02.15.07
Should Communities Support Seed Banks?
This is part of the series:
- Premise For The Abrupt Climate Change Game for Community Planners
- The Best Shade Tree
- Grow Corn for Food or Fuel
- YouTube Video Contest
- One Way to Think About A Community Disaster
- Culprit Tax (Carbon Tax) to Pay For Disaster Preparedness
- Should Communities Support Seed Banks?
- Save the World - Youtube Video Contest
- Victory Gardens as Community Insurance
- Deer and the Abrupt Climate Change Game
- Zone Roof Gardens to Plan For Abrupt Climate Change (the game)
- Who Knew the UK Drank So Much Tea? Maybe Their Streets Are Dark?
- Where’s the Climate Change Game?
- Gardening is the Answer . . .
- Help Juneau . . . Not That They Asked
- Don’t Save the World With Bamboo
- AP gets Silence of the Frogs Wrong?
- Reunion Smalltalk - How Will You Survive Global Warmng
Norway, awash in oil revenue and significantly at risk if an abrupt climate change event occurs, has been working on a seed bank. They are planning to hollow out a mountain, install failsafe climate control and rent out space to governments to store seeds against cataclysmic disasters like abrupt climate change, asteroid strikes or nuclear war.
Planning is great and they have the money to do it, but if one of these disasters occurs how are the client governments going to get to the seed bank? Who, exactly, will be authorized to make the withdrawal? Somehow I can’t picture an asteroid hitting the Midwest and the Agricultural Department riding out 10 years later, after the dust settles, to claim our corn. (Of course they did find the one mad cow in the US, so maybe I am underestimating them.)
More to the point, the USAD appears to maintain a seed bank in Colorado. Would it make more sense for communities or regions to fund local programs at local agricultural colleges? Any disaster big enough to wipe our seed stock is almost certainly going to wipe out our means to travel long distances to replace it.
