Cary Fowler, Director of the Global Crop Diversity Trust. (My comments in parantheses.)
All life shares the quality of biodiversity. That is, the ability to evolve into new directions. He shows a slide of a bunch of beans. (The variety in the coloring is really pretty.)
There are 120,000 varieties of rice. There are about 400 breeds of dogs, for perspective. Over the 12,000-15,000 years of agriculture, these varieties have sprung. Showing "potted corn," where each kernel is covered in a leaf. Varieties of sorghum! (Plants are so amazing.)
The "crook-neck" sorghum has a bend in the neck bred into them by farmers to make them easy to hang on a rope in their house.
When every other crop dies, Lathyrus&dmash;a plant—continues to live. That's the good thing. On the down side, it has a neurotoxin in it that will eventually paralyze you from the knees down. But there are varieties of low-neurotoxin Lathyrus. It's important to keep all these varieties.
Seed banks are basically just big freezers. They think there are 1-1.5 million distinct agricultural crops. The Trust's goal is to save them all.
Agriculture takes 70% of fresh water supplies, putting it in competition with cities.
Slide: In Greenland, a worn down church, where a Norse settlement lived. The Norse died because of climate change to which they were unwilling/unable to adjust.
Slide: Average temperature of growing seasons over the last 100 years. In Bangladesh, the warmest 5% seasons will be in the future be the coldest. "Even colder than the coldest. There actually is no overlap."
"This is unprecedented...I don't know if we're ready to cope with it." We're moving towards a global agriculture environment that has never been seen since the Neolithic era.
Our choices; Modify the environment to the crops. "We've already tried that," he jokes. Or we modify the crops.
In the next four years, the Trust will rescue 165k different crop varieties. They'll be placed in seed banks in multiple areas, as well as publish the information. Funded by an endowment.
"Our Plan B. I love Plan B." As far north as you can fly on a scheduled plane is Svalbard, Norway. They're building a safety backup for seed banks. Two seed banks were recently in Iraq and Afghanistan due to war; another lost in the Philippines due to hurricane.
If we lose plant varieties, we lose traits and tendencies in plants that may be useful to deal with climate change.
Svalbard is getting warmer, but they hope it will stay under freezing even in the future. Its glacier is melting. The upkeep costs of the Svalbard facility will be about $125k a year. (Pretty cheap.)
Svalbard is a fortress-like facility carved into a mountain. It has three bulk rooms in the mountain. It is currently being constructed. (It looks like a place that would serve as a goal in a movie or videogame.) The lip of the facility is slightly off the ground to help prevent snow from piling. [Pictured above; more here]
There is a concave wall at the end of the tunnel, so that a rocket or explosion at the front would be blasted back towards the tunnel, preserving the seed vaults.
(I've heard of this project before, but seeing the pictures, hearing Fowler's homespun talk, makes my stomach drop out.)
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