99% Invisible - 309- The Vault

Episode Date: May 30, 2018

Svalbard is a remote Norwegian archipelago with reindeer, Arctic foxes and only around 2,500 humans -- but it is also home to a vault containing seeds for virtually every edible plant one can imagine. The mountainside Crop Trust facility has thousands of varieties of coconuts, corn, rice and more, serving as a seed backup for humanity. For each crop, there’s an envelope with 500 seeds. This featured episode from the show “Endless Thread” explores an unusual reserve of invaluable resources. Plus, Emmett tells about another seed bank in more precarious part of the world. The Vault

This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. In the Arctic Ocean, there's a cluster of islands called Svalbard. The islands are technically part of Norway, but they're much farther north than the mainland. Like way, way up toward the North Pole. The landscape is icy and mountainous, and on one of the icy mountains of Svalbard is a very curious thing. A vault. The entrance to the vault itself is small but striking. It's like a man-made obelisk sticking out of a glacier on top of a mountain.

Yes, the vault itself is inside a mountain. That's Ben Brock Johnson from the podcast Endless Thread, a show in which Ben and his co-host Amri Seaverson tell stories that they find on Reddit. This week we're featuring one of those stories, so I'm going to hand this one off to Ben and Amri. This story has actually been posted a few times by different redditors, but it's about people who aren't necessarily redditors. Haga, Marie Haga.

Do you think Marie Haga is a redditor, Ben? I don't know, but she definitely knows how to talk to interviewers. Do you want very short answers, medium answers? Marie Haga is a former Norwegian diplomat. She was a member of Parliament in that country, former Minister of Energy. Her current job is to manage one of the world's most important vaults, maybe the most important vault in the world. Let me take you on a little tour.

Alright Marie, lead us into this glacier mountain. You open these metal doors. It's like something out of a science fiction novel. And you walk 130 meters into the mountains through a tunnel. The walls are covered in snow and ice. Heck, they look like they're made out of snow and ice. There's this big chamber. That I normally call the cathedral.

It's painted white. It's a lot of ice crystals there. In this big room, you see three doors. These doors lead into three vaults. Vaults within the vault. What's inside? The precious treasure that is stored on permafrosti reindeer covered islands in the Arctic Ocean by a bunch of Norwegians. Behind the ICIS vault door at zero degrees Fahrenheit. Boxes, boxes, boxes, and boxes of seeds.

Seeds. Inside of these metal envelopes, 500 seeds per envelope. The seeds are from all over the world, and I mean all over the world, every country. It's part of something called the crop trust. The crop trust is like this massive backup for the planet's every country. It's part of something called the crop trust. The crop trust is like this massive backup for the planet's food crops. There's only one backup and this is it. And it's all

thanks to a Russian guy with a crazy story. Don't worry that's coming. But right now, how about a list of seeds in the backup from Marie Haga, whose official title is director of the crop trust? Haga, whose official title is Director of the Crop Trust. So we are concerned to safeguard the 3,000 varieties of coconuts, or the 4.5,000 varieties of potatoes. The 35,000 varieties of corn, the 125,000 varieties of wheat, or the 200,000 varieties of rice, just to mention some examples. There seems to be kind of a Noah's Ark aspect to this. That is actually a good description.

It is kind of a Noah's Ark of seeds. And it is meant to be a backup if things go wrong around the world, and unfortunately things do go wrong around the world occasionally. Once a decade, Spalbart staff is supposed to take new seeds into the vault. This is going to happen just a few weeks after this episode comes out on February 26th, 2018. Marie Haga and her team will disarm the vaults alarm systems, turn on the lights to the long tunnel into the mountain, unlock and creak open the vaults big doors, and put more seeds inside.

Any country that wants to store seeds in the vault can do it for free. And Marie says, in the vault, there is world peace. South Korea's seeds sit next to North Korea's seeds. There are seeds from Iraq sitting in the frigid silence. Afghanistan, Syria. Seeds from Ukraine sit next to seeds from Russia. It's almost like this is the one thing

the whole world can get behind, protecting our food supply, in case of an emergency, like a big emergency. This single backup, this planet's worth of crop diversity, living in relative peace under a mountain, the spirit of this has its origins in World War II, a global existential crisis like no other. Svalbard story starts actually not too far away in Russia. The guy you could call Svalbard's story starts actually not too far away in Russia. The guy you could call Svalbard's Seed Vault's grandfather was a man named Nikolai Vavlov.

I don't know what the crop trust my organization would have been without Vavilov. He really explained to the world back in the early 1900s how we globally are fully interdependent when it comes to crops. The crazy part of Vavlov's story, though, is that this man, a giant in the world of crop genetics, was thrown in a Russian gulag for his scientific principles. And a bunch of his devoted co-workers had to fend off rats and starvation to protect his life's work. The richest seed supply the world had ever seen, hidden away, underground, in its own vault. And what is now the city of St. Petersburg?

Back then, though, it had a different name. Leningrad, and Leningrad was under siege. Okay, you know how people say so-and-so wrote the book on X? Well, agricultural ecologist ethno-botnist and Franciscan brother Gary Nabhenn wrote the book on our Russian botnist Nikolai Vavlov. Well, Vavivlov was from a very well-educated family in Russia, I think every one of his siblings became a scientist as well. The book is called Where Our Food Comes From, retracing Nikolai Bavlov's quest to end famine. In the circle of life, Garry's book shows

that this Russian botanist and geneticist story really begins in famine just like it ends. The grew up in a period where Russia and Eastern Europe had suffered one famine after another due to inclement weather causing crop failures. These famines that he grew up with, how serious were they? They were of epic proportions from the 1860s on. There were six major famines that killed over a half million people in Eastern Europe and Russia.

And so he grew up in this milieu. Tolstoy was writing about the... Vavlov's upbringing around these horrendous crop failures in famines leads him to learn a ton about plants and botany. And as he is doing his work as a botanist in the 1920s, he starts to get into this idea that collecting the plants or the seeds, preserving and understanding crop diversity around the world, might help fight off crop failures because he might be able to breathe the plants and find certain strains that could resist bad weather and thus famine. There were people with their eyes on the same prize earlier on in history, Thomas Jefferson,

for example, who collected seeds and brought back cuttings of plants to the Americas. But Vavilov was the first one who had the education in what we would call Olaf was the first one who had the education in what we would call evolutionary biology, how plants adapt to different climates and conditions. He had sort of this humanitarian set of values that underscored the way he did science and sort of a remarkable way. I mean, he really was a superstar up there with Charles Darwin and other people that we could mention. So we've been talking about Nikolai Vavlov, who by many measures is one of the world's

seminal plant geneticists, but also a scientist who has a very pointed reason for his work. He doesn't want any Russian, really any human, to die again because of famine. Over time, this remarkable humanitarian way of doing science gains Vavlov a lot of followers, both in terms of the science and his altruism. And over his career, Vavlov does something that's pretty incredible. He and his team of scientists gather hundreds of thousands of different kinds of seeds from 64 countries. It takes over 100 different expeditions to do this. He's like Russia's Indiana Jones of Seed collection. And he is super charismatic, he's handsome, he's good at raising money, but he's not without his detractors.

Everybody famous has some haters, and Vavlov's got a problem. That problem's name is Trophim Lysenko. Lysenko starts out as a student of Vavlov, and Vavlov encourages him. But then Lysenko gets into this weird pseudoscience that rejects the idea of genetics, and he becomes this like anti-science-based agriculture guy,

which is little odd because he also becomes the head of the Academy of Agricultural Sciences. Lysenko doesn't like Vavlov, they are rivals now, and Lysenko gains the ear and the favor of Stalin. It's August of 1940, you can almost guess what happens next. Vavilov was out on another collecting expedition in the Caucasus, found what he believed was a new subspecies of wild wheat that could be very effective because it was so drought tolerant. And as he was coming back to his vehicle,

several black unmarked cars from the KGB or its predecessor showed up and without talking to any of the other dozen scientists on the expedition, Vavlov was scuttled away and disappeared from public sight. So Vavlov is thrown into a prison in Leningrad, A.Krad, aka St. Petersburg. His family doesn't know where he is, his colleagues don't know where he is, but they have a mission,

Vavlov's mission, of preserving and studying the world's food crops, of killing off hunger forever. His mission has a headquarters. It's this building at 44 Hurston Street in St. Peter's Burke. His staff sort of came together, they adored this man and said, we can't let anything happen to this collection. We don't know what's going to happen. And so they put three to five of their staffers on duty 24 hours a day and sealed off 18 rooms because there was another threat about to hit St. Petersburg. The siege of Leningrad starts in 1941, a year after Vavlov disappears into a gulag. This prison is a stone's throw from his family home. Vavlov's family members pass by without even knowing he is right there in prison.

The siege of Leningrad is unique in that it lasts almost the entire war, nearly 900 days. The city is cut off on the north by the Finnish army and the south by the Germans. And at the time, it is one of the most destructive attacks on a major city in known history, constant bombing, lack of food and water. People actually rush into the craters after bombs drop because water gathers in the craters. That's how they get their water. And through all of this, people are starving to death in Leningrad. Everyone, Russian soldiers, government officials, also the families of the scientists who are

protecting, secretly protecting this massive seed bank, they are putting the location of the bank and the fact that it is full of food, seeds, rice, legumes in the metaphorical vault. They are not telling anyone, and they are really freaking out, by the way, because Hitler is rumored to be really focused on capturing the seeds in this seed bank as part of his world domination efforts. So it really is a high stakes mission. So think of it.

You're starving to death. Your family is. You opt for staying in this very powerful, leopositioned, well-guarded building, and your weight is going down. Your immune system is going down. And as one of the curators said, when someone asked him, was it hard for all of you to try to keep defending the seeds when you could have eaten them to improve your own personal health? He said, well, it was hard to wake up in the morning. It was hard to get on our feet because we were so weak. It was hard to get our clothes on because it was cold, but it was not hard to protect those seeds. the P collection curator. Alexander Skuken took care of P's peanuts and other legumes. And he was one of the ones who died in the first year

of the effects of starvation with his seed envelopes in his hand. We know that other people died of diseases carried by rats that they were trying to evict from eating the seeds. A rice collector named Demetri Ivanov, he died within just a few feet of a thousand packets of rice that just by boiling up water, cooking the rice could have saved his life. [♪ Music playing in background, playing a year and a half of eating frozen cabbage and moldy flour, he also died of starvation. He never made it out of the gulag. But the seeds survived, and so did the mission. The Spalbart Seed Vault in Norway is a direct descendant of Vavlov's work. And that building in St. Petersburg is now the Vavalov Institute of Plant Industry.

You visited the Seed Vault in St. Petersburg a few years back. What was that like for you? In my years of doing science, I've only wept twice. And once was in Hawaii when I saw 15 different endangered species, the last individual of many of those species all sitting on one table in a nursery, and there were none of those species left in the wild.

I felt the same way when I saw the wall of photos of those 12 scientists, Russian scientists, who gave up their lives to save those seeds. I was brokenhearted. What did you see in their faces. The best that any of us can hope to be on behalf of our fellow creatures. Thanks so much for talking with us. Thank you. Bless you for your good work. So, Amory, let's go back to Marie Haga for a minute, whose team of scientists recently opened this fall-bard seed vault on that frozen island in the Arctic Ocean. Yes, so here's a question, Ben. If these countries store the seeds there for free, who's paying that fall-bard electric

bill? Like who pays for the seed vault to exist? Great question. I asked Marie this. Our organization is first and foremost funded by governments. But increasingly, the crop trust is trying to work with the private sector. And Marie gave me an example. We have just developed a conservation strategy for coffee. Coffee happens to be a very climate sensitive. And that is why we think that the major coffee companies over the world should

get involved in our work and also contribute to funding it. I for one am very glad that the organization trying to protect the world's food crops from a doomsday scenario is also working on keeping coffee around. Yeah, I think we're going to need coffee after the apocalypse. But for Marie, of course, it's bigger than coffee. You know, I consider it a great privilege to work on something so fundamentally important as safeguarding the diversity of crops. That job is really about safeguarding the basis for our food, naam and tomorrow and forever.

There are other seed banks in the world and our very own Emmett Fitzgerald is going to tell us about one of them after this. Okay, so we're back with 99PI producer Emmett Fitzgerald and he's with us because he was actually looking into doing a story on Bavlov for our show, While Back, and it didn't pan out for a bunch of boring reasons. So when I heard the endless thread version, I was like, well, let's just play that one because we love the story. But you would actually done some interviews on the subject already. Yeah, and as I was researching it, I found out about this other seed bank. This one is based in Syria, and it's run by an organization called a Karda, and that stands for the International Center

for Agricultural Research in Dry Areas. And I actually spoke with the former director of a Karda Mahmoud Sula. My name is Mahmoud Sula, the former director general of the International Center for Agriculture Research in dry areas. And just like Nikolai Vavlov, when Mahmoud was a young plant scientist, he set off on his own seed collecting journey. And where did he go? So he went through all these central Asian countries,

places like Jordan, Lebanon, Iraq, Turkey. I collected in Afghanistan in August 1974. And at that time Afghanistan was a peaceful country. I was a beautiful country. And I never forget the mountains of pistachio trees in Afghanistan. Mahmoud drove all over Afghanistan in this little Jeep looking for wild wild lentils and chickpeas and pistachios, like you heard him talking about. And he wasn't just inspired by Nikolai Vavlov, he was literally following in Vavlov's footsteps, or at least he was trying to. At that time, I had the map of Vavilo, where did he go? So I was trying to follow the roots. But rural Afghanistan is extremely mountainous,

two mountainous for the Jeep, it turned out. We could not go to certain areas without going on a back of a horse or a donkey, because those areas are so narrow and so steep. But to be honest with you, even in 74, we could not follow what Vervilov did in the earlier years. And that's why you really admired this man. You know, he was certainly a remarkable person.

So what happened to all the seeds that Mahmoud collected? So those seeds were the beginning of the Akarta collection. And Akarta basically works with farmers in dry parts of the world, and one of the ways that they help them is by conserving and also breeding drought tolerant varieties of different crops. And in order to do this, they've collected a huge variety of seeds from farmers all over the Middle East and North Africa. They've got one of the world's largest collections of drought-collarant seeds, including thousands of varieties

of barley, and lentil, and phababines. And for years, this collection was stored in a facility in Aleppo, Syria, which I can see the problem. Right, and when violence broke out in that country in 2011, the plant scientists from Acarta started to get worried about their seeds. And so they sent some collection to other seed banks around the world.

They were creating duplicates of the collection. You know, in order to safeguard all that material and then eventually they were forced to leave Aleppo. But we got the seeds out before the staff fully had to abandon the research station. This is Kerry Fowler and he's actually the founder of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, which we heard about in the endless thread piece. And Fowler ended up calling up Mokmoud and inviting him to store some of the cardic seeds

up in the Norwegian Arctic. We got them up to Svalbard when it became clear that those researchers were not going to be able to go back to their institution and they had reestablished themselves in Morocco in 11 and they asked for their seed collection back so they could reestablish their seed bank. And so this was actually the first time that anyone had taken seeds back out of the Svalbard seed vault. And they used those seeds that had been stored there in that tunnel in the mountain to create two nude seed banks, one in Morocco and one in Lebanon.

So it's almost like they had this external backup hard drive for their computer. Even if something happens to the physical computer, you've still got all the data in this case, all the seeds, with all their genetic material, backed up somewhere else to start a new seed bank, somewhere else. Yeah, yeah, that's exactly right. That's an analogy that a lot of people use. And you know, there are seeds in a carda's collection that you can't find anywhere else.

So the consequences of not having that backup could be catastrophic. You know, in the past, this would likely, this kind of event, like likely have led to extinction. And in this case, I think it's pretty clear that that would be the extinction of something terribly valuable to world agriculture, because you can imagine that drought and heat tolerant varieties of wheat and barley and lentils chickpea and such are going to be in high demand, and that's the place you go to get them. It's really fascinating to hear a story of the seed bank not just being this potential to save us, but really it was used as it was meant to be to take in seeds and then send them out into the world to stop what could be a potential extinction of a whole species.

It's kind of stunning to watch in action. It's interesting as people refer to it often as the Doomsday Vault and there's this kind of this kind of expectation that it's just waiting around for the apocalypse so that we could then use these seeds to regrow, restart our civilization or something, but Fowler actually sees it as having a much more active role as this kind of like, you know, this sort of backup hard drive for other seat banks around the world. So that if you run into trouble, you can store your seats there

and then take them out when you need them again. It seems like they're truly inspired by Vavlov's work. Yeah, yeah, I mean, in Vavlov, obviously, like at the turn of the early 20th century was super concerned about food security for Russia, and the idea was like, we've got to have our genetic diversity protected. And obviously people were willing to die for that with the idea that Russia needed these seeds on the other side of the war.

And I think the challenges are different, obviously, today, and more global potentially, but when you think about the importance for all of us of protecting our genetic diversity, it's inspiring. And a lot of these people were continued to be inspired by Vavalova. Everyone I spoke with was referred back to him very fondly. I mean, so much so that they literally followed in his footsteps. Right, right. Which doesn't seem all that practical.

Right, right. I mean, yeah, and his, you know, the work that he did on, on kind of a centers of diversity around the world and how he thought about seeds were very much like ahead of their time. And people still refer back to him and his ideas have relevance today. 99% Invisible was produced this week by Ben Brock Johnson and Amri Seavritson, mixed and sound designed by John Parade and Paul Vegas, and Music by Squature.

This story originally aired on Endless Thread, which is a production of WBUR, Boston's NPR station in partnership with Reddit. Iris Adler is the executive are on Endless Thread, which is a production of WBUR, Boston's NPR station, in partnership with Reddit. Iris Adler is the executive producer of Endless Thread, Michael Pope is the advisor and Reddit. For my team, Senior Producer Katie Mingle, Senior Editor Delaney Hall and Producer Emmett Fitzgerald help bring this one home. The rest of the team is Avery Trophman, Joe Rosenberg, Vivian Lee, Taren Mazza, Shree Vusive, Sean Riel, Digital Director, Kirk Colstad, and me Roman Mars.

They're all loving of us now. We are a project of 91.7KALW in San Francisco and produced on Radio Row in Beautiful, Downtown, Oakland, California. 99% Invisible is a member of Radio Topia from PRX, a fiercely independent collective of the most innovative shows in all of podcasting. You can find us all at radiotopia.fm. You can find the show and join discussions about the show on Facebook. You can tweet at me at Roman Mars in the show at 99PI Orc.

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