Hybridization is how Cannabis biodiversity is vanishing – permanently.
“Hybridization, mostly during the last century, has obscured differences between the European and Chinese hemp groups, and between the Indica-type and Sativa-type ‘marijuana’ groups.”
Hybridization is homogenization.
Hybridization is why the strains at seedbanks and dispensaries are getting ever-increasingly samey.
Flavor-of-the-month strain names can’t hide the underlying reality that modern hybrids derive from a small handful of foundational strains such as Skunk, Northern Lights, and Haze.
This is a problem for science, business, and customers, all of whose range of understanding, products, and experience are constrained within a very narrow area of the cannabis gene pool.
But above all it’s a crisis for the ecology of cannabis because modern hybrid seed is flooding into ancient centres of cannabis cultivation in Asia and Africa, destroying local biodiversity permanently before indigenous communities get a collective say and before adequate collections of germplasm are established inside or outside these regions.
Image and quote from Ernest Small’s book, ‘Cannabis: A Complete Guide’.
For more information you can rely on, read the study by Judith Rhymer and Daniel Simberloff, ‘Extinction by Hybridization’.
For cannabis, hybridization is homogenization, and hybridization is extinction….
