This personal reflection is part of a series called The Big Ideas, in which writers respond to a single question: What is history? You can read more by visiting The Big Ideas series page.
History helps us make sense of the here and now by providing context and perspective. And sometimes history provides us with something more tangible: dinner, for instance.
During the Neolithic Age some 12,000 years ago, humans as a species began the slow transition from hunting and gathering food to developing agriculture.
We can think of this long agricultural history, and the crops that nourish us today, as the common heritage of humankind. This heritage is the result of trillions upon trillions of tiny experiments by early farmers and gardeners and by nature, conducted each growing season over hundreds of thousands of years.
Human society has evolved with its domesticated crops. We depend on them, and they depend on us. Conserving the diversity of our agricultural crops, the raw material for future adaptation to pests, diseases and new climates, has become our “evolutionary responsibility,” in the words of Sir Otto Frankel.
I take this responsibility to heart. It is what led me to make the first of dozens of visits to the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard in 2004 and spearhead the creation of what the media would later dub a “doomsday vault.”
I had proposed the creation of an international seed bank the year before, so the task fell to me to assess its actual feasibility. I became the chairman of a small Norwegian-appointed international committee, and began the planning process for what became the Svalbard Global Seed Vault. The vault’s purpose is to provide a safety backup for the world’s many seed collections that provide the genetic diversity used to breed new crop varieties. Threats to crop diversity stored in seed banks come from all directions: natural disasters, budget cuts, human error and conflict. Svalbard, at 78 degrees north latitude, is closer to the North Pole than the northernmost tip of mainland Norway. Because Svalbard is both very cold and very remote, it seemed the ideal place to freeze and store seeds safely just in case and for the long-term.
Humans have been encouraging diversity in crops for millenniums. Certain wild plant species, the forerunners of our modern food crops, are adept at “shattering,” or spreading their seeds at maturity, making them difficult to collect for eating or sowing. A greater proportion of seeds gathered by our ancestors would have been those that did not shatter but remained in the fruit or vessel attached to the plant. By planting those harvested seeds, our ancestors encouraged the “non-shattering” trait, increased their food supply and headed humanity in a new direction.
Charles Darwin helped us make sense of this previously hidden history and, in the process, upended most people’s understanding of their own origins. In 1859, Darwin proposed that evolution of all forms of life is the result of four elements: diversity within species, inheritance of traits, natural selection and time. Traits that provided some adaptive advantage would convey a tiny mathematical survival edge and thus over time would become more common in the species.
Natural selection — not supernatural forces — did the filtering, according to Darwin. It is “daily and hourly scrutinizing, throughout the world, the slightest variations; rejecting those that are bad, preserving or adding up all that are good; silently and insensibly working, whenever and wherever opportunity offers.” Not all selection is done by nature, however. For domesticated plants and animals — from wheat to apples to dogs — human hands have guided the process Darwin labeled “artificial selection.”
In the seed vault, I see the biological foundation of agriculture writ large. I walk amid the collected and conserved seeds, the results of nature’s “scrutinizing” and our “artificial selection.” These are the product of accumulated histories and genetic adaptations of the crops we have shaped, and with which we have shared the millenniums since our hunting and gathering days. It is an awe-inspiring tapestry of life we dare not unweave.
Today, thanks to the generosity of Norway and generations of farmers and plant scientists, the seed vault protects around 1,301,000 samples — each with about 400-500 seeds — of more than 6,300 species. There are 150,000 different types of rice being preserved and even more kinds of wheat. More than 100 institutional depositors have sent seeds for safekeeping.
In 2015, amid the civil war in Syria, an invaluable collection of wheat, barley, lentils, chickpeas and other crops at an international research institute outside Aleppo dodged extinction because we managed to get duplicate samples to Svalbard before fighting engulfed the facility. Despite the war, the seeds were saved. The insurance policy paid off.
I share the feelings Darwin articulated most beautifully in the conclusion of “The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection”: “There is grandeur in this view of life … that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”
On the farm where I live in upstate New York, I embrace this Darwinian view of life. As I stroll row after row through the trellised apple orchard, which contains more than a hundred different varieties, I find a Roxbury Russet, the first and oldest named American apple variety. Here is an Arkansas Black, a variety which really is almost black. There is a Redfield, whose flesh is red. In another row is the Esopus Spitzenburg, reputed to be one of Thomas Jefferson’s two favorites, and the Ribston Pippin, a variety that first appeared around 1700 and Darwin studied extensively. This is history you can eat. And history to treasure and pass on to the next generation.
Cary Fowler is one of the founders of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault and the former executive director of the Global Crop Diversity Trust.
The post History You Can Eat appeared first on New York Times.
