Wildflower Stew

We need this, the mystery of a growing plant, some process of nature beyond our control, no matter how small, some other life force co-existing, exhaling what we inhale, converting sun into sugar,  filtering our funky air, teasing the eye.

Sometimes it seems that the steel and concrete will just take over and everything will be paved over into a parking lot but I take heart from articles like this one from the New York Times: Editorial Notebook:  A Garden Stored Inside  about the 250 acre Botanical Garden in the Bronx that is visited by 800,000 people a year.

I was amazed to read in the Norway Post about the “Doomsday” seed vault. The Svalbard International Seed Vault will house in perpetuity seed samples of every major food crop.

The entrance to the “fail-safe” seed vault will “gleam like a gem in the midnight sun,” signaling a priceless treasure within: seed samples of nearly every food crop of every country. The vault has been designed to withstand even the worst-case scenarios of global warming over the next 200 years by being placed high above any possible rise in sea level and also 120 metres into solid rock so that rising external air temperatures will not  influence the surrounding permafrost.

The Arctic seed vault is part of a comprehensive global strategy being implemented by the Global Crop Diversity Trust http://www.croptrust.org/ to protect collections of crop genetic diversity around the world. 

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 20th, 2007 at 1:31 pm and is filed under Journal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.