Jim Richardson | Global Crop Diversity Trust
Cary Fowler at the Svalbard Global Seed Bank, also known as the "Doomsday" seed bank, in Longyearbyen, Svalbard, Norway. Dug into the frozen mountainside above the town, the seedbank is a last chance repository for millions of seeds, that could be used to restore agriculture should a disaster wipe out many of the plants we depend upon for food.
If you’re headed to the North Pole and find yourself craving filet of seal or a juicy moose burger, you’ll stop in Longyearbyen, the northernmost town on Earth, deep inside the Arctic Circle. Longyearbyen is a bitterly cold and remote place on Norway’s Svalbard Archipelago, only 600 miles from the top of the world. And yet it’s home to 2,500 people, a research center, one of Scandinavia’s finest restaurants, and the Global Seed Vault, which houses more than 500 million seeds that, when planted, could produce 930,000 different varieties of plants representing much of the world’s food supply.
I wasn’t salivating for moose meat when I set out on my 5,000-mile journey to Longyearbyen in February, arguably the coldest month of the year. My decision to go was based on the calling of one of my closest friends in the inhabitable world. My White Station High School classmate Cary Fowler, whose knowledge of agriculture and tenacious spirit, along with his vision for the future, created the Global Seed Vault, which opened for seed storage in 2008. Since then, Fowler has nudged me to meet him at the cavernous vault deep inside a snow and ice-covered mountain underneath the permafrost.
I had made all sorts of excuses over the years not to go to Svalbard, convincing myself that no one makes a coat warm enough for me to go there. Yet during dinner at Ecco in Midtown late last year, Fowler told me he may not return to Longyearbyen as often as he has in the past. He would keep access to a key to the vault, but he planned to spend more time in Memphis as the new chairman of the board of Rhodes College. He offered a gentle forewarning. If I wanted to meet him at the vault, I’d better do it soon. I took the bait. I prepared to head toward the North Pole with only one stop in mind: Longyearbyen and the Seed Vault.
To be exact, Longyearbyen is an old coal-mining town founded by an American who set up a coal mining operation there in 1906. It’s nestled in a valley on the island of Spitsbergen, the largest island in Norway’s Svalbard Archipelago, where the sun doesn’t shine nearly four months of the year and the polar wind doubles the bone-deep chill. It’s a place where most streets have no names and all inhabitants carry guns to avoid being eaten by polar bears that may wander into town. Most curious, it’s not a good idea to die in Longyearbyen since burials are prohibited. Dying was discouraged nearly 70 years ago after it was learned that bodies buried in the local graveyard did not decompose. The ground is just too doggone cold.
So, how does a kid from Memphis wind up creating a way to save humanity inside the Arctic Circle, a move that has inextricably linked Memphis and Longyearbyen?
Fowler and the author in the fifth grade at Avon Elementary School. Fowler is on the first row, far right. Thorp is pictured on the second row, fourth from the left. 1960.
"You might say it’s just due to a lot of accidents,’’ Fowler mused as he steered a rented SUV over the ice-encrusted terrain away from Longyearbyen’s small airport. After my 21-hour journey from Memphis, and Cary’s 17-hour trip from New York, he remained surprisingly philosophical. “Life is full of serendipity and one thing leads to another,” he said. “People think I’m brilliant, but anyone, really, could have planned out any of these things. It just happened to be me.”
A bit self-effacing, I thought, as I strained for a glimpse of reindeer foraging for food beneath the snow. Here’s a guy who graduated with me from White Station High School in 1967, spent 2.5 critically important years at Rhodes College (then Southwestern) before wanderlust and his disgust for the city’s racial climate found him living in Canada and finishing college at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia. As fate would have it, his honors degree inadvertently led him to a doctorate program in sociology at Uppsala University in Sweden, one of the world’s top research universities.
Fowler’s first job back in the U.S. took him to Durham, North Carolina, and the Institute for Southern Studies, where he published a special issue of a quarterly journal that focused on agriculture. “I was working on an article about the fate of small family farms in the South and that resonated with me because I spent a lot of time with my maternal grandmother at her small farm just outside of Jackson [Tennessee],” he said. Soon Fowler was invited to do research for a book that made him aware of the issues of crop diversity, which, simply put, is the genetic foundation — or variation within crop species — that allows agriculture to evolve and adapt to constant change, combating pests or diseases, and the challenge to produce enough food to feed the world.
Susan Adler Thorp
As Fowler explained it, 150 years ago there were about 7,000 known varieties of apples in the U.S. Because of disease and pests and human inattention, today there are fewer than 700 varieties of apples. The same holds true for corn. About 80 percent of the different types of corn that existed less than a century ago have vanished. In the U.S. alone, 94 percent of the different types of peas that were grown in our country are gone. To lose a variety of any crop is as irreversible as death. Without crop diversity, our food supply would be imperiled.
Fowler learned as much as he could about crop diversity, eventually becoming so knowledgeable in the topic that he became one of the few experts in the field. The world of agriculture noticed. The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) invited him to make a global assessment of the state of the world’s crop diversity. “That was a major turning point,” he says. “I was responsible for drafting a book about the state of the world’s genetic resources and for negotiating with countries to develop a global plan of action for cultivating crop diversity.’’
By 1996, Fowler supervised the negotiations that led to the adoption of this plan of action by 150 countries, and then accepted a job in Norway as Professor and Director of Research in the Department for International Environment and Development Studies at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences near Oslo. A mouthful, but it gave Fowler familiarity with Nordic life, language, and culture that would be important to the creation of the Seed Vault.
As we bumped unmercifully along the frozen landscape, I could hear the crunch of ice giving way to the weight of our SUV. Snow-covered mountains and glaciers were everywhere I looked. For Fowler, who vanquished me in every subject except fifth-grade math, Longyearbyen was the perfect place to build one of humanity’s most important projects — a seed vault whose contents could regenerate the world’s food supply in case of a catastrophic loss of crop diversity in one country, or in many.
Our first stop was the Spitsbergen Hotel — a real hotel with a receptionist on the second floor. The only thing different about hotels in Longyearbyen: you must remove your boots on the first floor when you enter. I kept a keen eye on Fowler and his wife, Amy Goldman Fowler. For the most part, whatever these seasoned Svalbard travelers did, so did I. In some respects, they were at home. I was on Mars.
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Fowler’s favorite restaurant in Longyearbyen, Kroa.
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Nachos topped with taco-flavored reindeer meat, jalapenos, cheese, sour cream and salsa.
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Smoked whale with longberry syrup, flatbread and sour cream.
The Seed Vault would have to wait. It was dinnertime and we headed to Fowler’s favorite restaurant, Kroa. It reminded me of an old tavern full of people, wooden tables, and beer. Fowler ordered nachos topped with reindeer. Someone else ordered a slab of whale. I ordered a potato.
For dessert, we were off to the sole reason I came to this nearly desolate and frozen place. It was late, we were tired, but I insisted on seeing the outside of the vault before ending a very long day. Knowing that Fowler successfully led the world’s effort to conserve crop diversity, I wondered out loud how that global agreement turned into the Seed Vault.
“Every country has seed banks to store and preserve seeds,” said Fowler. “It occurred to me after 9-11 that all seed banks are vulnerable to a 9-11 type of attack because they are in buildings. After Katrina hit, there were a lot of recriminations with people blaming each other why someone didn’t do something beforehand to prevent the flooding problems in New Orleans.
“Then it dawned on me,” he continued. “If there was a catastrophic event that destroyed the world’s seed banks, I would be blamed. There I was, the most visible person in the field of crop diversity. I felt that if I couldn’t get together with a few people and sound the alarm, then who would? The world needed a bigger and bolder fail-safe plan for its seeds. That was the Seed Vault.”
Longyearbyen’s remoteness and cold environment are exactly what Cary and his colleagues needed to convince the Norwegian government in 2006 that it should ante up $6 million and build a Seed Vault there. Their vision was simple: a vault that not only would house millions of seeds representing hundreds of thousands of varieties of edible plants; it would also preserve the genetic diversity of the world’s crops and, ultimately, the food supply.
As Fowler navigated up the side of a glacial mountain in the frozen dark, I asked what would happen if someone broke into the vault and stole the seeds. He assured me in his calming voice that I shouldn’t worry. “This isn’t Memphis or Detroit,’’ he chided. “Anyway, who would endure below-zero temperatures to break into a vault for a bunch of seeds?” Besides, he advised, the people who man the airport’s tower keep a close eye on the vault nearby, not to mention that the vault is electronically monitored so that when someone drives up to the vault, someone else will be watching.
After 15 minutes, the Seed Vault was ahead; a captivating geometric concrete edifice that juts out of the snow and is brightened in the near-darkness only by a light sculpture above its entrance designed by a Norwegian artist. In Norway, a percentage of a construction budget must be dedicated to art projects that will enhance government-funded buildings.
Jim Richardson, Jim Richardson
Cary Fowler at the Svalbard Global Seed Bank, also known as the "Doomsday" seed bank, in Longyearbyen, Svalbard, Norway. Dug into the frozen mountainside above the town, the seedbank is a last chance repository for millions of seeds, that could be used to restore agriculture should a disaster wipe out many of the plants we depend upon for food.
To see the Seed Vault from the outside is to understand the myriad of mythical exaggerations and whacky rumors that have attached themselves to the vault since it opened nearly a decade ago. Conspiracy theorists have claimed that the vault is a top-secret military installation; others have suggested it was built because of an impending apocalypse. The most recent rumor: The vault was flooded, destroying the seeds. The truth: Record rainfall last year caused water to seep into the entryway of the vault, freezing into ice on the walkway near the entrance. Cary dismissed these rumors — and others — as rubbish. He chalked them up to cynicism and the gullibility of people who get their information from alternative Internet news sites that specialize in sensation.
We returned to the vault early the next day for a longer and more serious visit, accompanied by a news crew from the CBS Sunday Morning program. It would be a chance for me not only to see the vault from the inside, but to watch a traditional news team prepare to tell yet one more story about the vault. As we approached the vault’s front door, Fowler reached into his pocket and pulled out the key as if he was opening the front door of his home. When he opened the heavy metal door, I stood in amazement. Ahead of us was a very long, well-lit, metal-lined tunnel carved out deep inside the mountain, reminiscent of a very long Quonset hut. The entrance and the tunnel are designed to withstand earthquakes and bomb blasts and, yes, even some water and ice.
The tunnel descends nearly 425 feet beneath the permafrost before ending at another set of heavy metal doors that open to an ice-encrusted cavernous area, or the vestibule to the actual vaults that house the seeds. Walk into that area and you’ll see three more locked doors, each covered with a thick layer of ice. These doors bar entrance to the three seed vaults, each 100 feet long, 33 feet wide, and 17 feet tall. Only one chamber — the middle one — is in use now as a seed vault, and the only one likely to be in use during our lifetime, explained Fowler.
It’s 22 degrees Fahrenheit in the vast area just outside the seed vault. That felt almost tropical compared to the bitter shock that came when Fowler opened the Seed Vault’s door and we were quickly ushered into the coldest place I ever plan to be. It’s -1 degree Fahrenheit inside the actual Seed Vault.
As the CBS people slowly worked their TV magic, I spent time talking with the Sunday Morning show’s very pregnant New York-based producer. Even while talking, we kept moving so we wouldn’t freeze in one spot. When she was busy giving directions to her crew, I wandered the aisles of the vault, reading the labels on some of the thousands of containers neatly stacked high on metal shelving inside this cave-like structure. The labels revealed the contents of each box — seeds for wheat, corn, pigeonpea, hops, kikuyu grass, mung beans, rice, fenugreek, sorghum, spinach — and the countries that sent them. Canada. Israel. Nigeria. Switzerland. Mexico. South Korea. North Korea. The United States. France.
Most of the containers were in plastic storage boxes with lids, like those you can buy at Walmart. A few countries sent their seeds crated in handmade wooden boxes, like North Korea. And then I spotted a container wrapped in a familiar color scheme that any Memphian should recognize: the purple and orange logo of FedEx. The country smart enough to fly their precious cargo via FedEx? Zambia.
“A regional facility there sent 1,463 seed samples that originated in 10 different countries in southern Africa,’’ Fowler explained. “I have visited that seed bank several times. One of the ‘threats’ they have encountered has been people breaking into the seed bank, presumably thinking that it was a financial bank since the sign out front says ‘bank.’ I don’t think any seeds have been stolen, but it gives you an idea of the range of problems a seed bank can encounter.”
Fowler spent the better part of three hours working inside the vault interviewing and creating the Sunday Morning segment whose final version would be about five minutes long. He didn’t seem to mind the sub-zero temperature at all, though the rest of us did, including Seth Doan, the CBS reporter conducting the interview.
Three hours inside the vault taught me several things. I know exactly where the seeds from Zambia are stored. The Seed Vault is designed in much the same way that the aisles are laid out in a Home Depot. A compressor unit keeps the air circulating to maintain the subzero temperature. Now I understand what frostbite feels like. And Fowler, that kid from Memphis, is one of the world’s most creative visionaries.
I spent two more days in Longyearbyen with Fowler and his wife and two other friends who joined us on the trip. The Norwegians are fond of saying that there’s no such thing as bad weather, only bad clothes. They’re right. Properly dressed with multiple layers, it’s an easy 10-minute walk into town, where there are shops, a pharmacy, a tourist center, restaurants, and a museum that offers the history of Longyearbyen and details the animal and plant life in the polar region.
We returned to the vault twice more. As we were leaving, a large group of Japanese tourists were standing outside the vault’s towering entrance, shivering and gazing at the lighted glass sculpture above. I headed straight for the warmth of our SUV, but not Fowler. He stood in the bitter cold before the tourists, kind of like a professor, answering questions about everything inside.
What I learned firsthand is that the Seed Vault is not a time capsule for seeds lying dormant in case of worldwide vegetative doomsday. It’s basically a very cold freezer with no purpose other than to keep seeds alive and viable and suspended in deep freeze just in case they are ever needed. And they have been needed.
Prior to the Syrian war, Aleppo was home to one of the most important seed banks in the Middle East: The International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA), housing seeds for important food staples such as wheat, chick peas and fava beans. ICARDA sent copies of its seeds to the vault in 2007. Following the destruction of Aleppo, the Global Seed Vault returned many of the seeds to new ICARDA seed banks in other Middle East countries, such as Morocco and Lebanon, where they are growing new plants and regenerating the seeds from the original Seed Vault deposit. Duplicates of those seeds were being returned to the Seed Vault as Fowler and I looked on.
Norway built the seed vault, thus the Norwegians own it. It’s funded with money raised by the Crop Trust, which Fowler led for seven years, from 2005 to 2012; during that time he raised about $180 million for the Trust, which funds the vault’s operations.
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Seth Doan, reporter for CBS Sunday Morning, talks with Fowler about the vault’s contents during recent filming about the vault, which was aired on CBS on April.
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Fowler with his wife, Amy Goldman Fowler, in front of the crates of seeds sent to the vault by the Iowa-based Seed Savers Exchange that preserves heirloom varieties.
There’s little doubt that Fowler feels at home in Longyearbyen, a foreboding place if you don’t know what to expect. But he’s accustomed to it. And he’s a realist. The time will come when he won’t return to Longyearbyen. “For me, it will be very sad,” he said, “but it has to happen. Just not yet.” Although he’s still an international traveler and a man whose talents belong to the world, his heart also is rooted in Memphis, which is why he and Amy bought a 110-year-old Midtown Memphis home and are in the process of renovating it. He’ll use it as his base during his term as chairman of the Rhodes College board as he gets to know his hometown once again.
Then, of course, there’s New York, where he and Amy spend most of their time on their farm upstate. There she nurtures her love of heirloom vegetables, including squash, melons, and tomatoes and has written four books on the subjects. Fowler, too, stays busy. In between visits to Memphis where his parents still live, he uses his space in New York to prepare for worldwide lectures about the vault and crop diversity. He remains a senior advisor to the Crop Trust, sits on a technical committee of the New York Botanical Garden where his wife serves as board chairman, is a visiting scholar at Stanford University, and continues to serve as chairman of the International Advisory Council for the Seed Vault.
And he also tends his apple orchard, where he is growing 125 varieties of new apple trees using cuttings and grafting, trying to preserve the diversity of many apples nearly lost over time. Hidden inside that orchard is a personal explanation of his life’s work.
“In the 1800s, before there was a modern seed and nursery industry, people were planting a lot of apples and, if the resulting apple tree was a really good one, they would save the cuttings and produce more like it and their neighbors would plant more like it,’’ Fowler explained. “That gave rise to thousands of varieties of apples. These varieties carried family names because people liked them and gave apples the honor of carrying their family names. That shows the link between people and plants. Plants co-evolve with human beings and their direct development is in our hands.
“We have good data about what happened to those apples. We know at least more than 6,000 of those named varieties of apples have been lost,” he said. “They are extinct. We’re not just losing varieties of apples, but we’re losing our own history and certainly culinary traits. We’re also losing options for the future. We don’t have a crystal ball to see what we need for the future. I’m just using apples as a surrogate. We could be talking about rice or wheat. We’re not at the stage we can know exactly what kind of apple we will want in the future. That means we need to be saving all of these traits of apples. It’s a library of life and there are a lot of answers to future life if we are smart enough to conserve that diversity.
“In other words,” he continued, “there’s something permanent about extinction. Since we aren’t God, and we can’t predict the future in detail, it’s important that we preserve the pieces.”
