To get some background on Vavilov, Amory and Ben spoke to Gary Nabhan, an agricultural ecologist ethnobotanist, Franciscan brother and author of Where Our Food Comes From: Retracing Nikolay Vavilov’s Quest to End Famine. “He really explained why we are fully interdependent when it comes to crops.” “I don’t know what the Crop Trust would have been without Vavilov,” says Haga. New York World-Telegram & Sun Collection. World Telegram staff photographer - Library of Congress. His name was Nikolay Vavilov and he lived in what was then the Soviet Union. The vault's origins start with one man, during World War II - a global existential crisis if ever there was one. If the Big One happens, we’ll want to grow food again, right? Shelves inside the Svalbard Global Seed Vault stacked with boxes of seeds from around the world. Protecting our food supply is probably the one thing the whole world can get behind. South Korea’s seeds sit next to North Korea’s. Any nation can store seeds in the vault for free, making the vault a sort of world peace zone. (Mari Tefre/Global Crop Diversity Trust)įor each crop, there’s an envelope with 500 seeds, says Marie Haga, executive director of the Crop Trust. We stumbled across this story while browsing one of the most popular subreddits, /r/todayilearned. It’s called the Crop Trust, and it’s meant to be a backup for humanity if… when?.

(Photo/Crop Trust)īuilt into the side of the mountain, the vault holds seeds: seeds for every edible plant you can think of. Reindeer near the vault, in Svalbard, Norway. Svalbard is almost like the end of the Earth - it’s a remote place with reindeer, Arctic foxes and about 2,500 humans. The vault in question is located far north, up in a Norwegian archipelago called Svalbard. The contents don’t glitter or shine or pay for anything, but they are probably the most valuable items in the world. This week on Endless Thread, we talk about a real vault, one that holds not only secrets, but actual valuables as well. Of course, that’s not an actual vault - more of a metaphorical one.

The vault amarillo