, up on-line. Headlined "In Defence of Difference: Scientists offer new insight into what to protect of the world's rapidly vanishing languages, cultures, and species," it's about the way conventional environmentalism is outliving its usefulness, and you can read it all here.

I wrote a book on the subject. That's how fascinated I am by it all. In Canada, it's called Waiting for the Macaws. In America it's called The Sixth Extinction. In the UK, it's The Lost and Left Behind (my favorite) and in Germany it's Warten auf die Aras. Which all goes to show - the marketing people always have a hard time with ideas like these. I will conclude this bit of self-advertising this way: Long live the memory of comrade Nikolai Vavilov, whose dangerous and brilliant ideas inspired the book, and also caused him to be sent by Stalin to Saritov prison, were he died in 1943.