Saving Seeds But Not Yet Sites
Entryway to the Svalbard Seed Vault in northern Norway (photo by Steffen Trumpf/Picture Alliance, via Getty Images, published at featured link below).
By Marcy Rockman, Lifting Rocks Climate and Heritage Consulting, for the SHA Climate Heritage Initiative
In late October of this year, the Svalbard Seed Vault in northern Norway received its largest deposit to date, approximately 30,000 new samples. The Seed Vault is a gene bank, holding seeds from around the world against a range of catastrophes, including climate disasters and other human-caused events. In this way it’s safeguarding genetic heritage of the world’s plants and millennia of agricultural development. The Seed Vault is the outcome of a powerful vision and wide collaboration. It also raises the question – what visions and plans are underway for cultural heritage of seeds and growth?
There are multiple seed gene banks around the world that store, study, and share seeds. While some withdrawals have been made, the Svalbard Seed Vault has been likened to an external hard drive, the back-up in case regularly used systems of seed stewardship fail. The size of the October deposits is a reflection of the growing recognition of the growing stresses of climate change.
The Arctic is warming, up to four times as fast as other areas of the planet. This warming caused a small flood at the Vault several years ago; this is now fixed, but archaeological sites across the Arctic do not have similar protections. They’re melting along with the permafrost that holds them. There is much to say about impacts of climate on archaeological sites everywhere, and the long-standing crisis at curation facilities struggling to hold what has been excavated previously. But keeping with the theme of seeds, I’ll note that media attention to saving of seeds, which is needed!, most often does not recognize the cultural knowledge that surrounds seeds: tools and care for growing them, recipes that have used them, language and songs that have carried these forward.These too should be part of what we plan for.
For a listing of all blog posts in this series, visit our Climate Heritage Initiative page.
