A Just In Case Stash
Hidden away in the far
north and extreme cold of Norway, is a stash of the world's
agricultural plant seeds.
This stash has been created to work as a fail-safe, or sort of
back-up of the world's diverse agricultural plant species, just in case a catastrophic event
(like our current global climate change, that's causing mass
extinction)
were to cause a world-wide agricultural collapse. "Biological
diversity, --crop diversity, is the
biological foundation of agriculture." -
Cary Fowler With-out this
diversity our system of agriculture will crumble and we will all
starve to death. By saving the diversity of plant species we may be
able to save ourselves in the future if it turns out that we need
some of those species that have gone extinct.
Example: we have a series of extremely dry years that
don't allow the growth of the kind of wheat we commonly use. If we
have a wide variety of species of wheat stored, then we cant go in
and find a species that likes dry conditions and begin planting that
kind instead. But, lets say all the other species of wheat went
extinct in the early 1900's and we never got around to storing any
of the seeds for later use. Our species would then be in really big
trouble. This is all of particular concern because we are in the
midst of a mass extinction, so much of the diversity in plant
species is withering away.
In this video Cary Fowler speaks at the TED conference
about his strategy to save the world, one seed at a time.
-For full screen there is a little button on the top right of the video box.
