Satisfying Your Ancestral Appetite

Safeguards for Native Plants and Animals

Whether for food purposes or aesthetic reasons, preserving indigenous plants and animals is crucial to maintaining and promoting biodiversity.

Genetic engineering (GE) threatens the survival of many region-specific crops, including wild rice indigenous to the Great Lakes area of the U.S. and Canada. The White Earth Land Restoration Project, fearing that GE rice may contaminate a crop that provides vital economic support to native communities, wants the Minnesota state legislature to require a two-year moratorium before any GE rice could be introduced into the state. Learn more at www.savewildrice.org.

In late April, Reps. Raúl Grijalva (D-AZ) and Gabrielle Gifford (D-AZ) introduced a bill to protect the Tumacacori Highlands in Arizona, an 85,000-acre portion of the Coronado National Forest that serves as habitat for more rare and endangered animal species than anywhere else in the U.S. If passed, the bill would disallow development on the land, roads and off-road vehicles. For more, see www.tumacacoriwild.org.