Saving the World - One Seed at a Time

Let me introduce you to a few images which have been in the news in recent weeks.  First, is the so-called doomsday vault that has just gone into operation in Norway. It's goal is to preserve seeds that might preserve the race come climate change or political disaster.

The second is an attempt to restore the fragile ecosystems of the Grand Canyon by regularly controlled flooding.

Through these pictures we glimpse the extent of our current planetary management.  We have interpolated ouselves into nature to such an extent that now we must manage nature just as we manage each other and our technologies.  (And indeed, just as.  The precursor to the seed vault is one of the origin stories for the Internet - we didn't want to get into a Library of Alexandria situation again - just think how much richness there is in the scattered remains of Greek texts - so we should distribute our knowledge through digitial libraries.  The same argument came up a few years later about rebuilding Manhattan after September 11, 2001: why should we concentrate all our smart folks in one small area... .  Some time I'll get it together to write a paper detailing these kinds of crossover strategies between the social, natural and technical worlds - they are more the norm than the exception, so examples are prolix - and some of the pictures are pretty).  The possible benefits are manifold - the canonical example is that a particular disease strikes our corn which the curerent superstrain has no resistance to.  You would go to the bank, search out wild or cultivated corns to locate a variety which could bestow that resistance and bob's your uncle.  Or take the climate change variant.  One current possibility - and my personal nightmare - is that the California vines are going to hitch themselves up and start migrating north, winding up in Michigan by one account I read.  Wouldn't it be nice to have vines which could adapt to the new California climate?

So why Norway?  Well, there is some curious reasoning indeed here - given in the New York Times article linked above: "In reviewing seed bank policies a few years ago, experts looked at the banks in a new light, Dr. Fowler said: “We said, we may have some of the best seed banks in the world, but look at where they are: Peru, Colombia, Syria, India, Ethiopia, the Philippines. So a lot of us were asking, what’s plan B?”   The goal of the new global plant banking system is to protect the precious stored plant genes from the vagaries of climate, politics and human error. Many banks are now “in countries where the political situation is not stable, and it is difficult to rely on refrigeration,".  So the reasoning goes that ultrasable Norway will be able to manage this enterprise in an ultrasable physical environment.   Of course that's just a silly statement for any period of time longer than say 50 years, and not much better for shorter spans.  Europe has had its fair share of political instaability in the past 100 years - it's certainly engaged in more World Wars than any other continent I can think of.  And who knows the status of polar ice in that region - there's already signs of permafrost melt damaging the Alaskan pipeline, and there's a possible huge multiplier effect for climate change in the vast methane deposits currently transfixed in frozen soil: if the predictions are right about the amount there and the possible speed of its release, then we ain't seen nothing yet. 

The Seed Vault has some possible great benefits, but it is fundamentally flawed in its conception.  So much of our th8king of dealing with environmental disturbance is to preserve the status quo - make the present moment go on forever.  In Seed Vault terms, this means that we are basically pretty pleased with the agricultural world we have - massive monocropping which is destroying complex ecosystems, thus rendering all of our species more vulnerable, including our very own.  So we are going to keep brussel sprouts, willy nilly, in the Santa Cruz area, because that's what local enterprises want and our economy is built around that.  The best way to do this is to carefull preserve the seeds in the bank.  There are two other fairly obvious solutions - you can work to ensure that we are not dependent as a species on a few strains of a handful of crops.  That sets in train a virtuous cycle - by encouraging biodiversity on the ground rather than in banks, you create a much more robust ecosystem.  (Reminds me, btw, of another crossover - just as we have been downsizing our businesses to create what's been called the anorexic organization - lean, mean and effective but completely unable to respond to fresh challenges because there are no slack resources, so we are downsizing nature - making it highly productive but highly vulnerable to change).    It also means that we as a species could start thinking about adapting to inevitable change rather than chasing the chimera of stability. 

Related to this is that in many ways we really are preserving the wrong darned thing.  People, plants and animals only ever exist in complex communities.  Preserving a single species in isolation makes the same identity error as those who assume that a clone will be like its original: nurture really does matter.  I think it would be wrong to assume that what we really had better do (because we have no choice, they say, because the damage has already been done) is take over the process of evolution ourselves - freezing it at the present moment - because it's too important a job for nature to carry on by itself.  This is what Michel Serres ironically calls the 'natural contract' we have entered into over the past few centuries - from about the time when Rousseau invented the 'social contract' (that's the one we just broke in New Orleans...). 

Now I don't much like contrarian positions - fighting species preservation is a little like battling world peace.  So I won't even talk here about good logging policy (which makes the forests uglier for us who happen to be alive but allows for much faster recovery) or mention the fact that the real biodiversity hotspots are the big cities....  So let's just say that the Seed Vault is a good idea - but that it should be one of many.  It should be seen as a member of a toolkit, not a solution in itself.

Comments

[Steve Cisler]

A step above traditional saving of seeds and cuttings over the thousands of years of farming is a recent trend for non-profits to grow at a local, then regional and national level for exchange and storage techniques. The most prominent is Seed Savers Exchanges out of Decorah, Iowa. Since 1975 more than one million exchanges have been made among members. The Italian-based Slow Food movement also has a seed saving component, and many state agriculture extension programs have ties to specialized academic institutes. For example the Chili Pepper Institute at New Mexico State University is a Mecca for chiliheads hunting for the hotest pepper. Currently, It's Bhut Jolokia, an Indian pepper that has measured four times as strong as the previous Guinness.

I met an Italian film producer working on a story about an old Italian fellow who saves seeds but as part of a larger story. How the food is prepared, the social context, and more of the history of the plant in his area. She believes this background should be part of any long range seed saving program, and that would change the Norwegian archive in many ways.

[Eric]

I love the closing lines of this post "So let's just say that the Seed Vault is a good idea - but that it should be one of many. It should be seen as a member of a toolkit, not a solution in itself."