https://archive.ph/Wm7OB
"Xochimilco, Mexico City—In Mexico City’s massive Central de Abastos market,
the largest produce market in the world, you can walk for 10 minutes along a
half-mile-long corridor filled only with bananas. Down another of the market’s
eight hallways, millions of onions balance precariously; down a third, lettuces
are stacked taller than their sellers. Enough produce flows through these halls
to feed some 30 percent of the 22 million residents of this capital city. It’s
a showcase for modern agricultural supply chains.
Just a few miles south in the Xochimilco neighborhood is a totally different
kind of produce mecca—one more than a thousand years old. Here, in a wetland
cut through with spidery canals and packed with wildlife, farmers like Miguel
de Valle still farm by hand on the chinampas, artificial islands first built by
the predecessors of the Aztecs from the mud of what was then a vast shallow
lake.
Before the Spanish Conquest, the super-productive chinampas formed the backbone
of the Aztec city’s food supply. The soil was so rich and growing techniques so
effective that they fed hundreds of thousands. But over centuries, and most
noticeably in the last few decades, the encroaching metropolis and cultural
shifts away from local food production sharply diminished them.
Today, though about 5,000 acres of chinampas still exist, only about 2.5
percent are used for traditional agriculture. The area is instead best known as
a popular tourist attraction, one that on weekends and holidays is bustling
with neon-painted party boats.
But a fervent group of boosters, including de Valle, think that reviving the
old tradition is both possible and necessary. “We have to protect this manner
of farming,” de Valle says. “My goal is to conserve what people have been doing
here for hundreds of years.”
Doing so, he and others say, could help improve the megacity’s food security,
enhance its environmental sustainability—the chinampas are a cooling oasis and
a haven for wildlife—as well as preserve its deep cultural heritage."
Via
Future Crunch Jul 25, 2022:
https://futurecrunch.com/good-news-aids-botswana-coal-us-ocean-colombia/
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
