| Which civilisations built pyramids? The Egyptians built large tombs, the Maya and Aztecs built honorific temples across Mesoamerica while corporate America built the Bass Pro Pyramid in Memphis, Tennessee. Each significant in its own right but only one has a laser arcade inside. However, the pyramid that you will perhaps be more familiar with in your childhood comes from none of the above but instead, Sweden. |
| The food pyramid has been plastered across most schools since the 1970s. At least one wall had a large multicoloured triangle filled with everything from breads, eggs, steaks and vegetables, you know the drill. It was a Swedish creation with the aim of identifying both cheap foods and the foods needed to provide supplemental nutrition. |
| Over time it got adopted by various health agencies across the world and modified to reflect cultural norms and local produce. It impressed the importance of getting balanced forms of nutrition from multiple sources in order to lead a healthy life. What it didn’t show is that despite all of the necessary variety, all of our food has a common denominator: seeds. |
| Everything we eat is either grown or has eaten something that was. Go back far enough in the food chain you will find your diet’s agricultural roots. The importance of seeds has been identified ever since the time of hunter-gatherers but only in the last century have we started developing extensive infrastructure to catalogue and store them. |
| Seed banks protect the genetic diversity of the world’s plant species. They hold seeds for every purpose from protecting against species loss to preserving the cultural identities of communities. They are quite literally preparing for a post-apocalyptic world in which we cannot predict what will the ground be able to grow, let alone exist. |
| Whilst some are storage facilities, others are laboratories for the genetic testing and editing of plant species to create more resilient species. They are hulking feats of engineering to protect some of the smallest components of the natural world. As the world sails into an unknown future, these fortresses are our insurance against a changing ground. |
Germination
| The act of saving seeds stretches back to the origins of agriculture. Cultures around the world protected and preserved harvested seeds over the winter months in order to replant them in the following year. These practices are not just a functional practice but an acknowledgement that human survival is dependent on safeguarding natural resources. |
| The seed banks that we know today emerged from Soviet Russia in the early twentieth century under the supervision of the botanist and geneticist, Nikolai Vavilov. Growing up in both harsh climatic and political conditions, Vavilov had repeatedly seen the devastating impact of famine on the Russian people. |
| Over the course of a decade, Vavilov embarked on numerous expeditions across continents to collect the genetic samples of various crops with the aim of building a foundation for a more diverse food supply in Russia. He collected samples of over 250,000 species with the intention of using the genetic diversity found in wild crops to re-engineer domesticated (farmed) crops to become more resilient to extreme conditions. |
| Despite his ambitions, Vavilov was working within an atmosphere of scientific doubt and resistance under the reign of Joseph Stalin. Vavilov was ultimately arrested and imprisoned following backlash from hardline sceptics of genetics and evolution, eventually dying of starvation in a gulag. However, following the successive regimes of Stalin and Nikita Khrushchev, Vavilov’s eponymous seed bank was restarted in St Petersburg in the sixties. |
| Today, around 80% of the seed bank’s collection is of the only remaining samples. Seeds are stored but in frozen vats and room temperature units, often requiring regeneration every decade to ensure their longevity. The bank’s collection was instrumental in safeguarding crop strains that vanished during wars and, in some cases, helping reintroduce them after adverse events. |
Eggs and BasketsSeed banks operate on one principle, biodiversity. In order to provide resilience against future climatic swings or famine events, seed banks store an extensive variety in order to ensure that a portion of the preserved seeds would be able to withstand the changes.Biodiversity protects against the weaknesses of a single crop from being exploited. A plantation of a single crop, no matter how desirable, would be equally vulnerable to extremes such as heat, drought or flooding. Seed banks ensure that populations around the world have access to healthy and usable collections of seeds should disease or human activity harm a crop. Industrial scale farming has meant that many plant species have been bred for desirable qualities such as taste or visual appearance. A skew towards a limited number of characteristics means that the overall gene pool of a crop loses its inherent, wild biodiversity. Seed banks allow for a wider variety of characteristics to be preserved and drawn from if needed in the future. The mother of all vaultsDeep inside the Arctic Circle, on the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard, lies the world’s most famous seed bank. Almost entirely underground, the entrance juts out like the tailfin of a giant concrete aircraft that has buried itself into the mountainside (ironically, Svalbard’s airport is the world’s northernmost commercial airport).In an otherwise remote and white tundra, the entrance to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault offers a glimmer of hope. Its unassuming doors appear as if they have been taken off of the local substation and the ventilation grille above would not be out of place at a leisure centre. But above these two elements sits a glowing sculpture of shimmering metal plates glowing in an iridescent blue hue that humanises this grey shard. It is a simple but clear sign that within this barren landscape lies a precious treasure, one too delicate for the world outside. Run and funded by the Norwegian government, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault holds close to one million seed samples. It is stylised as a ‘doomsday vault’ with the intention of preserving seed samples for a projected lifespan of two hundred years, only allowing sample withdrawals in the most extreme circumstances. In an act of global co-operation, the bank does not aim to create its own unique collection of seeds but instead creates a back up supply of the seeds stored by banks worldwide. Per its original design, the vault relies on the frozen ground it was buried within to keep it dry and provide passive (readily available) cooling for the facility should the electrical supply fail. The permafrost, ground that continuously stays below 0 °C, allows the vault temperature to be maintained at -18 °C in order to all but eradicate rot and decay of the seed samples. Apart from refrigeration, the site’s 130 m elevation above sea level ensures it is at no risk of flooding on the island. Svalbard bears many overlaps with global cultural practices. Beyond seeds, it became a repository for ancestral potato varieties of the Quechua communities in Peru as the impacts of climate change threatened the ability to sustain local Andean biodiversity. The principle of passive cooling has also been used extensively by indigenous communities across the Arctic Circle. In the Northern Territories of Canada, ice houses in the Inuvialuit Settlement Region have been used for decades to store harvests. Underground and carved into the permafrost, community ice houses create a collection of connected vaults for local families to store food and scraps for both humans and pets. Despite this, the permafrost posed a greater threat to the vault. A combination of warming temperatures and construction activities disturbed the ground and eventually caused leaks into the vault’s main access tunnels. The vault tunnel had to be reinforced and re-sealed to prevent any further damage during a 2018 renovation project. But Svalbard is not just an insurance policy for the future. As the Syrian civil war was being waged in 2015, Aleppo’s seed bank was occupied by armed forces and prompted the first withdrawal from Svalbard. Researchers studying the impact of drought and high temperature were no longer able to rely on the Syrian storage banks and backup supplies from Svalbard were used in order to continue research. Svalbard and other seed banks are physical reminders of humankind’s dependence on nature. They are products of an optimism that humans can preserve the variety of nature and yet this is only required due to a pessimism (perhaps realism) of a possible catastrophe wrought by human activity itself. They are creations to protect humans from themselves. |