Seeds for the Apocalypse: Norway Buries 500,000

I can’t believe this is real. There is a seed bank in the Arctic where 500,000 samples of everything on Earth is stored. You know, in case we blow everything up with a nuclear bomb and the only people who survive can fly around the earth on hover-pods replanting our lost flora after the radioactivity dies down.

They even call it a Doomsday vault in Reuters. It is the most diverse collection of food seeds in history. And I can’t stop thinking about new questions I have.

Just who is going to get into this vault? And how? What would they possibly be able to do with all of these seeds if it came to some kind of doomsday scenario where they were the only person or people on the planet. Would you really be spending your day planting conifers and orchids? I don’t know- maybe you would? Maybe things would suddenly be a whole lot easier. No people, no jobs beyond staying alive, and your whole role is to repopulate the earth…

The vault itself is only 2 years old and located on an archipelago off of Norway. It’s under the permafrost. Not nuclear war nor power failure can harm this vault. It’s indestructible, so to speak.

So, are there Monsanto seeds in there or natural ones?

 The Global Crop Diversity Trust runs the vault with the Norwegian government and the Nordic Genetic Resource Center in Sweden. Amazing. I still can’t get over the fact that it exists at all, let alone that it is government funded… ok, that part I believe… but I still want an explanation as to how this is supposed to help or be deployed in the event that there is some kind of massive disaster- like, HOW IS ANYONE GOING TO KNOW IT’S THERE? HOW IS ANYONE GOING TO GET IN?

The $10 million facility opened in 2008 with 268,000 varieties of seeds from more than 100 countries.

 In all, Reuters says that three vault rooms will eventually be able to hold 4.5 million samples- which could mean up to 2 billion seeds (multiple seeds per sample).

Check this sentence: “Blasted out of icy rock 1,000 km (600 miles) from the North Pole, the air-locked vaults would stay frozen for 200 years even in the worst-case scenario of global warming and if mechanical refrigeration were to fail, designers say.”

Straight out of Reuters. That sounds like an infomercial.

The folks who run this thing think it could be a valuable resource in creating new seeds that are more resistant to global warming changes.

So we’ve got all of these seeds buried up in the Arctic- it still strikes me as something James Bond would be saving in a movie or the kind of place that they are actually training Chuck Norris Ninja Dudes or something.

All of the research and storage could be done anywhere- the doomsday stuff, ok, I get it.

But who’s going to be able to get in??? And what’s going to grow???

Can you believe this was one of Time Magazines Top Ten inventions of 2008?

Photo Credit: pictoscribe (via Flickr under CCL)

Coal River Wind Project

In 2007 some artists from New York City went down to the mountains of West Virginia and made a revealing documentary about mountaintop removal mining and the toxic effects. Watch the video.

Along those lines, the Coal River Wind Project is trying to use video, the web and social media to turn one mountaintop removal project into a wind farm. There's something wonderfully playful about the name of the project: the Coal River Wind Project. Wait... coal... river... wind...

It's a river running through the heart of West Virginia coal country, a place where the coal is so embedded into the local culture and economy and identity of the area that the river is named after it. If rivers are, as I think of them, the veins of the Earth, then this area of West Virginia named its blood after coal.

And now, the movement to place windmills on top of mountains is taking its name from that very blood moniker: Coal River Wind Project.

The idea is that instead of blowing off the mountaintop for the faster, easier, more cost-efficient mining (don't forget toxic, destructive and massively altering to the ecosystem) technique of mountaintop removal mining, the coal company will mine in the traditional way- digging tunnels and carting it out- while simultaneously building windmills on top of those mountains, thereby creating renewable energy at the same time. Both would change the landscape- but the mountaintop removal mining would destroy the mountain and likely poison the waters around it, perhaps even the Coal River, giving unfortunate birthdays to two ironies: one being that the Coal River would be destroyed by its namesake, the other being that Mountaintop Removal mining would, in turn, destroy its own namesake: the mountaintop. I find it disturbing to destroy the things that two things are named after, a mountain and a river, to get at some coal really fast and on the cheap.

They have a whole page full of media resources for the press and the general public. They've got links to blog posts, images from every angle, and a link to the Coal River Wind Radio Ad.

They are teaming up with iLoveMountains.org, another advocacy agency working to stop mountaintop removal mining. This is a true example of a grassroots campaign working to use the web to advance their cause.

What I want to know is, after being written about by everyone from Jeff Biggers on the Huffington Post to the Associated Press on CNN why their YouTube video only has 93,000 views? They've been at this since 2008... this could be much bigger.

Please watch it yourself and pass it on to your friends and network.

Almost 500 mountains have been destroyed by way of mountaintop removal mining. It’s brutal, destructive, and really only good for the coal company, who gets to save money and time. This is part of the legacy of the Bush Administration’s destructive environmental policies- he was fine with it and now it’s become a normal, almost typical way of mining. If we wouldn’t dream of letting this happen to our national parks or neighborhoods, why let it happen to the second-most bio-diverse area in the world?

Lobbying and the Earth

When I was in high school I remember two formative teachers- we’ll call them Mrs. K and Mr. N. Mrs. K. taught speech and she taught it like she loved it and like she truly believed that each of us could be impactful, effective speakers. And she was good at it. Mr. N. taught literature like he was on fire. He was good at it. From the two of them I learned and cultivated a love for the power of words. They were also children of the 60’s who had chosen ideals and people over money, and they taught things from that perspective- it’s important to believe in something and to be able to articulate that argument, and it is important to create and appreciate beauty.

I came from that place and from people like that. I’m not a purist- I understand that the world does not operate the way teachers from 60’s liberal arts universities would like to imagine it could. But if my experience of those two formative teachers as a teenager is one side of the spectrum, lobbying in Washington D.C. is the other side. Want proof? The New York Times had a post in Green Inc. yesterday about Deryck Spooner, a grassroots organizing big dog who has run major campaigns for the Nature Conservancy, the AFL-CIO labor group, and NARAL, and abortion rights group.

What’s that? A talented, connected and proven grassroots organizer for environmental, labor and reproductive rights? Must be a bleeding-heart liberal, right?

Wrong.

He just got hired by the oil industry's biggest trade group: the American Petroleum Institute.

Is it because Spooner knows something wonderful about petroleum that we all just don’t understand? No, it’s because API has a whole lot of wonderful money FROM petroleum that we just can’t understand…

Like I said earlier- I get it. The guys is a well-paid lobbyist- that’s his job. He got paid by the liberal groups too. I just think it’s worth pointing out to everyone who does not live in Washington that the guy who led the Nature Conservancy’s push for climate change legislation will now lead the grassroots organizing wing of the American Petroleum Institute.

The move comes two months after the trade group cut 15 percent of its staff and said API had "not been as effective as we could be in educating public officials or the public about the critical role of oil and gas in our economy. ... You will see us evolve into a more nimble, more aggressive" organization. "We're going to be aggressive in our outreach to educate the public," said API President Jack Gerard in December.

"Jack's vision is to mobilize the 9.2 million people whose jobs rely on the oil and gas industry. We do plan to step that up," said API spokeswoman Cathy Landry.

And the best part is that Spooner fully admits that he is all about advocacy itself, not the causes he works for. Green Inc. wrote that Spooner “doesn't see the move from Nature Conservancy to API as that big of a jump.”

"I have worked for vastly different organizations throughout my career," Spooner said. "The bottom line is it's all about advocacy, that's what I'm passionate about. Mobilizing and organizing people to influence the public process and public policy is what I truly love to do. At the end of the day, I don't necessarily believe that the views of [the Nature Conservancy] and API are incompatible. [API members use technology] "to ensure that the places that they drill are not impacted. [API members] "don't just want to drill anywhere for drilling's sake. There's a lot of science going into where they drill," said Spooner.

 Photo Credit: alles-schlumpf (via Flickr under CCL)

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