It works pretty much in the same way as keeping a safety deposit box in a bank.įor example, North Korea still owns the contents of their deposit even though Norway owns the facility that houses and protects the hermit’s kingdom’s spare seed supply. The government of Norway owns the facility, having undertaken most of the construction and operational costs (although investors include the Bill Gates and Rockefeller foundations), but all countries are welcome to store their seeds in the vault for free. The world’s largest library of crop genetic diversity is kept securely sealed most of the year, only a few people have access to the vault and there are no permanent employees on site. Oh, and the vault also has more than 20,000 marijuana seeds, ensuring weed will indeed survive the apocalypse. It is designed to survive the depredations of man, natural disaster, and time. Even North Korea participated and keeps a deposit box there. These are the “spare” copies the back-ups to the back-ups of crop seeds held in the world’s gene banks, sent in by rival nations across the globe. Buried 390 feet deep inside a sandstone mountain on an island between Norway and the North Pole, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, also known as the doomsday vault, is home to the millions of seeds that could save a post-apocalyptic world. So it’s a cultural element in this because it’s not only the genetic material, the information, but also the association with a deep identity that we have and we want to keep it.” In other words, rather than an ominous time capsule of some potential apocalypse, the Seed Vault is more a backup, a library of our agriculture that someday may be integral in reviving part of our food system.In the event of Armageddon, I think I know where I’ll be headed now. “Our identity is the potato,” Alejandro Argumedo, co-director of Association ANDES explains in the film. “The other message of sending the seeds to Svalbard is that all that culture, also is kept. The one example provided of success is a “potato park” in the Andes of Peru that cultivates a wide variety of the crop, which while isolated does provide a moving account of why agricultural diversity isn’t just important for our food, but also culture. The film could have used some diversity itself in terms of voices, as while Fowler is a smart and calm voice in explaining the need for security against agricultural collapse, there are no contrasting voices of dissent. Seeds of Time through Fowler puts a human face on what is widely nicknamed the “Doomsday Vault.” At the time of the Seed Vault’s groundbreaking in 2006, the agricultural advocate from Tennessee was director of the Global Crop Diversity Trust (GCDT). A feature-length documentary called Seeds of Time, directed and produced by Sandy McLeod, both profiles Fowler and explores the potential plight of failing agriculture, where climate change, population growth, and the lack of diversity in crops could be devastating for our food future. The design solution to the loss of seed banks around the world, where low funding is often as much a danger as natural disasters, cooling unit failures, and war, was instigated by Cary Fowler. The Svalbard Global Seed Vault holds thousands of plant species seeds copied from gene banks around the world, kept cool in a mountain surrounded by permafrost, ready as a restart for our agricultural biodiversity. On a Norwegian island 810 miles south of the North Pole is a safety net for an agricultural crisis. Still from ‘Seeds of Time,’ with a view to the Svalbard Seed Bank (all images courtesy the filmmakers)
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