An article a couple of years ago drew quite a bit of ridicule for detailing a proposal to create a cryogenic seed-base - that is, a stockpile of seeds kept in deep-freeze in secure facilities, preserved as a fail-safe in case of a global climatalogical catastrophe. Just to add a bit of James Bond quality kitzch, the vault would be located in the Antarctic or Arctic Circle, just for an extra level of protection - no word on whether it would be guarded by lasers and/or sharks.

 

The seed-bank, it was said, would protect us against ourselves as humanity homogenized and marginalized many important agricultural species. The more we limit genetic diversity in a population through interbreeding or genetic engineering, the more specialized and vulnerable that species becomes - this is true for plants as well as animals.

 

Now the dream has become a reality - the facility, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, opens on February 26th in Norway’s sovereign region of the arctic circle. To their credit, the vault, which has already received its first shipment, comprised of 21 boxes of paired specimens, have taken great pains to represent the genetic diversity, both natural and domesticated, of the species in question.

Additionally, they’ve chosen to start with species that, while not the most popular foods in the western world (maize, soybean, cowpea, and Bambara groundnut) are hardy, thriving in adverse conditions, and sufficient for sustaining a human diet, for those of us that survive and/or miss the last plane to Mars.

 

That’s the thing - I think it’s worth taking a moment to debate the relative wisdom or hubris of this whole project, because it reads like the same kind of ill-conceived scheme as the would-be Mars colonies. They teem with boundless optimism, but lack any sense of responsibility for the current state of things. Can you imagine a catastrophe which would destroy all plant life, but leave mankind intact? (much less capable of traveling to the North Pole in an effort to revegetate the planet we’d already once destroyed)

 

I respect the Norwegians for conceiving of such a project, kind and proactive people that they are, but I think it’s fatalistic, and frankly shameful, that we must go to such extreme lengths to make up for the average American’s refusal to change their daily lives - recycle, reduce, reuse, and make Green choices as a consumer, and all of this will turn out fine.

 

Source http://news.yahoo.com/s/livescience/noahsarcticarkforseedssettoopen

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