Gregory Levin grew up in Leningrad – now St. Petersburg – and even as a small child, his love of plants and curiosity earned him the name “little botanist”. During the terrible siege of Leningrad from 1941-44, the Germans killed all of the adult males in Gregory’s family. The population was starving and ill. Gregory saved his mother from scurvy by boiling up pine twigs and adding crystals of lemon acid. He faced many adversities—poverty and quotas against Jews among them—to earn his doctoral degree and begin his life’s work as a roving plant explorer.
For more than forty years, Dr Levin trekked across Central Asia and the Trans Caucasus in search of wild and endangered pomegranates. At Garrigala, a remote agricultural station in Turkmenistan Dr. Levin developed and tended the world’s largest collection of pomegranate varieties, as well as persimmons, walnuts, figs, olives, apricots, almonds, quince, peaches, figs and jujubes. After the breakup of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, funding from Moscow evaporated and Dr Levin was exiled from his collection of 1117 pomegranates.
With no more than their modest belongings and scientific knowledge to begin a new life, the Levins moved from their home of forty years to Israel. The leadership of Garrigala fell to a Turkmen agricultural director with no budget who resorted to ripping out precious trees and replacing them with vegetable cash crops to sustain the compromised collections. Fortunately, having the end of the Soviet Union, Dr Levin sent 60 of Garrigala’s best pomegranate varieties to Israel, and to the United States
His memoir Pomegranate Roads: A Botanist’s Exile from Eden is a unique botanical, geographical, medical, even mythological history of Punica granatum—the original ‘apple’ in the Garden of Eden, according to Dr. Levin.
Source: CBD website
Montreal, 30 June 2010 – At their annual summit, held on 25-26 June in Muskoka, Canada, leaders of the Group of Eight (G8) have again emphasized the critical importance of biodiversity to human well-being, sustainable development and poverty eradication, and highlighted the serious threat posed by the current rate of biodiversity loss.
Regretting that the international community is not on track to meeting its 2010 target to significantly reduce the rate of loss of biodiversity, G8 leaders underlined the importance of adopting an ambitious and achievable post-2010 framework.
In the G8 Muskoka Declaration, Recovery and New Beginning, leaders noted that: “In 2010, the UN International Year of Biodiversity, we regret that the international community is not on track to meeting its 2010 target to significantly reduce the rate of loss of biodiversity globally. We recognize that the current rate of loss is a serious threat, since biologically diverse and resilient ecosystems are critical to human well being, sustainable development and poverty eradication. We underline our support for Japan as it prepares to host the tenth meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity this October and in particular we underline the importance of adopting an ambitious and achievable post-2010 framework. We recognize the need to strengthen the science-policy interface in this area, and in this regard we welcome the agreement to establish an Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES).”
On 22 September 2010, leaders of the Member States of the United Nations will convene in New York in a special high-level meeting on biodiversity being held prior to the opening of the general debate of the sixty-fifth session of the UN General Assembly. The tenth meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (COP 10) will be held from 18 to 29 October 2010 in Nagoya, Aichi Prefecture, Japan. The two meetings provide opportunity for the international community to renew and strengthen commitment to halt the loss of biodiversity.
The Conference of the Parties is expected to adopt a new Strategic Plan for the Convention for 2011-2020 that sets a suite of SMART targets – goals that are at once strategic, measureable, ambitious yet realistic and time-bound – that address the underlying causes of biodiversity loss in a way that will permit national implementation within a global framework.
“Beginning with the 2007 Heiligendamm Summit, and continuing with the G8 meetings in Toyako in 2008 and L’Aquila in 2009, biodiversity issues have been a part of the G8 agenda. It was therefore fitting that the G8 leaders met in the host country of the Secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity to address this vital issue at their 2010 meeting, in a year that coincides with the celebration of the International Year of Biodiversity,” said Ahmed Djoghlaf, Executive Secretary of the Convention on Biological Diversity.
