The Svalbard Global Seed Bank

The ultimate safety deposit box. (The Bus 4.30)

Welcome aboard The Bus!

The Stop

Built into a mountainside on the Arctic Ocean island of Spitsbergen, Norway, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault is a secure facility designed to ‘safeguard the seeds of the world’s food plants in the event of a global crisis’. Though there are over 1,700 seed banks around the world holding food crop seeds for safekeeping, natural catastrophes and war, or even problems with funding or poor management can make them vulnerable and affect their reliability. As the loss of a crop variety is as irreversible as the extinction of any other form of life, the Seed Vault - constructed in the permafrost to provide a natural backup in the event the vault’s cooling systems fail - stores duplicates of seed samples from these other crop collections to safeguard against potentially catastrophic loss.¹

Straight Outta Star Wars: The Svalbard Global Seed Bank

With climate change and population growth putting immense pressure on the world’s food supply, the Seed Vault is considered the ‘ultimate insurance policy’. Plant researchers and breeders rely on seed banks to supply varieties with desirable traits, and if for some reason any of these seed banks are lost, the collections can be restored by retrieving the copies from Svalbard. Think of it as the ultimate safety deposit box - but in this case, instead of holding wills and deeds, it’s a permanently frozen collection of up to 4.5 million varieties of seeds from around the world.

The seeds are sealed in three-ply aluminium packages which are placed into plastic containers and then onto metal shelves in one of three storage rooms which are kept at -18 °C (-0.4 °F). As each packet contains an average of 500 seeds, when the Vault reaches full capacity, a maximum of 2.5 billion seeds may be stored. While the Government of Norway owns and maintains the facility, they do not own the seeds - all deposits are the property of the depositor, and only they are allowed to access the seeds if and when required.

Currently, the Seed Vault holds over 1.1 million seed varieties, ranging from ‘unique varieties of major African and Asian food staples such as maize, rice, wheat, cowpea and sorghum to European and South American varieties of eggplant, lettuce, barley and potato.’ Though deposits generally come from official banks, some indigenous communities have begun to store seeds for duplication - in 2015, the Parque de la Papa in Peru deposited 750 samples of potatoes, and in 2020, the Cherokee Nation became the first US tribe to make a deposit in the form of nine ‘heirloom food crops which predate European colonisation’.

For a tour of the facility, follow this link: Svalbard Global Seed Bank.

The Detour

Today’s Detour is to Birdsong. Subtitled ‘The dying whistled language of the Hmong people in northern Laos’, this Guardian documentary (17:38) explores, well, just what it says: the whistling traditions of the Hmong, whose ‘language straddles the boundary between music and speech.’ With the advent of technology and urbanisation, this traditional language - and the instruments which enable it - are disappearing. A fascinating, otherworldly film, this is the story of three practitioners of a ‘vanishing musical language’.

Birdsong

The Recommendation

Today’s Recommendation is Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow (2016), by the Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari.² About six years ago, the librarian at my school³ organised an assembly at which several faculty members shared their favourite book connected to the theme of ‘journey’. I’d forgotten about this, but when I pulled my copy of Homo Deus off the shelf the other day, I discovered it had evidently been my choice, as a copy of my talk was inside:

Like all of the books discussed today, Homo Deus is also about a journey - but a journey into the future of the human species in a world of rapidly-changing technology.

What’s going to happen to democracy when Google and Facebook know our likes and dislikes and our political preferences better than we know them ourselves? What will happen to the welfare state when computers push humans out of the job market and create a massive new ‘useless class’? How will the world religions handle the reality of genetic engineering? What will happen when medical advances provide those who can afford it the promise of something approaching immortality? Will Silicon Valley end up producing new religions - such as Dataism - and not only new gadgets? If you’re thinking this is just a theory, take a moment to really consider your relationship with the phone in your pocket.

Homo Deus blends science, history, philosophy - and many other disciplines - to consider a future in which humanity loses not only its dominance, but its very meaning. Humans are the most successful species on earth - we’ve seriously reined in famine, plague and war - yes, these still exist, but on a far smaller scale than at any time in the past. In fact, today more people die from obesity than starvation, more die from old age than from infectious diseases, and more people commit suicide than are killed in war. Humans are the only species in the history of the earth that has single-handedly changed the entire planet - and fewer and fewer believe in a higher being who shapes our destinies, as we do this ourselves.

The problem is that success breeds ambition - and Harari argues the next step for the human journey is the search for immortality, boundless happiness and powers of creation far, far greater than any ancient person would have been able to imagine. Humans are on a roll - but where’s this going to end?

Well, you’ll have to read it to find out - but a hint can be found in this quote: ‘History began when humans created gods; history will end when humans become gods.’

Thanks - and read this book.

It’s a great read, and - considering what has occurred in the years since its publication - eerily prescient. For more information, here’s a review from The Guardian: Homo Deus Review (The Guardian).

The Sounds

Today’s playlist is a selection of five tracks selected because either the song or the artist references seeds or plants (and sometimes both): ‘Sowing the Seeds of Love’ (Tears for Fears, 1989), ‘Seed to a Tree’ (Blind Melon, 1992), ‘Where the Wild Roses Grow’ (Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, 1996), ‘29 Palms’ (Robert Plant, 1993) and ‘Pure’ (The Lightning Seeds, 1989). Enjoy!

The Thought

Today’s Thought is from Yuval Noah Harari:

‘Humans have an amazing capacity to believe in contradictory things. For example, to believe in an omnipotent and benevolent God but somehow excuse Him from all the suffering in the world. Or our ability to believe from the standpoint of law that humans are equal and have free will and from biology that humans are just organic machines.’

If you have a thought on this Thought - or any part of today’s issue - please leave a comment below:

And that’s the end of this Stop - I hope you enjoyed the diversion!

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Until the next Stop …

1. Sources for today’s Stop include Svalbard Global Seed Bank (Britannica), The Doomsday Vault (The Guardian), Description of the Facility, Cherokee Nation Sends Seeds (Forbes) and Svalbard Global Seed Bank (Croptrust.org).

2. Harari’s first book - Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (2014) - was an international bestseller, championed by everyone from Bill Gates to Mark Zuckerberg. A brilliant thinker, Harari possesses a very clear mind. For more about Sapiens and him, see this review from The Guardian: Sapiens (The Guardian).

3. Sue remains one of my favourite librarians of all time. When I worked with her she was a tireless advocate for reading and arranged numerous school-wide events in which faculty and staff would share with pupils their reading interests. This particular assembly was great, but my favourite was her recreation of the South Bank Show, where a handful of us sat on stage and - in front of a big projection of the book’s cover - discussed with each other why our choice of book should be read before taking questions from the kids in the audience. It was genuinely fun. My suggestion was Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland, for what it’s worth.