A Northern Noah’s Ark for Seeds
Sommer solstice today! In the annual rhythm nature is at its full bloom here in the northern hemisphere, and from now on will go again back. Everything in creation is living with bigger or smaller cycles of manifestation and dissolution. The seeds of one cycle are preserved for the next one, like shown the story of Noah’s ark or of Vaivasvatha Manu in the east, who collects the seeds of life for the next creation.
This seems to be the inspiration of the Global Crop Security Trust, whose mission is it “to ensure the conservation and availability of crop diversity for food security worldwide. The fight against hunger is one of the greatest challenges facing the world over the coming decades. Crop diversity is fundamental to defeating hunger and achieving food security. But it is at serious risk. An increasingly unpredictable and changing climate, and a world population expected to reach 9 billion by 2050, will place unprecedented demands on agriculture. Conserving the vast diversity of crop varieties is the only way to guarantee that farmers and plant breeders will have the raw materials needed to improve and adapt their crops to meet these challenges – and provide food for us into the future.”
As the press told yesterday, they have just startet building a vault dug into a frozen mountain deep in an Arctic island’s permafrost, which will serve as a Noah’s ark for world seeds in case of a global catastrophe. Premiers of Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Finland and Iceland were attending the cornerstone ceremony near Longyearbyen, a town in Norway’s Svalbard Islands, about 620 miles from the North Pole. The seeds, packaged in foil, would be stored at such temperatures that they could last hundreds, even thousands, of years.
If the grass seeds sold by clever German business men to football friends as “Hallowed Ground” – a box of the standardised seeds used for the football grounds of the world cup – will also be included in the northern ark was not reported by the press…
