Wired - Fascinating Photo-Essay On Globe's Seed Banks, W. Interesting Piece On Seed Politics

[hatrack]

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Global efforts to preserve seed stock for an uncertain future are no more evident than at the Svalbard “Doomsday” Seed Vault, which Doherty visited and photographed in March 2010. Located 800 miles south of the North Pole, on the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen, the Svalbard Seed Vault is the world’s insurance policy against botanical holocaust. The $9 million facility houses over 10,000 seed samples and was likened to a Bond villain’s lair when it began operation in January 2008. Doherty hopped a plane to Svalbard with Cary Fowler, executive director of the Global Crop Diversity Trust, and Ola Westengen, the operation manager of the Vault. She watched in surprise as Fowler and Westengen unloaded the shipment themselves and wheeled the boxes down the long tunnel on a handcart.

Not only is the vault impervious to temperature fluctuations and sea-level rises, it can withstand a terrorist attack. “The door is not on axis with the tunnel, there is a small curved wall in line with the tunnel engineered to disperse a blast radius,” says Doherty.

For Doherty, the Svalbard Seed Vault embodies the contradiction of hope and pessimism inherent to seed-saving activities. “On the one hand, volunteers and governments from around the world are collaborating to create a global botanical back-up system,” says Doherty, “But on the other hand, the gravity of climate change and political instability creates the need for an inaccessible ark.”

In addition to being an engaged observer, Doherty has also adopted the image-making equipment of the facilities she has visited. At the National Center for Genetic Resources Preservation (NCGRP) in Fort Collins, Colorado, Dornith got her hands on their Kubtec Xpert 80 Digital Specimen Radiography System to image seeds and tissue samples of cloned plants used in global agriculture. The NCGRP preserves genetic resources from animals, microbes, aquatic organisms and insects, as well as plants.

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http://www.wired.com/rawfile/2011/10/dornith-doherty/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+wired%2Findex+%28Wired%3A+Index+3+%28Top+Stories+2%29%29&pid=1115&viewall=true

[zalinda]

1. I've just started seed saving

and plan to do more in the future. It makes sense. If a virus hits a GMO crop, what the hell does the world do?

zalinda