A simple, healthy dish from India…

Readers of this blog may know it is named after one of my favorite foods, chickpeas, or Cicer arietinum. This legume is high in protein and it’s one of the earliest cultivated legumes. Remains dated more than 5,000 years old have been found in Anatolia and in Europe.

(Photograph by Jaymi Heimbuch, TreeHugger)

So I try to post about chickpeas whenever the opportunity arises. Today I came across a TreeHugger recipe for chickpeas simmered in masala sauce. Kelly Rossiter explains that this simple Indian recipe takes very little effort and the results are quite tasty.

Jaymi Heimbuch says, “I knew I'd love this dish just by looking at the ingredients--it has so many fantastic spices with simple chickpeas and tomatoes to soak them all up and provide texture--but I had no idea that it would come together so easily.”

Here’s the link if you’d like to give it a try: http://www.treehugger.com/easy-vegetarian-recipes/chickpeas-simmered-masala-sauce.html

New projects preserve biodiversity of the planet...

(Photo of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault by Mari Tefre)

The New York Times announced two major multi-million dollar projects this week that will contribute to the preservation and understanding of the biodiversity of the planet. The first, Near Arctic, Seed Vault Is a Fort Knox of Food, is about the Svalbard Global Seed Vault in Norway. This new seed bank is engineered to store and protect samples from every seed collection in the world.

With plant species disappearing at an alarming rate, scientists and governments are creating a global network to store seeds and sprouts, precious genetic resources that may be needed for the world’s food supply to adapt to climate change, writes Elisabeth Rosenthal.

The Global Vault is part of an effort to gather and systematize information about plants and their genes, which may be “more valuable than gold” since the FAO has reported that three-quarters of crop biodiversity has been lost in the last century.

The second, The Encyclopedia of Life, No Bookshelf Required, is about the launch of Harvard biologist Edward O. Wilson’s project to catalogue the 1.8 million known species with room for the millions of other species as they are discovered.

An international team of scientists has introduced the first 30,000 pages of the Encyclopedia of Life and they predict they will have the other 1.77 million within 10 years. The species currently listed online come mainly from databases of fish, amphibians, and plants, and the authors hope the scientific community will pool its knowledge on the pages, writes Carl Zimmer.

Major advances have made the goal more realistic than past attempts, since biologists can now consult databases that hold DNA sequences from hundreds of thousands of species. And ten of the largest natural history libraries in the world are scanning millions of pages of scientific literature, which computers are text-mining to add information to species pages.

Both programs will become increasingly more important as we face biodiversity loss caused by human-induced climate change.

New chickpea helps farmers adapt to climate change...

Chickpeas--one of the plants with the highest amount of protein--are a staple of Middle Eastern food. Farmers in Turkey, according to a September 4 report by Environment News Service, have been enduring a severe drought that has caused their crops to fail. A new chickpea variety that can withstand drought and still produce a high yield has been developed by scientists with the International Center for Agricultural Research in Dry Areas (ICARDA) based in Aleppo, Syria.

Why a blog?

I decided to experiment with a blog to share ideas, news about events, and interesting people and places without having to flood everyone with email! Now friends, colleagues, and family can visit me here to find out what I've been doing and what I've been thinking about.

The main idea was to post important stories from the media and share reports from public events on this blog, and it will likely be a space to explore issues from the Environmental Management program I'm starting at Harvard this summer.

Although blogs are adding to the quantity of information, much of it terribly unimportant, my goal is to actually decrease my contribution to the Data Smog (David Shenk, 1997) by using this blog as much as possible instead of sending email to friends and colleagues all over the world!

This will be a very personal site, but it will be mostly about my professional interests in the Environment and in Sustainable Development in Armenia and other countries. A word about the title: cicer (chickpeas) is one of my favorite foods (I am a vegetarian). It's great in an Indian curry, in Middle Eastern food, and even in a burrito. It's a great source of protein and I find it to be very hearty and healthy.