Seed Banks

When I watched the TED video, the very first shocking sentence I heard was: "In the U.S. (in the late 1800's), farmers and gardeners were growing 7,100 named varieties of apples; imagine that, 7,100 apples with names. Today, 6,800 of those are extinct, no longer to be seen again." What this video was striving to get across was that the variety of corn, rice, and wheat we grow today may not thrive in a future who is constantly being threatened by climate changes. I definitely agree. I agree with this because I personally feel that the apples who are now extinct prove that they've already diminished due to the future's climate changes. To solve this dilemma, they built a seed bank, Global Seed Vault, under a mountain in Svalbard to conserve biological diversity and agricultural diversity of unique varieties of food crops. "Workers used a refrigeration system to bring vault to -8 degrees Celsius (just below 0 degrees Fahrenheit), and a smaller refrigeration system plus the area's natural permafrost and the mountain's thick rock will keep the vault at at least -4 C (25 F)." This will hopefully keep these seeds stored for centuries to come, or perhaps they may be sooner that.

There is also another seed bank, The Millennium Seed Bank, located in London. This seed bank, however, does not contain food crops' seeds, instead, it contains plant seeds. The seed bank "aims to house all the 300,000 different plant species known to exist to ensure future biodiversity and protect a vital source of food and medicines."This seed bank is in a complicated situation though because they receive their money from the national lottery and the other from donations. The danger within the way they receive their money is that there is 2012 London Olympics coming sapping lottery money, which means that it will lead it to run dry from money. Donations may also run dry due to the fact that the economy is a current down fall and people or organizations will not be able to donate. On the positive side, this seed bank is held at -20 degrees Celsius keeping the plants safe for thousands of years.