Arctic Vault to Secure Earth’s Seeds

WASHINGTON – Cary Fowler won’t send out a dove and wait for it to bring back a sprig of olive branch when he opens an ambitious arctic vault on Tuesday that many are likening to a Noah’s Ark for seeds.

But the executive secretary of the Global Crop Diversity Trust will be on hand in Svalbard, Norway, to begin the storage of seeds from every variety of food crop.

The arctic "Doomsday Vault," built into the permafrost, is designed to protect life-sustaining agriculture in the event of nuclear holocaust, natural disasters, mismanagement, or some other unforeseen catastrophe. The effort’s Web site (croptrust.org.) says the vault will not for now accept genetically modified seeds.

Fowler, who usually works in Rome for the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, graduated in 1967 from White Station High School. He has been involved in crop diversity issues since the mid- 1970s and was until recently a professor of agricultural sciences in Norway. He got his Ph.D. in Sweden after attending Rhodes College in Memphis and Simon Fraser University in Canada.

In an e-mail last week from Europe, Fowler said he’s not big on official ceremonies but looks forward to getting under way. "I know that this is an important and historic moment for agriculture," he wrote.

The Prime Minister of Norway, Jens Stoltenberg; Jos Manuel Barroso, the president of the European Commission; and Nobel Prize winner Wangari Maathai will also be on hand.

A White Station classmate who’s known Fowler since elementary school and has visited him at his home in Oslo said he was "a man of commitment and passion," and politically active, even in high school.

Susan Adler Thorp, a former columnist for The Commercial Appeal, had considered attending the grand opening of the vault but said last week she won’t make it.

Nancy Hart, a former television reporter for WMC-TV Channel 5 in Memphis and now based in Italy, is also in Svalbard, documenting the event. In an e-mail from Norway on Saturday, she wrote: "Cary, without a doubt, is the visionary for this entire operation – I saw him this morning at the vault, being interviewed by NBC and by a German public television documentary crew and then he was leaving to meet ABC for another interview." Hart reported that "it is 15 below outside with wind that makes the snow horizontal."

The vault was built by the government of Norway at a cost of $3 million. It will store the seeds in sealed aluminum foil packets 230 feet underground, beneath a meter of concrete.

There the seeds will stay frozen even if the electricity supplying refrigerators fails because the temperature will never rise above 27 degrees Fahrenheit. The vault will eventually house duplicate sets of unique varieties of seeds from many of the 1,400 seed banks around the world, acting as an insurance policy against their failure.

Maintaining a diverse set of seeds helps assure that if a blight or other threat strikes one of the increasingly homogenous crop varieties the world now depends on, plant biologists will have the plant genes available for a comeback.

"How would we, in our times, be judged were we not to ensure the safety of the one resource that is absolutely critical to human life on earth?" Fowler asked rhetorically in his e-mail to The CA.

Washington correspondent Bartholomew Sullivan can be reached at (202) 408-2726.

——————–

Then God said to Noah, ‘Come out of the ark, you and your wife and your sons and their wives. Bring out every kind of living creature that is with you – the birds, the animals, and all the creatures that move along the ground – so they can multiply on the earth and be fruitful and increase in number upon it.’

- Genesis 8:15-17

——————–

Seeds of the Mid-South

Of the seeds going into the vault Tuesday, some trace their genetic heritage to Mid-South heirlooms, including:

Beans: Missouri Turkey Beans, Old Time Kentucky Heirloom

Lima: Tennessee Butter, Dixie Buttercup

Cowpea: Mississippi Purple

Pepper: Tennessee Tear Drop

Tomato: Sudduth’s Brandywine

Source: Cary Fowler

——————–

One vault for mankind

In an e-mail to The Commercial Appeal last week, former Memphian Cary Fowler spelled out what the seed vault project means to him and to mankind:

"I am set to leave for Svalbard about an hour from now to make final preparations for the opening on the 26th. Frankly, I’m not the kind of person who enjoys ceremonial openings very much. But, I am sure I’ll have a big sense of relief when the ceremony is finished and I can calmly look out over hundreds of thousands of samples of distinct crop varieties and know that finally we have secured their future, and their assistance, in future crop improvement programs.

"In that sense, I know that this is an important and historic moment for agriculture. It’s a bit odd to think I played a role in it. But life has its surprises and I’ve been lucky. And probably a bit stubborn!

"I was up in Svalbard last week when the first cargo plane of seeds arrived. Imagine, an entire plane filled with nothing but small packets of distinct varieties!

"There wasn’t much time to sit and reflect about feelings then, but it was great to see seeds moving into the facility we had worked so many years to create."