Saving Our Seeds

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              "text": "The Kew Millennium Seed Bank, Sussex: A worker at the seed bank is seen here checking up on a species of Leucadendron that is now extinct in nature. If a plant species is poorly represented at the bank, seeds are planted and grown out in order to harvest more seeds. The bank calls this process “multiplication”.",
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              "text": "The Kew Millennium Seed Bank, Sussex: A worker from the facility is seen here removing cuttings of plants stored in a tank of liquid nitrogen. This method of storage takes up less space than the traditional storage of cuttings in jars. It also has the added benefit of saving on energy and plant-food costs since artificial lighting and air conditioning are not required and plants don’t need to be fed when they are frozen.",
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              "text": "The Kew Millennium Seed Bank, Sussex: A sample of some of the more exotic seed varieties stored at the seed bank. With about 100,000 of the world’s plant species facing extinction, the project to collect as many known samples as possible is a race against time.",
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              "text": "The Kew Millennium Seed Bank, Sussex: Seeds being scanned by X-ray at one of the seed bank’s laboratories. This procedure aims to provide researchers with a clear picture of the inner morphology of the seed. It helps sift out the ‘empty’ seeds that regularly appear in nature and detect insect larvae that might be living within the seed.",
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              "text": "The Kew Millennium Seed Bank, Sussex: A view of the lift at the entrance of the storage facility in The Welcome Trust Millennium Building. Housed here are facilities for seed preparation, laboratories, and areas for public exhibitions. The storage vault lies under the building.",
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              "text": "The Kew Millennium Seed Bank, Sussex: Robin Probert, head of conservation and technology at the seed bank, is here seen removing some seeds from a storage facility. The storage vaults are maintained at a temperature of -20 degrees C. Seeds are dried and then chilled so that they can be germinated at any point in the future. A seed’s lifespan depends on its species with some remaining viable for only a few decades to while others can remain in storage and be revived after millennia.",
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              "text": "The Kew Millennium Seed Bank, Sussex: Here a laboratory worker checks the seeds individually and separates them before they’re sent for analysis. Collections need to cleaned to remove dust and debris before storage.",
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              "text": "The Svalbard International Seed Vault, Norway: A sample of the thousands of seed varieties stored in tubes at the facility. The total storage capacity of the two vaults at the Svalbard facility is 3 million seeds. The facility serves as a backup for the world’s 1750 seed banks.",
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              "text": "The Svalbard International Seed Vault, Norway: A view of the terrain surrounding the seed vault. The rocky terrain surrounding the facility acts as an additional security layer. The remote location—Svalbard is part of a group of islands located almost 950 kilometres to the north of Norway, lying midway between Norway and the North Pole—coupled with the island’s harsh weather conditions proved challenging during the facility’s construction.",
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              "text": "The Svalbard International Seed Vault, Norway: A view of the ice-covered walls inside the facility. The vault is protected by two airlocks at either end of this tunnel. Even in the worst-case scenario of the entire ice structure of Antarctica melting, which would lead to a 60-metre rise in sea levels, the vault would not be in danger of being touched by running water.",
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              "text": "The Svalbard International Seed Vault, Norway: A view of the roof of the vault, which is made of steel panels set with prisms and mirrors to reflect polar light and enable it to emit a muted glow. It was designed by the Norwegian artist Dyveke Sanne and the art agency KORO.",
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              "text": "The Svalbard International Seed Vault, Norway: An ice-covered door at the facility. The Spitzbergen mountain was chosen as a site for a number of factors including its year-round permafrost. If ever the refrigeration system failed the seeds inside the vault would still be maintained at -5 degrees C. Cary Fowler, the vault’s architect, reckons that it would take up to two centuries for the vault to warm to freezing point in case of an electricity cut.",
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              "text": "The Svalbard International Seed Vault, Norway: Here, a scientist at the facility holds up a thermometer indicating the temperature in one of the storage rooms (-14.8 degrees C). The cooling process when the vault first became operational took two months to complete. The seeds need to be stored at the internationally recognized standard of -18 degrees C.",
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The island of Spitsbergen in the archipelago of Svalbard, Norway, takes its name from the Dutch words for “jagged peaks”. The stark Svalbard landscape seemed a perfect remore setting to author Philip Pullman for the kingdom of the Panserbjørne (the race of armoured bears) in His Dark Materials. This remoteness and the additional advantages of permafrost and a lack of tectonic activity made it an ideal location to situate the Global Seed Vault. Designed to last for a thousand years and withstand natural and global disasters, the vault consists of a steel compound tunneling 120 metres into the side of a sandstone mountain. It has collected over 740000 seed samples and at some point will have amassed a sample of every seed ever used in human history.

Though commonly referred to by the media as the “doomsday vault”, its original purpose was to counter the slow loss of biodiversity and to help repopulate seed banks all over the world in case of disaster. An example of this was when a fire broke out at the National Plant Genetics Resources Laboratory in the Philippines in January 2012. Damage sustained in the in vitro laboratory led to the loss of hundreds of seed duplicates of banana, taro, sweet potato, and yam. Parts of the collection that were not duplicated at any other location have now been lost forever. Conspiracy theorists, however, see the project as a diabolical plot by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and other organizations that have pledged a stake in it to one day control the world’s food sources.

The concept of creating seed banks emerged 30-40 years ago at the end of the Green Revolution, which led to the realization that, as old varieties of seeds were abandoned for hybrids, a significant amount of agricultural biodiversity was being lost. Take India, for example, which had over 100,000 varieties of rice in the 19th century. There are now only a few thousand varieties remaining.

At Svalbard, every country owns the seeds they deposit, and neither the vault authorities not the Norway government can allow access to the seeds without the depositor’s consent. This raised concerns that non-influential collectors would have limited access to the stores. Another concern is that this system has allowed large firms to patent seeds if they have not already been patented.

Another international conservation project is the Millennium Seed Vault in West Sussex. Coordinated by the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, this is the world’s largest plant conservation project. Its vaults have the capacity to hold 30 packed double-decker buses of grains, which makes it about 100 times bigger than the facility at Svalbard. It works in collaboration with other biodiversity projects and by 2020 would have collected duplicates of 25% of the world’s plant species.

This photo essay makes a small exploration of these two seed repositories revealing the interiors of their deep vaults and the methods used to store their valuable holdings.