How the Global Seed Vault Aims To Fight Future Famine 115
Lanxon writes "The Global Seed Vault opened in 2008 after engineers spent a year drilling and blasting through the sandstone, siltstone and claystone of the Norwegian Platåberget Mountain to create a system of subterranean chambers on the Advent Fjord's southern flank that could store 4.5 million seeds. It's a $9 million bet against climate change. But can it save us from the threat of worldwide famine? An article at Wired explores its current state and its future: '... it operates as a secure storage space for samples of other collections that are at risk. The samples remain at all times the property of the depositors, the only proviso being that the originals must be freely available to researchers and breeders under the terms of the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources. There have been deposits from every continent: 3,710 species in total, from 29 crop institutes representing 226 countries. Over the past few years the need for a secure storage facility has become ever more urgent. A typhoon in the Philippines in 2006 caused a flood that left the national crop gene bank under two meters of water.'"
Seed bank? Bah! Apocalyptic spectacle more like (Score:3, Informative)
A single seed bank like this doesn't make any kind of biological sense. It is remarkably unlikely to be useful in the event of catastrophe: it's a long old road up there to Norway to replenish stocks of some ancient carrot variety from most parts of Europe.
If you actually wanted to guard biodiversity, you would encourage social networks of gardeners to replant varieties each season and share the ensuing seeds. The French organisation Kokopelli [wikipedia.org] does this, but seems to suffer from legal harassment rather than incur the subsidies it would receive in any sane world.
An analogy for the slashdot crowd might be Napster (centralised) vs. BitTorrent (distributed).
When you cut out the bullshit it's very simple... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Monsanto seeds in there? (Score:5, Informative)
Natural News? Seriously? Hint: a site that promotes homeopathy, reiki, and magic silver as cancer cures and says the vaccines cause autism isn't a good source of information. Great example of crank magnetism though.
Crap like this is what pisses me off. No, Monsanto is not your friend, but then you have clueless people railing against them with no idea as to what is actually going on, and that just makes the whole issue that much harder. I won't listen to the medical opinions of a doctor who uses the terms brain and heart interchangeably, and I won't listen to agricultural opinions of people who use pesticide and herbicide interchangeably. And you know so many are only against Monsanto because they do genetic engineering, and, at this point in time, anti-GMO is just another form of baseless pseudoscientific crank denialism woowoo. "I saw Splice once, so I know more about genetic engineering than geneticists!" No, you don't, you just can't be effed to crack a book before protesting. They're like the anti-vaxxers and alt-med quacks who rant about companies like Pfizer and Merck, not because of the bad things those companies actually do, but because said cranks don't understand the science behind pharmaceuticals/vaccines. Then people like me, who do understand the science behind GMOs, the science behind what Monsanto does, are left in the awkward position of defending Monsanto for the sake of accuracy.
By all means, keep an eye on them, they are not to be trusted, hell, it looks like they may have lied about the yield of there latest generation of soybean, but keep it in the real, don't try to pass off anti-Monsanto sentiment as actual science, and stay away from tinfoil land. When the two major points in an agreement are backed by moneyed interests and and the ignorant yet vocal, it makes it really hard to find the truth.
Re:Monsanto seeds in there? (Score:3, Informative)
Oh, crap, you're right, I guess I really wasn't paying attention. I forgot the dash in the term woo-woo. [skepdic.com] My bad. I hope that clears things up.