A cold drizzle was falling over St. Petersburg last March, and the gray morning light filtered through the grimy windows of the ceremonial rooms of the Vavilov Research Institute of Plant Industry, one of the oldest seed banks—and the most storied—in the world, situated on St. Isaac’s Square. In one of the rooms, a woman in a smock sat at a table with a brown packet, and its contents, pea seeds, spilled out over the table in front of her. She did not look up from sorting through the seeds as two visitors passed, and, with her lips moving silently, she appeared to be lost in thought, or prayer. Cary Fowler had an appointment to meet the director general of the Vavilov Institute, Nikolai Dzyubenko, in order to discuss the institute’s seeds. Fowler, an American, is the world’s seed banker.

It’s a nebulously defined position, yet a critical one. As the executive director of the Global Crop Diversity Trust, which funds the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, in Norway, Fowler is engaged in the Noah-like task of gathering the seeds of about two million varieties of food plants—both the familiar domesticated crops and many of their wild relatives—in order to create the first global seed bank. We tend to imagine apocalypse coming in the form of a bomb, an asteroid, or a tsunami, but should a catastrophe strike one of the world’s major crops Fowler and his fellow seed bankers may be all that stand between us and widespread starvation.

Any of the diseases currently active in the United States—the rust fungus attacking soybeans; the potato late blight (the same one that caused the Irish potato famine), which turns potatoes into a black mass of rot; the Western bean cutworm, which feeds on corn plants—has the potential to turn into a devastating nationwide scourge. Should that happen, the only remedy—genetic resistance—might lie in an obscure variety, stored in a seed bank. The Vavilov Institute is a monument to the extraordinary sacrifices people have made in order to save seeds.

During the winter of 1941-42, when Hitler’s troops were blockading Leningrad, cutting off food and supplies, the scientists who worked there protected the seeds stored inside the buildings, which amounted to several tons of nutritious food, from the starving Russians outside. At night, thousands of rats would invade the laboratories; the staff guarded the seed collections with metal rods. When some collections of potatoes needed resowing during the winter, institute workers found a plot outside Leningrad, near the front. Eventually, much of the collection was smuggled out over frozen Lake Ladoga, to a hiding place in the Ural Mountains. Stchukin, a specialist in peanuts, died of starvation in the building, as did D.

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Ivanov, a rice specialist, both surrounded by thousands of packets of seeds. The story of what happened at the Vavilov Institute has a mythic resonance in the mind of every seed banker, and Fowler glanced around almost reverently as he walked through the shadowy halls. One of his personal heroes is Nikolai Vavilov, the Russian biologist and plant breeder for whom the institute is named—and the first man to dream of creating a world seed bank. For Fowler, coming here, to arrange for the institute to send seeds to the Svalbard vault, in time for its opening, in February, 2008, was, in a sense, finishing the job that Vavilov had started. And Vavilov himself was following in a tradition of seed saving that reaches back into prehistory. Before seeing Dzyubenko, Fowler was shown around some of the old rooms by a member of the institute, a tall, thin man with a long beard. Most of the exhibits concerned the life of Vavilov, who was born in 1887, the son of a prosperous Moscow merchant.

Vavilov’s education as a plant breeder coincided with the rediscovery, in 1900, of the work of Gregor Mendel, an Austrian monk who had died in 1884, and whose pea-breeding experiments were overlooked during his lifetime. Mendel established the fundamental laws of inheritance, and Vavilov, among others, was prescient enough to grasp their implications. Plant breeding, which had hitherto been an art, would now be a science.

By crossing and backcrossing progeny with parents in order to isolate desirable qualities—higher yields, stronger roots, frost resistance—plant breeders could select traits from a broad spectrum of varieties, and combine them to create superior seeds. In order to realize the power of these new tools, however, breeders needed easy access to a large pool of genetic diversity. That was the quest to which Vavilov devoted his life.

With the aim of creating hardier and higher-yielding Russian crops, Vavilov embarked on a series of expeditions to collect and catalogue ancient domesticated varieties (known as “landraces”) of wheat, barley, peas, lentils, and other crops, as well as their wild relatives, reasoning that because they were well adapted to their natural environments they must contain valuable genes that could be incorporated into Russian crops. Over the next two decades, Vavilov himself collected more than sixty thousand samples, in sixty-four countries; altogether, his teams collected two hundred and fifty thousand samples. The present-day collection is based on those seeds. Most people understand crop diversity in terms of choice—it’s the difference between the sweet, creamy flavor of a Gala apple and the tart, crisp taste of a Granny Smith. But agricultural diversity is much more than that; it is a record of more than ten thousand years of human experience with crops, and of the struggle to produce food in changing ecosystems and climates.

Crop diversity may be the most precious natural resource we have, because, as Stephen Smith, a research fellow at Pioneer Hi-Bred, one of the world’s largest seed companies, has said, “How humans use diversity in farming determines our food, our health, and our economic well-being, and that in turn determines our political security.” Crops such as corn and potatoes have been forced to adapt to vastly different climates in distant places: climate change has been a constant in the lives of crops for millennia. That is why seed banks, which are the primary repositories of crop diversity, are so important: the genes in them may represent our best hope for feeding ourselves in a warming world.

Vavilov observed that crop diversity is scattered unevenly around the world. There are certain places where it is abundant—Asia Minor for wheat and barley, the Andes for potatoes—and other places, such as Russia and the United States and Northern Europe, where there is very little. Vavilov eventually mapped eight centers of diversity, loosely grouped in a belt around the planet’s middle. (Scientists speculate that the last Ice Age killed off diversity in much of the Northern Hemisphere, leaving a small center around the Mediterranean, where asparagus was first domesticated, and another in Eastern Europe, where barley and peas grew in abundance.) Building on the earlier work of a Swiss botanist named Alphonse de Candolle, Vavilov developed a theory that since diversity occurs over time, the centers of greatest diversity must also be the centers of origin for those crops. In 1926, he published “The Centers of Origin of Cultivated Plants.” Vavilov’s insight (which was subsequently qualified by other researchers) became the basis for national claims of sovereignty over seeds. But war and politics prevented Vavilov from realizing his dream of a world seed bank. Like so many other Soviet scientists, he fell afoul of Stalin.

Vavilov came from a wealthy family, was not a member of the Communist Party, and was friendly with Nikolai Bukharin, a rival of Stalin’s. Furthermore, genetics was considered a form of “metaphysics,” and geneticists the enemies of Bolshevism.

Vavilov was arrested in 1940, charged with treason and espionage, and interrogated, sometimes under torture, for eleven months. His trial was held on July 9, 1941; the tribunal took only five minutes to find him guilty and sentence him to death by firing squad. Later, Vavilov’s sentence was commuted to twenty years in a prison at Saratov, on the Volga River.

There Vavilov died, of starvation, on January 23, 1943. He was buried in a common grave. Fowler was familiar with these details of Vavilov’s life, but he listened politely as his guide repeated them. Fowler is six feet tall, fifty-seven years old, with curly reddish hair, glasses, and a Southern accent and courtliness that derive from his upbringing, in Memphis, Tennessee. He had not removed his green parka—the rooms were chilly—and he carried a briefcase, which contained artists’ renderings of what the Svalbard vault will look like. Dressed in a blue blazer, with a buttoned shirt collar hanging loosely around his neck, he looked like a schoolboy who had spruced up for a class photograph.

His eyes are deep-set, and his prominent forehead sometimes makes it hard to discern whether they are open or shut. This morning, he looked very pale; he had told me earlier, as we left the hotel, that he thought he was coming down with the flu. But that wasn’t going to keep him from his appointment with the director. In addition to discussing the transfer of some of the institute’s seeds, Fowler wanted to broach the delicate subject of what condition the seeds were in. As a seed bank, the Vavilov has been in long decline.

“No one I know would claim to know what is really happening there,” Fowler had written to me before the trip. “The most important question being, To what extent are the collections still alive? Certainly much has died. But how much? Some experts in particular crops claim that a lot still exists. But for other crops we know that the conditions of conservation/regeneration could only have led to large losses.” Nikolai Dzyubenko occupies Vavilov’s former office, on the south side of the square. The wooden floors creaked and groaned loudly as we approached the room.

Dzyubenko wore pink-tinted glasses, and his eyes were expressionless. He sat directly underneath a portrait of Vavilov, whose face was smiling, eager, and full of energy and optimism. The room looked both grand and tawdry; all the old elegance had floated up to the ceiling, like smoke, and clung to the elaborately painted plaster and the chandeliers.

Fowler, gritting his teeth against his worsening flu, took out his papers and began to describe the Svalbard Global Seed Vault. “It’s seventy-eight degrees north, very remote, and the town has an excellent infrastructure,” he said. “There will be a big ceremony in February, for the opening, and we’d very much like to work with you on getting some of the Vavilov seeds sent there in time for that.” A heavyset man, who was wearing a green sweatshirt that said “Australia” in yellow letters on the front, interpreted.

Dzyubenko answered that, technically, moving the seeds to Svalbard would not be difficult, “but since we are not independent, and since the Vavilov collection is a public treasure, this must be discussed with our superiors at the Academy of Sciences in Moscow—the decision cannot be made at this level. So it will take some time to discuss it.” I glanced over at Fowler, to see if this prospect—waiting for the wheels of Russian bureaucracy to turn, before seeds from the institute could get to Svalbard—discouraged him at all. But he merely pressed his lips together, and nodded. After their talk, Dzyubenko flung open the doors to the next room, to reveal a small feast of pastries, fruits, cold meats, cheeses, juice, and vodka that had been prepared in the American’s honor. Fowler felt too queasy to eat any of it, though he did manage to touch the vodka to his lips for a toast. I thought that he would skip the tour of the storage facilities that the director had planned, but he insisted on going through with all of it, including a visit to a new cold-storage room. Another room, full of large stainless-steel liquid-nitrogen storage vats, looked impressive—until Fowler noticed that the digital readouts on all but one of the vats said “Error.”.

From the beginning of the United States’ history, its people have been preoccupied with seeds. The early settlers faced a landscape largely devoid of domesticated crops, with the notable exception of maize, which Native Americans had brought from Central America. Among economic crops, only blueberries, cranberries, hops, and a type of sunflower originated in North America; a meal made exclusively of local ingredients would be meagre. Therefore it was necessary to import plants and seeds from other countries. Thomas Jefferson, who once wrote, “The greatest service which can be rendered to any country is to add a useful plant to its culture,” smuggled rice seeds out of Italy by sewing them into the lining of his coat. Just as immigration brought cultural diversity to the United States, so the immigrants brought botanical diversity, in the seeds they carried with them, which were often concealed in the brims of their hats and the hems of their dresses. In 1862, in the midst of the Civil War, Congress, at the urging of Abraham Lincoln, established the Department of Agriculture, in order to collect “new and valuable seeds and plants...

And to distribute them among agriculturalists.” Great plant explorers like David Fairchild, who was Alexander Graham Bell’s son-in-law, and Frank Meyer, for whom the Meyer lemon is named, introduced new crops to the United States, where they thrived. Oz The Great And Powerful Avi Free Download. By 1898, when the U.S.D.A. Established the Office of Foreign Seed and Plant Introduction, the government was distributing some twenty million seed packages a year to farmers. A network of state breeding stations helped develop the most productive varieties for each region. Beginning in the late nineteen-forties, the government established regional seed banks that focussed on individual crops: a center in Ames, Iowa, was devoted to maize; the apple and grape research station was in Geneva, New York; the potato center was established in Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin. In the nineteen-fifties, the government constructed a national seed bank—the Fort Knox of seeds—in Fort Collins, Colorado, the cornerstone of what is known today at the National Plant Germplasm System. The bank, which I visited in December of last year, holds nearly five hundred thousand kinds of seeds—its holdings include both varieties grown domestically and backups for other, international collections.

It is a model for the Svalbard vault. The main storage vault is kept at eighteen degrees below zero Celsius: the ink in my pen froze as soon as I entered the room. Fowler explained the basic principles of storing seeds in banks. When the seed comes in from the field, it is sorted, labelled, cleaned, and dried to a humidity level of about five per cent. Dryness and cold are the most important factors, to slow down the seed’s metabolism, and to insure that it won’t germinate. Breeders’ collections are generally stored at room temperature or a little below and are intended to last for only a few years; base collections are kept at between minus ten and minus twenty degrees Celsius, a temperature at which some seeds can live for more than a hundred years.

(Grains, such as wheat and barley, tend to live the longest.) In any well-run bank, samples of the seeds have to be regularly germinated, to insure that the seeds are still viable. If the germination rate drops below a certain point, new plants must be grown in the field from the seed and new seeds collected from those plants. “It’s not too complicated, but there’s a lot of labor involved, and it’s expensive,” Fowler said. “Plus, there are equipment failures, poor management, funding cuts, natural disasters, civil strife—you name it.”.

Fowler’s interest in agriculture began on his maternal grandmother’s three-hundred-acre farm, near Madison, Tennessee, which he visited every summer as a boy. “There was cotton, corn, soybeans, chickens running in the back yard, a couple of milk cows—it was a real old-fashioned farm,” he told me. “We’d go to the experimental plots at the local agricultural station for our seeds, and my grandmother would talk to everyone about the different varieties and make selections.

She wanted me to take the farm over. She would always ask me, ‘Do you want to be a farmer?’ We spent a lot of time driving down dusty roads while she gave a running commentary on the quality of crops and soils, pointing things out. But I was more interested in the stuff I was studying in school—Sartre, freedom and determinism, the role of the individual in society, that kind of stuff.

And I knew I wanted to be politically active, though I wasn’t sure in what area.” During the school year, Fowler lived with his parents, in Memphis, where his father was a defense attorney and, later, a judge. He took an active part in civil-rights demonstrations, and was present in the church on the night that Martin Luther King made his last speech; King was assassinated in Memphis the next day. When he graduated from Simon Fraser University, in Canada, in 1971, he received conscientious-objector status, “which greatly upset my father, who had enlisted the day after Pearl Harbor,” Fowler told me. After working in a hospital in North Carolina, as a clerk, for about a year, he was released from service, and planned to go to Sweden, to study for a Ph.D.

In sociology at Uppsala University, forty miles north of Stockholm. That year, however, Fowler discovered an oddly shaped mole on his stomach. By the time it was biopsied, the cancer had spread all over his body. “ ‘Do you have life insurance?’ the doctor asked me,” Fowler recalled. “ ‘No,’ ” I said. “ ‘Why?’ ” “ ‘Because you have six months left to live.’ ” The doctors did what they could, removing part of his stomach where the melanoma had appeared, but the prognosis was still grim. “So I went home and waited to die,” Fowler said.

“Every time I’d feel the slightest twinge in my body, I’d wonder, Is this the cancer? Is it starting? Am I going to die now?” But he didn’t die, and after about a year he decided, “This is no way to live,” and he went back to pursuing his sociology Ph.D. The doctors were so astounded that they sent Fowler to Memorial Sloan-Kettering, in New York, for a test of his immune system. Although it seemed to weaken when it was resisting the cancer, it became remarkably effective once the cancer started. “Ten years later, I was given a diagnosis of testicular cancer,” he said. He underwent a painful procedure that involved injecting dye into his feet and then circulating it through his lymphatic system; an X-ray would show how far the cancer had spread.

“I lit up like a Christmas tree,” Fowler said. “The cancer was everywhere. Though they didn’t tell me at the time, they had never had a patient who had survived that kind of cancer.” The doctors elected to do extensive radiation treatments; Fowler still has a map of tattoos all over his body that guided the radiation machine. Once again, Fowler told me, “The cancer just disappeared.” I asked how his cancers had influenced his work in saving seeds.

Fowler replied, “The first one, I didn’t handle it very gracefully. I was scared.

Really scared. And the reason I was scared was that I hadn’t done anything—I hadn’t contributed constructively to society. And that was frightening.”.

Farmers began to turn away from the ancient practice of saving seeds early in the twentieth century. Plant breeders had discovered that, when two inbred lines are crossed with each other, the next generation explodes in “hybrid vigor,” producing more robust plants than those which were allowed to pollinate randomly (known as “open pollination”). If the progeny of two pairs of inbred lines are themselves crossed (a “double cross”), their offspring will be even more vigorous. However, if those crosses and double crosses are then allowed to reproduce naturally, through open pollination, only a fraction of their progeny will show hybrid vigor. Corn is among the easiest plants to hybridize, because the male parts, which are the tassels that contain the pollen, and the female parts, which are the ear and the silks, are widely separated. It is relatively simple, though labor-intensive, to cross two inbreds by sowing the two lines side by side in nearby rows, and removing male parts of the plants from one line, to insure that it is fertilized by the other.

(This method of emasculating corn plants still provides summer employment to thousands of teen-agers throughout the Midwest.) American agriculturalists in general were slow to recognize the potential of hybrid corn, but several American breeders championed the new technique. One of them, Henry A. Wallace, happened to be the son of Warren Harding’s Secretary of Agriculture, Henry C. Wallace, and his enthusiasm was heard in high places. In 1924, a Henry A. Hybrid, which he dubbed Copper Cross, won a gold medal in the Corn Show at the Iowa Corn Yield Test.

In 1926, Wallace founded the Hi-Bred Corn Company, later Pioneer Hi-Bred, to market his seeds. Pioneer was by no means the first private seed company. A seed trade, catering to farmers who didn’t want to take the time to clean and sort their seed, had existed since the early eighteen-hundreds. But farmers had only to buy the seed once, and then generate more seed themselves.

With hybrids, however, farmers had to buy the seed every year if they wanted to enjoy the benefits of hybrid vigor. From a commercial point of view, plant breeders had hit the jackpot—a “biological patent” on seed. Pioneer reaped the benefits of this good fortune, and eventually became the dominant seed company in the world.

In 1933, hybrid corn amounted to about one half of one per cent of the planted corn acreage in the United States. By 1945, thanks in part to promotion by the U.S.D.A., that figure had risen to ninety per cent. Throughout the Depression, American farmers, who could have grown and saved their own seed by using traditional open-pollinated varieties, instead bought hybrid seed from corn companies; the increased yields justified the expense.

Beginning in the nineteen-forties, American-made hybrid seeds were sent around the world, as part of a vast agronomic program that came to be known as the green revolution. Norman Borlaug, an American plant breeder, used a strain of Japanese semi-dwarf wheat, known as Norin 10, which had been bred in Japan and brought to the United States in 1946, during the Allied occupation, to create a wheat with a stalk short enough to support a larger, more productive head. First in Mexico, and later in Pakistan and India, Borlaug’s wheat allowed local farmers to double, and in some cases quadruple, their yields.

In 1966, the International Rice Research Institute created a variety of stunted rice called IR8, a cross of an Indonesian type with a Chinese strain, which was widely planted in Asia. The green revolution was a complicated blend of altruistic and imperial motives, played out through seeds. The notion that humans now had the power to banish the spectre of starvation and famine, which has haunted our species for millennia, was a potent one. The green revolution is estimated to have fed roughly a billion people who might otherwise have starved. In developing countries, production of cereals doubled.

By the mid-eighties, the average person in these countries consumed twenty-five per cent more calories per day than in the early sixties. But the development and distribution of the superseeds, which was funded by the World Bank, the United States seed trade, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Ford Foundation, was also a clever way of planting American-style agrarian capitalism in developing nations that might otherwise be in danger of succumbing to Communism. In Fowler’s 1993 book “Shattering,” written with Pat Mooney, a Canadian activist, he points out that the new hybrids “produced not just crops, but replicas of the agricultural systems that produced them. They came as a package deal and part of the package was a major change in traditional cultures, values, and power relationships both within villages and between them and the outside world.” Now, instead of growing crops for local consumption, farmers began growing crops for export. And, like the American farmers before them, Mexican, African, and Asian farmers lost the incentive for saving seed. Plant breeders and seedsmen bitterly criticized Fowler and Mooney for politicizing the debate about genetic resources. Pokemon Xd Gamecube Iso Deutsch Englisch there.

By indirectly encouraging developing nations to deny plant breeders access to their seed banks, the activists were placing the responsibility for the conservation of those resources with countries whose unstable or dysfunctional governments couldn’t be counted on to take the necessary measures. Many scientists felt that politics had no place in decisions about genetic conservation. Few wanted the governance of agricultural plants to follow the route that was eventually taken to guide the trade in medicinal plants—the Convention on Biological Diversity, which took effect in 1993.

With the C.B.D., nations like Brazil, whose rain forests have long drawn bio-prospectors looking for new plant-based drugs and therapies, affirmed sovereignty over the genes within their borders. That system makes some sense when applied to the production of pharmaceuticals, which are distributed to narrowly focussed markets, but not to food, which is a worldwide resource. Even the countries within the centers of diversity depend heavily on imported crops to feed their populations. A similar treaty for world agriculture might mean that, in order to develop a variety of wheat using strains from numerous countries, individual agreements would have to be negotiated with every country. That was unthinkable. Meeting that Fowler attended in 1981, the octogenarian Sir Otto Frankel, who was then among the world’s most prominent plant scientists, angrily denounced Fowler in a Roman restaurant. Fowler told me, “Here I thought I was trying to do something good, and so to have one of the leading lights in the field just go off on me really made me question what I was doing.” Among the people who witnessed the confrontation was Jack Harlan, who had inspired Fowler to take up the cause of genetic resources in the first place.

Later, after Frankel left, Fowler went on, “I asked Harlan if he thought we were doing something that was bad, unproductive, destructive, and he said, ‘I would never tell you that,’ and then he said, ‘They’re going to fight you and call you names for five years, then there will be a period when things get a little bit better, and then in ten to fifteen years they will adopt all of your ideas but claim the credit for it themselves.’ And that’s pretty much what happened. At the third International Technical Conference, in 1983, I was viewed as a dangerous radical, and by the fourth conference, in 1996, I was in charge.”. In 1993, the F.A.O. Hired Fowler to oversee the drafting of a Global Plan of Action for the Conservation and Sustainable Utilization of Plant Genetic Resources—a first step toward a rational, worldwide seed-bank management plan. The International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture, which was adopted by the U.N. In 2001 and has been ratified by most of the countries of the world, laid the legal groundwork for a global seed bank.

The treaty is both a victory and a defeat for Fowler. It recognizes a version of the concept of “farmers’ rights,” and establishes a system of compensation for genes used in the creation of patented seeds. However, in return, the developing nations agree to drop their opposition to the principle of patenting seeds. In effect, Fowler has compromised one of his original principles, common heritage, in order to achieve the other. Fowler and his colleagues knew where they wanted the vault to be—on the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard. Although Norway took sovereignty over Svalbard in 1925, the archipelago has a long tradition as an international terra nullius—a no man’s land.

In the early nineteen-eighties, a backup site for the Nordic Gene Bank was created in a coal mine near the town of Longyearbyen. It contained the seeds from the five Nordic countries—Iceland, Finland, Norway, Sweden, and Denmark. Norway had proposed expanding the facility into a world seed vault, but, with the Seed War then raging, the idea was untenable. Now, however, with the treaty in place, and with a rising awareness of the ecological threat posed by climate change, the idea of an ultimate backup to all the other seed banks—a Doomsday vault—seized the imagination of officials in both Norway and Rome. In June, 2006, the groundbreaking ceremony at Svalbard was widely covered in the press all over the world. The vault is not the seed bank that Fowler envisaged back in the eighties—a common bowl from which the world could feed as one.

Far from it: each nation will have access to only its own seeds. Nor does the vault much resemble the world bank that Vavilov envisioned—a kind of breeders’ utopia, in which the seeds of every kind of food plant in the world are available. In 2006, thirty million new acres of G.M.O.s were planted, bringing the total worldwide acreage to two hundred and fifty-two million acres—about seven per cent of the world’s cropland. Altogether, more than ten million farmers from twenty-two countries planted biotech crops in 2006. But few, if any, of these seeds are going into the Svalbard vault. I accompanied Fowler to Svalbard, to visit the site of the Doomsday vault.

We flew from Oslo to Longyearbyen, a settlement of some two thousand inhabitants, and the northernmost destination on earth serviced by regularly scheduled flights; it’s about eight hundred miles from the North Pole. From the air, I could see the craggy, snow-covered peaks thrusting some five thousand feet into the air—the mountain range discovered by the Dutch explorer Willem Barents in 1596, when he ran into it while trying to sail over the top of the world. For the next two hundred years, Svalbard was an international center of whaling, but by the end of the eighteenth century the bowhead whale had been hunted to extinction in these waters. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Svalbard was used by hunters, mainly Russians and Norwegians, whose greatest prize was the thick white coats of the polar bears that roamed the islands and the surrounding ice floes.

(The polar bears survived, barely, although now climate change is threatening them with extinction once again.) The huts of some of the most famous hunters and trappers of the era remain, scattered on the snow. Longyearbyen is on Spitsbergen, the largest of the islands, which means “jagged mountains” in Dutch. Its regular inhabitants live in neat wooden structures that are painted in bright colors. In the early twentieth century, Svalbard became a center of coal mining, and, on the crags above the town, the old mining trellises, which were used to bring coal out of the mines, can be seen: stark structures with thick cables strung between them. There is still some mining on Spitsbergen, but these days the Longyearbyen economy is driven mainly by the thousands of tourists who come during the summer months to explore one of the last true wildernesses in Europe, and to watch the Fourteenth of July glacier, at Krossfjord, on the northern side of Spitsbergen, calve into the Barents Sea. Rune Bergstrom, the chief environmental officer for Svalbard, drove us to the site of the vault, halfway up one of the mountains visible from Longyearbyen. As we left town, he pointed out the graves of miners who died in the influenza epidemic of 1918.

Scientists hoping to study the virus had taken tissue samples from the bodies in 1998. We followed a winding road up a steep ridge that was lightly covered with a fine, dry snow—a kind of Arctic sand. Along the road we saw two Svalbard reindeer: odd, goat-size animals, with comically stunted legs and long, awkward-looking antlers.

The vault is tunnelled into the sandstone rock face of one of the mountains, near the old mine in which the backup to the Nordic Gene Bank is stored. The design is straightforward: from the entrance, a long tube lined with steel and concrete leads straight back to three large rectangular concrete rooms, which will house the seeds, on shelves. Surrounding the entrance of the shaft will be a twenty-seven-foot-tall concrete structure.

A series of colored lights will be embedded in the top—an artist’s installation. In November, as the four-month-long polar night settles over Svalbard, the lights will begin to pulse, producing a curtain of light that will change according to the lighting conditions of the Arctic.

It will be visible far across the Barents Sea, out on the ice floes that the polar bears roam. When the sun returns, in late February, the lights will go out and the reflective surface will glow with the light of the never-setting sun. To get a better sense of what it will feel like to be deep inside the mountain, we visited the Nordic bank. It was a relatively warm day—about twenty degrees Fahrenheit. In a mining shed, we donned blue overalls, helmets, headlamps, and gas masks, and followed a miner down the abandoned mine, stepping carefully over railway trestles on the tunnel floor. From time to time, we could see black seams of unmined coal in the walls.

About two hundred yards in, we came to a large wooden door, which was frozen shut. The miner pounded on it with a sledgehammer until finally it swung open to reveal a smaller door, which was also frozen. Behind that was a large black steel cage, filled with crates. Frost covered the bars, and the ice crystals glistened in the beam of our headlamps. Fowler climbed inside the cage and opened one of the wooden lids. Inside, packed in foam peanuts, were sealed glass ampules, with acquisition numbers etched in the frosty glass.

The ampules contained seeds, about five hundred of each variety, of two hundred and thirty-seven species. Back outside, I wondered what would happen if the sea levels rise as much as some scientists predict they will. “We are a hundred and thirty metres above sea level,” Fowler replied, his breath frosting. “The max sea-level rise under the worst-case climate-change scenario is eighty metres, so, whatever happens, the seeds should be safe.” But who can predict what will happen if the ice melts? A northern sea lane could open year-round between Europe and Asia (the passage that Willem Barents was looking for in 1596, when his vessel became trapped in the ice), and Svalbard could take on the strategic importance that Malta held for centuries, when it was a midpoint between the Christian and Islamic worlds. Will the seeds themselves be viable in a world that warm? Even if they can grow, they won’t have evolved the defenses necessary to ward off all the new pests and diseases that will appear.

On the other hand, perhaps a few of the seeds inside the vault will hold the answers for the farmers of the future. “When you think about it, the plants have already been there,” Fowler said.

“When Columbus brought maize to Europe—that was a climate change. When maize then went to Africa, that was a climate change. We need to figure out how the plants were able to adapt to these changes, and repackage those traits.” Far away in the distance, I could see one of the old hunters’ shacks, and I thought of the bowhead whale, hunted to extinction by eighteenth-century whalers, and of the polar bears, struggling for survival on the ice floes.

Species extinction seems to be the baseline in humanity’s relationship with the natural world; the notion of sanctuary is a relatively new and tenuous idea. But Fowler’s craggy face, seen against the mountains, showed no trace of doubt. ♦ CORRECTION: In “Sowing for Apocalypse,” by John Seabrook, the number of bushels of corn produced annually by American farmers was incorrect; the correct number is eleven billion.

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