![]() ![]() ![]() They can then request to withdraw the seeds – also for free – if and when they need them. Amongst the seeds being protected this way by The Crop Trust currently are 200,000 varieties of rice and 125,000 varieties of wheat. The free global service allows organizations to store their seeds once they are already placed in both their own collections and another seed bank, as a final back up. The arrangement with depositing organizations is akin to a safety deposit scheme. The Svalbard Global Seed Vault in Norway acts as an insurer to other seed collections. Diversity is disappearing in the field and seed banks are disappearing due to war and natural disasters.” The way we farm and the way cities and industries have grown has damaged the diversity of crops, reducing options for future crops. Rather than conceiving of a future Doomsday as a single, monolithic event, Haga reports that “there are small doomsdays happening around the world every day. The Svalbard Global Seed Vault in Norway exists, according to its executive director Åslaug Haga, to “safeguard one of the most important natural resources” – plants. Whilst this might immediately conjure ideas around pollution and aggressive, destructive forms of farming, it also includes other of man’s interventions such as the engineering of crops and stepping in to protect biodiversity. The new epoch is “defined by the radioactive elements dispersed across the planet by nuclear bomb tests, although an array of other signals, including plastic pollution, soot from power stations, concrete, and even the bones left by the global proliferation of the domestic chicken were now under consideration,” reported The Guardian newspaper.Īnthropocene is marked by man’s interferences with the planet being so great as to alter the natural course the earth would have otherwise taken. The International Geological Congress in Cape Town recommended that this new age, which they say began in 1950, should be defined as ‘Anthropocene’, taking the place of ‘Holocene’ which began 11,500 years ago when the glaciers began to retreat. In August, scientists reported that man’s impact on the planet is so great that the era of the earth we are currently living in should be reclassified as a new age. The image is available signed and unsigned in limited quantities here. One hopes, of course, that the doomsday vault will never be needed, but it’s still good to know it’s there - and that the seeds within it can be stored safely for more than a millenium.The above image by Jonas Bendiksen is available in the Magnum Editions Poster collection, featuring contemporary works from 33 Magnum photographers. Each vault can hold 1.5 million sample packages of all types of crop seeds, from carrots to wheat. The seeds are packed in silvery foil containers - as many as 500 in each sample - and placed on blue and orange metal shelves inside three 10-by-27-meter (32-by-88-foot) storage chambers. Stoltenberg and Maathai made the first deposit in the vault - a box of rice seeds from 104 countries. “It is very important for Africa to store seeds here because anything can happen to our national seed banks,” Maathai said, bundled up against the cold. Food and Agriculture Organization and Biodiversity International, a Rome-based research group. She is a board member of Crop Diversity Trust, which collects the seeds for the Svalbard vault. It is a precaution for the future,” said 2004 Nobel Peace Prize laureate Wangari Maathai of Kenya. It will serve as a backup for the other 1,400 seed banks around the world, in case their deposits are hit by disasters, economic collapse, war or climate change.įor example, war wiped out seed banks in Iraq and Afghanistan, and one in the Philippines was flooded in the wake of a typhoon in 2006. It is built to withstand global warning, earthquakes and even nuclear strikes. Svalbard Global Seed Vault, just 1,000 kilometers (620 miles) from the North Pole, is designed to house as many as 4.5 million crop seeds from all over the world. “It is the Noah’s Ark for securing biological diversity for future generations,” said Norway’s Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg. “This is a frozen Garden of Eden,” European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso said at the opening ceremony Tuesday, as guests carried the first seed deposits into the icy vault, deep within an Arctic mountain in the remote Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard. It’s a remarkable venture - and an even more remarkable piece of engineering: ![]() The so-called “doomsday” seed vault opened recently in Norway. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |