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A Dire Warning From The “Doomsday Vault”

Climate change alarmists are taking full advantage of the “Sudden Stratospheric Warming” (SSW) event, which occurred above the Arctic in mid-February, as further evidence that the world’s unpredictable and sometimes chaotic weather is jeopardizing humanity’s food security.

The split of the polar vortex, otherwise known as an SSW event, shifted the Arctic airmass to most of Europe as well as Western parts of North America. Climate alarmist pointed out that massive snowstorms in Europe, dangerous weather patterns in the United States, and rain in the Arctic demonstrates how extreme weather is altering seasonal growing patterns.

Here is what Bloomberg said, “the world was upside down: it was raining in the Arctic Circle and snowing in Rome,” as explained above, the SSW event has been the primary driver of chaotic weather since mid-February.

Researchers, activists, executives and government officials gathered in Longyearbyen, a small coal-mining town on Spitsbergen Island, in Norway’s Svalbard archipelago, to commemorate the 10-year anniversary of what has become known as the “Doomsday Vault,” which is an underground bunker buried deep inside a mountain where the world stores its plant seeds from apocalyptic consequences of climate change and war, said Bloomberg.

Last month, we reported how the Norwegian government is planning to allocate 100 million kroner ($13 million) in technical improvements to enhance the facility after it sprung a leak from melting permafrost — officials warned that climate change could put the facility at risk.

“Biodiversity is the building block to develop new plants and because of climate change we’re in a terrible need to quickly develop new varieties,” said Aaslaug Marie Haga, executive director of Crop Trust, a group established to support gene banks. “The climate is changing quicker than the plants can handle.”

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Climate Change Adds Urgency To Push to Save World’s Seeds

Climate Change Adds Urgency To Push to Save World’s Seeds

In the face of rising temperatures and worsening drought, the world’s repositories of agricultural seeds may hold the key to growing food under increasingly harsh conditions. But keeping these gene banks safe and viable is a complicated and expensive challenge.


During the 872-day German siege of Leningrad in World War II, in which an estimated 1.1 million civilians died, a small band of workers devoted themselves to safeguarding a priceless trove of 200,000 seeds at the Institute of Plant Industry. Then the world’s largest seed bank, the collection had been amassed, in large part, by famed Soviet botanist Nikolai Vavilov during expeditions to 64 countries.

As the siege wore on and starvation became epidemic, workers at the institute refused to eat the seeds and protected them from hungry citizens.

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Scientist holding seeds

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Seeds stored at a gene bank in Mexico.

Nine of Vavilov’s seed bank colleagues ultimately died from starvation.

Seventy years later, in 2012, employees of a gene bank at the International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas in Syria (ICARDA), heroically duplicated irreplaceable wheat, barley, and lentil seeds and spirited them out of the battle-scarred country to the frozen Svalbard Seed Vault, located inside a Norwegian mountain. Last year, the vault was opened for the first time to retrieve those seeds in order to re-establish ICARDA’s gene banks in Lebanon and Morocco.

From war, to civil strife, to natural disasters, seed banks around the world face crises that, with surprising regularity, befall these genetic repositories that are the lifeblood of the international agricultural community. With 9 billion people to feed by 2050 and with crops facing increased stress from rising temperatures and drought, plant breeders must marshal all of the available crop diversity to continuously develop new varieties of wheat, maize, rice, and other foods.

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The Largest Seed Exchange in the World Inspires Change – Shareable

The Largest Seed Exchange in the World Inspires Change – Shareable.

Ethical consumers in the US are increasingly concerned with the seeds used in the production of their food. However, this has been an issue in Europe for many years. In fact, there are several transnational seedsaver networks, like Arche Noah, which have become policy reform experts on heritage seeds. 

One of the most famous groups within Arche Noah’s 8,000 member network is the “live” seedbank Peliti, which has been raising awareness about endangered varieties of heritage seeds since 1995. Once tiny, now Peliti  is an NGO that receives thousands of visitors for its annual seed swap where you can get a mind boggling number of seed varieties for freeIt’s the biggest event of its kind in the world with an estimated 5,000 visitors last year from about 50 different countries. Recently I had the opportunity to interview one of the 200 Peliti volunteers, who are spread throughout Greece and beyond.

A typical day during Peliti Seed Swaps in Northern Greece.

They call themselves a live seedbank because traditional seedbanks store seeds under refrigeration, sometimes for up 10 to 15 years, which is “more like a seed museum than a seedbank,” according to volunteer Vasso Kanellopoulou. Peliti concentrates on keeping their seeds reproducing and germinating so they don’t fall vicitim to genetic erosion. Originally they started out with only a few hundred varieties, now they have thousands they’re saving from extiction.

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Olduvai IV: Courage
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Olduvai II: Exodus
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