Global Seed Vault is actually a reminder that the world is always ending.
the Global Seed Vault on the Svalbard
archipelago (is) part of a frigid cluster of islands far north of Norway where polar
bears outnumber human residents. It’s a destination I first
discovered in Lauren Redniss’ remarkable illustrated study of weather, Thunder
and Lightning. There, she writes, you’ll find the vault, a
reinforced and heavily secured tunnel, built into a frozen mountain. It
contains hundreds of thousands of unique samples of agricultural crops and
serves as a backup repository for seeds from more local vaults around the
world. The collection is so inclusive that, as of 2016, virtually every country
was represented within.
In photographs, the vault’s exterior is strikingly
beautiful, thanks in large part to the haunting crystalline light installation
by Dyveke Sanne above the entrance. When Redniss draws the vault, though, she
emphasizes just how small it is, a tiny gray wedge emerging out of the endless
white expanse of the mountain. It’s an image of resilience in the face of
almost overwhelming odds, a reminder that, much as our species is capable of
self-annihilation, we somehow incline toward survival.
Sometimes, kept awake
by my work, I would tell myself stories of Svalbard. They always began the
same: Long after the fall of industrial civilization, an adventurer would
discover mention of the Seed Vault in the ruins of an ancient library.
Gathering a ragtag crew and building a makeshift longship, she would sail
north, in search of treasures that might help her people learn to farm again.
Along the way, she would battle pirates and dodge errant ice flows. My
adventurer never arrived at the vault: The mere knowledge that it was there,
that she was traveling toward it, was reassuring enough to lull me asleep.
I’m hardly alone in
imagining Svalbard as a source of optimism. As Redniss notes, this remote
locale is sometimes described as a “doomsday vault,” a buffer against our own
radical fragility. One representative CNN report on the site from 2015
frames it in these very terms, calling it “our insurance policy” and quoting a
source who claims that it would allow us to “recreate agriculture in the
world.” A more recent Gizmodo article, similarly, discusses a
new deposit to the vault under the headline, “Scientists Add 50,000 Seeds to Arctic Doomsday Vault Because
Everything Is Awful.”
Such language is
understandable: Redniss quotes a 2008 statement from the vault’s parent
institutions holding that its contents would remain frozen for 200 years even
in the event of “worst-case scenarios for global warming.” Heavily reinforced
as it is, it also seems like the sort of place that could survive more violent
conflicts too—in the unlikely event that any battle found its way that far
north. The project’s progenitor, agriculturalist Cary Fowler, notes in the
conclusion to his book Seeds
on Ice that he’s sometimes asked whether the facility could
endure a nuclear blast. “My glib answer to such questions is that it depends on
how big the bomb is,” he writes. “Tellingly, no depositor, scientist,
journalist, or politician who has ever gone down into the Seed Vault has
emerged to question the safety of its contents.”
Though such facts are
reassuring, the Svalbard vault was never really designed to support life after
the end—at least not in the singular, definitive sense that “the end” suggests.
As Fowler stresses in Seeds
on Ice, the vault was envisioned not out of an obsession with
“doomsday” but in a more “pragmatic” spirit. It exists in an ongoing
relationship with scores of local seed vaults around the globe, helping them
protect their critical contents against the risk of more regional and immediate
disasters: floods, power failures, violent uprisings, and so on… read more:
http://www.slate.com/articles/