Doomsday Seed Vault in Svalbard, or Don't Worry: There's Always Something to Worry About

Quite a few people talk about Saving the Earth from Global Warming. The Global Crop Diversity Trust, in league with Bill Gates and some huge American companies, is doing something about it.

The Doomsday Vault

The "Doomsday Vault" is what news media calls The Svalbard Global Seed Vault. It's a hardened storage facility, buried in a mountain in Iceland, where seeds from around the world are being stored.

I think it's a good idea.

Others think it's some kind of plot.

Still others are doing the same thing themselves, on a more regional scale.

I'm not at all convinced about "Global Warming." When I was growing up, back in the fifties and sixties, all the best minds knew that we were heading for another ice age. I remember reading quite interesting articles about it. The idea was the basis for some rather intriguing science fiction stories, too. (Alas! I can't remember any titles.)

Back then, global temperatures were going down, on average. Now, a half-century later, they're going up.

I live in Minnesota: If I got excited every time the thermometer went up or down, I'd go crazy.

Still, that seed vault is a good idea. Bad things happen now and then: droughts, floods, pestilence, plague, suburban development. It's a good idea to have something in reserve, for next year's seed.

Dutch Elm Disease

A 'crisis' that I'm more interested in is the endangered elm tree of North America. Not just one tree, of course: the whole community of elms on this continent is being wiped out by Dutch elm disease.

Despite the name, Dutch elm disease isn't a plot by The Netherlands to deforest America. The disease may have started in Asia, and been carried, by accident, to Europe and then America. It's been spreading across the continent for decades. Elm bark beetles carrying the Dutch elm fungus have long since swept past my home in central Minnesota, and into Canada.

The cathedral-like elm-lined streets I remember are dying.


(from Unimatic1140, via Wikipedia Commons, used w/o permission)

The good news is that the U.S. National Arboretum has developed two types of Dutch elm disease tolerant American elms, called 'Valley Forge' and 'New Harmony.'

They're able to survive Dutch elm disease, because scientists fiddled with their genes. Which brings me to the GMO 'crisis.'

Invasion of the Mutant Chickens: GMOs are Upon Us!

I've been reading about the horrific threat of GMOs (genetically modified organisms) for several years now. Concerned citizens wonder what unknown terror may be lurking in the supermarket freezer, now that scientists have tampered with the natural order of things, bringing forth organisms not found in nature.

As anyone who's see "Frankenfish" knows, this is a serious problem.

Or is it?

People have been raising, growing, and eating GMOs for over 8,000 years. That's about how long we've had 'domesticated' plants and animals. There's a reason why the fryers you pick up in the grocery don't look like their wild cousins. People have been modifying the domestic chicken's genes for a long time.

Then there's that gobbler on the table each Thanksgiving in America. The wild turkey is a bird worthy of Ben Franklin's praise. The GMO version is a sort of 'body builder' turkey, with lots of muscle - and a reputation for stupidity. It's said around here that turkey farmers have to bring the birds in out of the rain. Otherwise, they'd drown, trying to drink the falling water.

I know: toward the end of the 20th century, new technologies were developed that made breeding new strains of plants and animals faster and more effective. In fact, the new processes can eliminate the breeding aspect entirely.

I think that it's a good idea to be concerned about eating these new plants and animals, but I don't think they're something to be afraid of. Study them, do the contemporary equivalent of feeding them to the pig to see what happens: but don't assume that they're dangerous just because they're new.

If that sort of, ah, cautious approach had been used, a few millennia back, we wouldn't have whole wheat bread. Some people can't tolerate gluten. One of my daughters can't eat food with wheat in it, for example. But that isn't a reason to stop growing wheat, and treat wheat as a dangerous GMO.

Here are the articles and blog posts that got me on this rant:

• "Arctic Seed Vault"
  The Global Crop Diversity Trust
  • "The Svalbard Global Seed Vault, or the Doomsday Vault as the media have nicknamed it, will be the ultimate safety net for the world's most important natural resource.
  • "The world's seed collections are vulnerable to a wide range of threats - civil strife, war, natural catastrophes, and more routinely but no less damagingly, poor management, lack of adequate funding, and equipment failures. Unique varieties of our most important crops are lost whenever any such disaster strikes, and therefore securing duplicates of all collections in a global facility provides an insurance policy for the world's food supply.
  • "The seed vault is an answer to a call from the international community to provide the best possible assurance of safety for the world’s crop diversity, and in fact the idea for such a facility dates back to the 1980s. However, it was only with the coming into force of the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources, and an agreed international legal framework for conserving and accessing crop diversity, that the seed vault became a practical possibility...."
• " 'Doomsday Seed Vault'... What Aren't We Being Told?"
  Know The Lies (June 4, 2008)
  • "On this God-forsaken island Bill Gates is investing tens of his millions along with the Rockefeller Foundation, Monsanto Corporation, Syngenta Foundation and the Government of Norway, among others, in what is called the 'doomsday seed bank.' Officially the project is named the Svalbard Global Seed Vault on the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen, part of the Svalbard island group....
  • "...Did we miss something here? Their press release stated, 'so that crop diversity can be conserved for the future.' What future do the seed bank's sponsors foresee, that would threaten the global availability of current seeds, almost all of which are already well protected in designated seed banks around the world?...
  • "...Genetically engineering a master race?
  • "Now the Svalbard Seed Bank begins to become interesting. But it gets better. 'The Project' I referred to is the project of the Rockefeller Foundation and powerful financial interests since the 1920's to use eugenics, later renamed genetics,[sic!] to justify creation of a genetically-engineered Master Race. Hitler and the Nazis called it the Ayran Master Race...."
  • Boiling the wordy text down, we're supposed to believe that The Svalbard Seed Bank is part of a plot to exterminate entire populations, and force the rest to buy seed each year from American seed companies.
  • I suppose the presumed threat could be called "Big Seed" - and no, the author doesn't use that term.
• "Cracks in Arctic Ice and Kona Coffee Seeds"
  John's Blog (May 29, 2008)
  • "That’s a far stretch, isn’t it? Global warming and Kona Coffee. What’s the connection?
  • "Well, probably there are several, but I'll focus on just one. There are at least two facilities in the world that are 'banking' heritage seeds of plants from all over the world. The best known is probably the so-called Doomsday Seed Vault in Norway in the Arctic Circle, only 500 miles or so from the North Pole. Sponsored by $30 million from the Bill Gates Foundation as well as donations from the Rockefeller Foundation, Monsanto Corporation, Syngenta Foundation and the Government of Norway, among others, this is said to be a major effort to 'conserve crop diversity for the future.'
  • "So if there is a catastrophe of some sort… nuclear war, an astroid hitting earth, devastating weather… or perhaps failure of agriculture worldwide caused by glitches in GMO crops… there would be a source for seed stock to replant. To start again...."
  • This blogger has what seems like a good idea:
  • "...The first thought I had, however, was that we probably need to make a seed bank ourselves, here in Hawaii. Perhaps a much smaller facility, without the blast doors and airlocks of the Doomsday vault, because if we need those on this island… we probably won't need the seeds...."
  • And, the standard-issue attitude about those scary GMO (genetically modified organism) seeds:
  • "... Monsanto and Syngenia are two of the major donors. They are perhaps the largest proponents of GMO crops in the world today. And another backer is the Rockefeller Foundation, which is generally credited for beginning the 'green revolution' founded on chemical fertilizers. I'm wondering if these are the people whose hand we want controlling possibly the last source of heritage seeds, pure seeds which may someday be the only ones not touched by the transgenic qualities of GMO crops."
  Okay: a somewhat legitimate concern. I don't think that the Green Revolution was part of a plot to decimate the population of Africa (I didn't make this up - it's implicit in "Know The Lies"), but I do think that Monsanto may be acting in Monsanto's best interests.
  • Although I doubt that Big Seed intends to enslave the people of Earth.
• "Scientists create WA's own plant Noah's Ark"
  The Sunday Times (May 27, 2008)
  • "A GROUP of dedicated scientists have constructed WA's [Western Australia] own "Noah's Ark" to protect native plants from extinction.
  • "The plant safe house is brimming with seeds from over 70 per cent of WA's rare and threatened plant species --_ an insurance policy in the event of a local or global catastrophe.
  • "The Threatened Flora Seed Centre in Kensington accommodates the world's largest collection of seeds from threatened WA plants, protecting the state's biodiversity...."
• "The Threat of Dutch Elm Disease"
  University of Saskatchewan Extension Division (1995)
  • "This is the first in a series or articles addressing the issue of Dutch elm disease.
  • "American elm is one of the largest, most impressive, and most abundant landscape trees in Saskatchewan. When fully mature, a single American elm may tower to 30 meters with the broad arching branches spreading to cover most of an average city lot. The distinctive vase-like branching pattern of these trees also permits them to form graceful gothic vaults over the streets they line. The trees are relatively fast growing, they thrive on a wide range of soils, tolerate soil compaction, root disturbance, drought and extreme winter cold. With this impressive list of features, it is no wonder that American elm became the most widely-planted street tree in North America over the past century.
  • "As with most things which seem too good to be true, American elm faces one major drawback. A well-established 100-year-old American elm can be killed in as little as two weeks if it is attacked by Dutch elm disease...."
• "The Great Elm Returns"
  USA Today (November 6, 1997)
  • "The beloved American elm once arched over the streets of this nation, forming long, shady cathedrals of nature that defined the look of this country's for two centuries.
  • "The United States has never looked the same, never looked as good, since a tiny beetle landed in Cleveland in 1930 on a log aboard a ship from England. the European elm bark beetle brought Dutch elm disease, a fungus that has killed hundreds of millions of elm trees -- as many as 95‰ of American elms -- in the greatest ecological accident to strike North America.
  • "Now, in the most important development ever in the fight against Dutch elm disease, the U.S. National Arboretum has developed an American elm tree that possesses an extraordinary genetic ability to withstand the fungus. When injected with massive amounts of the most deadly strains of the disease, this remarkable American elm wilts only slightly and then recovers to full health...."
• "Ulmus americana / 'Valley Forge' and 'New Harmony'"
  The United States National Arboretum (October 11, 2005)
  • "The U.S. National Arboretum is pleased to announce the release of two new Dutch elm disease tolerant American elms, 'Valley Forge' and 'New Harmony'. Over the past 50 years, millions of stately elms shading the streets of the American landscape have been lost to Dutch elm disease (DED). Selected after 20 years of research, both 'Valley Forge' and 'New Harmony' have good levels of disease tolerance, although neither is immune to DED. Both cultivars possess the "classic" American elm shape and the tolerance to air pollution and poor soil conditions of the species. 'Valley Forge' and 'New Harmony' present a new opportunity to plant an old American favorite. Plant history. Plant a disease-tolerant American elm!..."
  • Pretty good advice. This page has photos, and data about the new elms.