Svalbard, Crop Diversity's Noah's Ark

One of my favorite literary genres has always been the doomsday, or dystopian, novel. I'm pretty sure On The Beach, by Nevil Shute, was my first encounter, as a teenager, with this category of grim, post-apocalyptic survival-of-the-fewest reading, and after that I was hooked. My all-time favorite has to be Walter M. Miller's A Canticle for Leibowitz, written in 1959, deep in the heart of our nuclear holocaust cultural fears. Although I have to also mention Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, Jean Hegland's Into The Forest, Russell Hoban's Riddley Walker, andRichard Matheson's I Am Legend (no, no, not the Will Smith flick, which is only the third film to be made from this monstrous novel,) the actual book itself.

I offer this, not as gratuitous information about my reading habits, but to provide background for my fascination with the official dedication late last week of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, or, as much of the media has been calling it: The Doomsday Vault. Planning for this Noah's Ark of crop diversity began thirty years ago, and work on the facility started in 2006 on the frozen island of Spitsbergen in the Svalbard Archipelago, 500 miles from the North Pole. The vault is the project of the United Nations' sponsored foundation The Global Crop Diversity Trust Fund, (which I will hereafter refer to as the GCDTF, okay?) working in conjunction with the Ministry of Agriculture and Food of the Kingdom of Norway, and is intended to ensure survival of crop diversity in the event of plant epidemics, nuclear war, natural disasters or climate change; and to offer the world a chance to restart growth of food crops that may have been wiped out. Or, as the GCDTF site says...It will be the ultimate safety net for the world's most important natural resource.

Even without catastrophes on the global scale envisioned by dystopian novelists and the far-sighted planners of the Vault, crop biodiversity is fast diminishing through smaller, more local disasters. Industrial agriculture itself is one of the biggest causes of this loss. The aim of the Svalbard vault is not just to preserve these varieties as we know them but also to safeguard the gene pool for breeding if, say, a devastating new disease emerges or global warming places new stresses on commercially important varieties. The Vault holds over 1.5 million distinct seed samples of agricultural crops, with the capacity to conserve over 4.5 million. The seeds will be stored at -18C to prevent them from germinating. But even if these fans in the cooling system fail, the natural permafrost surrounding the vault will keep them at around -4C. Fenced in and guarded, with steel airlock doors, motion detectors and polar bears roaming outside - the concrete facility will, its backers say, be the most secure building of its type in the world. The poetry of this facility (please go to the image gallery on the GCDTF site, (scroll to the bottom of this page - the Image Gallery link is on the lefthand sidebar) and spend a while with these breath-taking photos), the permafrost, the light shining out onto the ice from the aboveground portions of the building, the months of eternal night,the seeds being gathered into this repository from all corners, all peoples, of the planet - The scope of this project has captured my imagination as little else has recently.Will anyone be around...and who will they be? after our final cataclysm to open this Vault, begin life over by planting these seeds? I can't be the only one to see that this has "big doomsday novel" written all over it, and oh my god, the movie that would follow!! Golden Compass, eat your heart out!

Technorati Tags: biological diversity, global catastrophe, Global Crop Diversity Trust, Svalbard Global Seed Vault,

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