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Welcome to Your Daily Dot where Dot will share tips, advice, and stories on how we can make our world better. |
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All Dear Dot illustrations by Elissa Turnbull. |
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Dear Reader,
In a tall, narrow concrete and steel building on an island somewhere between Norway and the North Pole lies treasure beyond imagining. Within what is essentially a massive safety deposit box are the keys to the world’s agricultural biodiversity, 1.3 million seeds from 930,000 species of food crops — an insurance policy in the event of a collapse of our food systems. It’s called the Global Seed Vault.
But our insurance policy has a problem. Specifically, climate change. More specifically, the melting of the permafrost along with particularly intense spring rains in 2017 created flooding at the entrance to the vault, endangering these precious seeds. The Norwegian agency that runs the vault was caught flat-footed, admittedly unprepared. So, to be clear, a project designed to protect our food from potential disaster, including climate change, wasn’t prepared for the changes wrought by climate change. Or, as Naomi Oreskes puts it, “humans are not very good at anticipating change, even in the short run.”
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Reflecting on this experiment in seed saving, Scientific American writes that we can draw larger lessons. “Big projects that claim they will help us ‘adapt’ to climate change seem to ignore how severely an altered global climate will affect all systems and humans on Earth. For example, seeds saved now in Svalbard will stop evolving while in cold storage. If farmers try to plant them decades from now, the seeds will be thrust into a natural world to which they are no longer adapted, and they could fail to thrive.”
Which isn’t to say we shouldn’t proceed with a relatively low-cost, low-risk undertaking like the Global Seed Vault. But, as Oreskes makes clear, our main focus shouldn’t be on responding to climate disasters, but rather on doing everything we can to prevent them in the first place.
Pre-emptively,
Dot
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