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Transcript

How Seed Banks Work · Stuff You Should Know

0:01
Speaker 1: Josh, my friend. If you are a listener of ours
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Speaker 1: But you can find out all the information and all
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Speaker 1: are Squarespace Live touring home on the web, and we
0:35
Speaker 1: hope to see everyone out there. Welcome to Stuff you
0:40
Speaker 1: should know from House Stuff Works dot com. Hey, and
0:49
Speaker 1: welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, There's Charles W.
0:52
Speaker 1: Chuck Bryant, Jerry rolland this is us stuff you should know.
1:00
Speaker 1: I'm just trying new stuff. I mean, we're coming up
1:02
Speaker 1: on a thousand episodes. Man, you've got to keep it
1:04
Speaker 1: fresh somehow. So I tried the A team. You've actually
1:07
Speaker 1: done that like seventy six times, the same one. Kidding,
1:11
Speaker 1: It's probably true. Though. Uh, if you were a seed,
1:14
Speaker 1: what seed would you be? I would be a pumpkin seed.
1:18
Speaker 1: Oh wow, because you know you won't get eaten. Oh
1:23
Speaker 1: I don't know. I like pumpkin pie so well, and
1:25
Speaker 1: people toast pumpkin seeds, so yeah, I'm way off base there. Yep,
1:29
Speaker 1: what else you got, however? Mind no pumpkin seed? Bam.
1:33
Speaker 1: I would be a watermelon seed because they remind me
1:37
Speaker 1: of my grandfather. That's sweet. How do they grow those
1:41
Speaker 1: seedless watermelons? Huh uh, you're a watermelon seed, you should know.
1:46
Speaker 1: Or the square ones? Yeah, those are cool too. They
1:49
Speaker 1: cost like sixty dollars in Japan. Really, yeah, they're really expensive.
1:54
Speaker 1: I would have one just that have it. I would
1:56
Speaker 1: like shell lack it so it would never die, right,
2:00
Speaker 1: and just keep it in my fridge for a conversation piece.
2:02
Speaker 1: It's not a bad idea, man. Or actually I took
2:04
Speaker 1: that back. I'm gonna start marketing fake square watermelons as
2:08
Speaker 1: conversation starters or refrigerator magnets shaped like square water mountains.
2:14
Speaker 1: What about that? Hmm? All right, and they call that
2:21
Speaker 1: running running something into the ground. Um, I've got something
2:25
Speaker 1: for you. You in the food Fads episode, asked me
2:30
Speaker 1: what my go to crock pot recipe was, and I
2:34
Speaker 1: told you, and then I was like, okay, moving on,
2:36
Speaker 1: and I upon listening to it because I don't know
2:39
Speaker 1: if everybody knows this or not, but you and I
2:41
Speaker 1: all listened to the episodes and Jerry before we release them, um,
2:46
Speaker 1: and I was like, I didn't ask Chuck what his
2:49
Speaker 1: crock pot recipe? What did you, Chuck? I didn't. What
2:53
Speaker 1: is your go to crock pot recipe? Do you know
2:58
Speaker 1: what it is? No? I don't. If it's not, um, no,
3:03
Speaker 1: I'll tell you what it is. It is a a
3:06
Speaker 1: turkey ghoulsh surprise. That sounds good. So just some ground
3:11
Speaker 1: turkey and some onion and green pepper and red pepper
3:16
Speaker 1: and uh all manner of spices. And you can also
3:19
Speaker 1: throw in like eggplant or squash or you know kind
3:23
Speaker 1: of any veg veggie like that and chunk it up.
3:25
Speaker 1: That sounds good and just spice it up real good,
3:28
Speaker 1: throw it in that crock pot. Uh, maybe add a
3:31
Speaker 1: little chicken broth or something. Uh do they have turkey broth? Yeah?
3:35
Speaker 1: They do? Okay, sure, Well, then don't be weird. I
3:38
Speaker 1: don't check. I don't I don't think chicken broth would
3:41
Speaker 1: clash with turkey too bad, but yeah, probably turkey broth
3:44
Speaker 1: would be better. Well, you may not know something in
3:46
Speaker 1: your mouth might be disturbing and you're just like, something's
3:48
Speaker 1: not quite right. So what's the surprise that you're using
3:51
Speaker 1: chicken broth in a turkey based dish? Is it like
3:54
Speaker 1: a human thumb? The surprise? I tried the thumb, but
4:00
Speaker 1: that's much of us twice twice, yeah, because they only
4:05
Speaker 1: have two thumbs, got you? Now? I know? The surprises
4:09
Speaker 1: is our lentils. Oh yeah, that's nice. So then you
4:13
Speaker 1: dump a bunch of lentils in there. Um maybe, I
4:15
Speaker 1: mean you could throw it all in there at the
4:17
Speaker 1: beginning if you, but they'll get kind of really gushy,
4:19
Speaker 1: but maybe towards the intoso lentils in there, and then
4:22
Speaker 1: it all just cooks up to a big kind of
4:24
Speaker 1: soupy mess and then you can eat it for a week. Well,
4:28
Speaker 1: the next time there's a house Stuff Works weekly book
4:31
Speaker 1: club meeting, you've got to bring that to the pot luck. Okay, right,
4:35
Speaker 1: all right, because I want to try it done our
4:40
Speaker 1: lentils seeds because that'd be a great segue. But I'm
4:42
Speaker 1: almost a hundred percent sure that I would be wrong
4:45
Speaker 1: in saying, well, lentils are seeds. I think it's a legum.
4:48
Speaker 1: It is a lagoon, but it is a laguma seed. Well,
4:51
Speaker 1: you didn't ask me that. I don't have any idea,
4:53
Speaker 1: although they are protecting lagoons and seed banks, so okay, okay,
4:58
Speaker 1: Well then they're probably not seeds, but they're pretty close,
5:01
Speaker 1: so we'll use that as a seguay. How about that? Yeah,
5:03
Speaker 1: And you know what's funny is we uh could have
5:06
Speaker 1: sworn that we did this one, or at the very
5:08
Speaker 1: least did the doomsday vault. And I think we covered
5:11
Speaker 1: the doomsday vault in the video, but we we did
5:14
Speaker 1: touch on it in Well the Moon Safe Humanity. Yeah,
5:17
Speaker 1: that's a good one. But I went back this is
5:19
Speaker 1: when we had transcripts, and it was a funny one
5:21
Speaker 1: to read because we brought it up without researching it
5:24
Speaker 1: off the top of our head, which always gets us
5:26
Speaker 1: in trouble, and just sort of chatted a minute about
5:29
Speaker 1: the doomsday vault and then said, you know, don't hold
5:32
Speaker 1: us to anything because we this wasn't supposed to be
5:34
Speaker 1: a part of the show, so we didn't really cover it. No,
5:38
Speaker 1: and we certainly didn't do a whole episode on all right,
5:40
Speaker 1: and we're not going to this time. Because even though
5:44
Speaker 1: the Doomsday Vault better known as the small small Bard
5:48
Speaker 1: Global Seed Bank, which is in small Bard, Norway, which
5:54
Speaker 1: is close to Long Year Be in Norway, which is
5:57
Speaker 1: the closest town to the North Pole, right, Um, this
6:03
Speaker 1: seed bank is hands down the most famous seed bank
6:07
Speaker 1: in the entire world. It's run by technocrats who really
6:10
Speaker 1: know how to work the media, right, But it's far
6:15
Speaker 1: from the only one. There are a lot of other
6:17
Speaker 1: seed banks out there, and even the whole concept of
6:20
Speaker 1: seed banking in general is pretty interesting. So it's fall
6:24
Speaker 1: Bard will be the star. If we're a band, would
6:27
Speaker 1: be seed Banks featuring the stylings of small Bard Global
6:32
Speaker 1: seed Bank. That's probably that should be the title of
6:35
Speaker 1: this episode. I thought you could say featuring the stylings
6:38
Speaker 1: of small Bard Globalstein and that sounded like a like
6:41
Speaker 1: a a small time magician that's great, or an accordion act.
6:47
Speaker 1: Good stuff. Um, all right, well, let's get to it.
6:51
Speaker 1: This one, by the way, it was written by my
6:53
Speaker 1: friend Debbie. I noticed you remember Debbie, Debbie Ronka, my
6:56
Speaker 1: buddy from New Jersey and uh so flemental material. You
7:01
Speaker 1: found a really great article on the doomsday vault. What
7:04
Speaker 1: was that from the Guardian or yeah, that was by
7:07
Speaker 1: um Suzanne Goldenberg in the Guardian from May two fifteen. Yeah,
7:12
Speaker 1: that's one of my favorite kinds of articles is when
7:15
Speaker 1: they profile something and then it's set up as like,
7:20
Speaker 1: you know, the sunrise is early in Norway and and
7:25
Speaker 1: Schfinn gets out of his yurt and trudges across the
7:29
Speaker 1: glacier and so it's sort of couched in this story
7:32
Speaker 1: of the the dude who works there, one of the guys.
7:35
Speaker 1: But then you get all the deats along the way.
7:36
Speaker 1: It's very cool. Yeah, that's that's called a long read
7:39
Speaker 1: or long form. Yeah. And actually there's two really great sites,
7:44
Speaker 1: ones called long form and one's called long read once
7:47
Speaker 1: a dot Common ones a dot Org. I can never
7:49
Speaker 1: remember which, but if you like that kind of writing,
7:52
Speaker 1: that's all those sites are, just page after page after
7:56
Speaker 1: page of links to articles like that. Yes, and in fact,
8:00
Speaker 1: to our buddy, uh Joshua Bearman, uh huh, great writer
8:04
Speaker 1: of long form. He has his own little shingle called
8:06
Speaker 1: Epic Magazine. If you're looking for like those really great. Basically,
8:10
Speaker 1: people mind the that site to make movies. They're such
8:15
Speaker 1: good stories. Yeah, yeah, well he he wrote the magazine
8:19
Speaker 1: article that um uh far yeah, not Fargo. Argo, the
8:24
Speaker 1: Ben Affleck movie was based on. Yeah, we would be cool.
8:28
Speaker 1: The funny part about that slip up is the Coen
8:30
Speaker 1: Brothers at the beginning of Fargo say like this is
8:32
Speaker 1: based on a true story, which is not true at all. Right.
8:35
Speaker 1: He also wrote a really great one um about California
8:39
Speaker 1: surfer gang Um that smuggled pot out of like Coronado
8:44
Speaker 1: Island in the seventies, and it is just begging to
8:50
Speaker 1: be made into a movie. If it hasn't been yet,
8:52
Speaker 1: I think it's optioned. Surely it is that right, Coronado
8:58
Speaker 1: High yep. And I'm pretty sure Barman wrote that back
9:01
Speaker 1: in like two says the internet. Yea, so put down
9:04
Speaker 1: your streaming TV shows for God's saken, I would say,
9:07
Speaker 1: read a book, but at the very least read a
9:09
Speaker 1: long form article. Yeah. Can can I get on a
9:12
Speaker 1: soapbox for a second, We'll talk about seeds eventually, everybody
9:15
Speaker 1: just be quiet. So the whole concept of their being
9:20
Speaker 1: TV everywhere and like you can take TV to the
9:23
Speaker 1: beach now you don't have to talk to anybody. You
9:26
Speaker 1: can like watch TV on the subway. That's That's that
9:31
Speaker 1: bothers me. Chuck it bothers me, like to my core,
9:34
Speaker 1: And I know that makes me very unpopular. I don't care.
9:37
Speaker 1: I stand with Josh. You know, Emily and I have
9:41
Speaker 1: been listening. We've been sitting around in a room at
9:43
Speaker 1: night together in silence and listening to s town Oh Cool,
9:48
Speaker 1: which I've I've forgotten how fun it is because I
9:51
Speaker 1: usually listen to podcasts on my own, like in my car.
9:53
Speaker 1: But just to sit around, like with your loved one
9:56
Speaker 1: and listen to something that's kind of neat too, yeah,
9:58
Speaker 1: you have somebody to look at and be like, oh
10:00
Speaker 1: can you believe that? Man? All right, I'll bet everybody
10:05
Speaker 1: thinks we sit around and listen to podcasts together. Can
10:08
Speaker 1: you believe that? Alright? Alright? Seed banks? Sorry, So, Debbie
10:13
Speaker 1: Ranka makes a really great point that you think of
10:15
Speaker 1: seed banks as this probably something new from you know,
10:20
Speaker 1: the environmental movement, probably something from the nineties, maybe as
10:25
Speaker 1: far back as that, But she says, no, no, seed
10:28
Speaker 1: banks are a concept as old as agriculture. Basically that
10:33
Speaker 1: in the in the cradle of agriculture, Mesopotamia, which is
10:37
Speaker 1: present day Iraq. They have found seed banks um as
10:42
Speaker 1: old as eighties, seven hundred and fifty years. So, UM,
10:47
Speaker 1: the seeds stores back then, we're protecting, uh, the seeds
10:52
Speaker 1: from animals, from weather, that kind of stuff. Pretty basic stuff, right,
10:56
Speaker 1: But the concepts the same. It's that that you need
11:00
Speaker 1: seed from one harvest to create the next harvest. And
11:03
Speaker 1: so even back then, there's evidence that it was highly
11:06
Speaker 1: ritualized collecting seeds and then protecting them in important places. Yeah,
11:12
Speaker 1: and UH, whether it is certainly something that we're still
11:15
Speaker 1: guarding against uh to the extreme. That's one of the
11:19
Speaker 1: reasons we we have seed banks today. But UM, one
11:22
Speaker 1: of the main reasons is crop diversity. Um. If you
11:26
Speaker 1: if you think that corn you're eating is just corn,
11:30
Speaker 1: or rice you're eating is just rice, or even you
11:33
Speaker 1: know bosmati rice or jasmine rice or did the Big
11:37
Speaker 1: two or sushi rice. Uh, you'd be in for a
11:42
Speaker 1: big surprise if you knew that there were thousands and
11:44
Speaker 1: thousands of varieties of all of these crops, these staple crops.
11:49
Speaker 1: And UM diversity is the key because we've seen throughout
11:52
Speaker 1: history when bad things happen when there's blight. Uh, with that,
11:57
Speaker 1: there's a fungus. If there's um just anything that can
12:00
Speaker 1: kill a crop. You want something that is diverse on
12:04
Speaker 1: your hands so you can try something new. Right. Remember
12:07
Speaker 1: in the famine episode where we talked about how one
12:10
Speaker 1: of the reasons that Ireland suffered so tremendously was because
12:14
Speaker 1: the potatoes they had were all basically the same throughout
12:17
Speaker 1: the whole country. It was the same variety of potatoes, right,
12:20
Speaker 1: So when that potato blight came, it was it was
12:24
Speaker 1: a pathogen that all of the potatoes in Ireland were
12:27
Speaker 1: susceptible to, where if they had had multiple varieties of potatoes,
12:32
Speaker 1: sure a lot of the potato varieties would have been
12:34
Speaker 1: wiped out, but there would have been some that survived
12:37
Speaker 1: to right, Yeah, you know whose fault that was? Who's
12:40
Speaker 1: the English? Well, they definitely didn't make anything easier on
12:43
Speaker 1: them if I remember correctly. No, of course, but I'm
12:46
Speaker 1: just spoken fun. But But the the idea that there
12:49
Speaker 1: are just tons and tons of different varieties out there,
12:52
Speaker 1: there certainly are. But if you take another order of
12:55
Speaker 1: magnitude step back and look at the global food system,
13:00
Speaker 1: there's really like thirty crops that make up basically all
13:03
Speaker 1: of the food supply, right, and that's not too bad.
13:06
Speaker 1: Thirties fine, we could survive on just one. Really, the
13:10
Speaker 1: problem is if you go the opposite direction and zoom
13:13
Speaker 1: in a little further, those crops are fairly homogenized these days.
13:19
Speaker 1: And it's thanks to our buddy Norman Borlog. So he
13:24
Speaker 1: fathered the green Revolution in large part, which was there
13:27
Speaker 1: were a lot of predictions that the world's carrying capacity
13:30
Speaker 1: was going to be reached by the nineteen sixties and
13:34
Speaker 1: that a billion people were going to starve to death.
13:37
Speaker 1: And that was because the agriculture that we had at
13:40
Speaker 1: the time was capable of producing only so much crop yield.
13:44
Speaker 1: So Norman Borlog took it upon himself to say, I'm
13:48
Speaker 1: gonna save the world. And he came up with these
13:50
Speaker 1: new techniques and new varieties of crops and said, here this,
13:54
Speaker 1: this variety is going to get you way better yields.
13:57
Speaker 1: It can survive flooding, it can survive drought, old plant.
14:00
Speaker 1: This and his his varieties that he bred were so successful.
14:05
Speaker 1: Number one, he won the Nobel Prize and it's widely
14:09
Speaker 1: credited for saving possibly a billion lives with his work.
14:13
Speaker 1: But secondly, it was so successful that it became basically
14:18
Speaker 1: the only varieties of those crops that were planted. And
14:22
Speaker 1: in the nineteen seventies here in the United States, we
14:25
Speaker 1: came just running smack dab into what a problem that
14:30
Speaker 1: can be when this corn blight hit. Yeah, there was
14:32
Speaker 1: a big fungus in the seventies and Uh, I didn't
14:36
Speaker 1: say what I wanted to say, and it cut the
14:40
Speaker 1: corn yields in the United States in half. And luckily, UH,
14:44
Speaker 1: we did have some more varieties at our disposal. We
14:47
Speaker 1: had a relative of it was a wild corn was
14:50
Speaker 1: just crazy paint and it was it was fungus for assistance.
14:57
Speaker 1: So in that case we were able to uh save
15:00
Speaker 1: the day UM, which is kind of the whole point
15:02
Speaker 1: of crop diversity and seed banks is to have something
15:05
Speaker 1: on hand in case the worst case scenario happens, so
15:09
Speaker 1: all your your potatoes aren't in one basket, or all
15:13
Speaker 1: your corn isn't in one basket. So literally with that
15:16
Speaker 1: corn blake too, we learned the hard way. UM. Something
15:20
Speaker 1: like one quarter to one half of the corn yields
15:24
Speaker 1: in the United States were lost UM during the seventies,
15:28
Speaker 1: and it was because something like I think of the
15:32
Speaker 1: corn being grown in the US was identical in this way, Um,
15:37
Speaker 1: that the corn blake could could manipulate and kill. So
15:41
Speaker 1: we said, oh, well, we need to diversify a little more.
15:44
Speaker 1: It was a hard lesson learned, but it was a
15:45
Speaker 1: lesson learned. And since then this idea, like you said,
15:48
Speaker 1: of of crop diversities become more and more important, and
15:51
Speaker 1: people have said, well, we'll start banking seeds so we
15:55
Speaker 1: can protect the genetic line and protect varieties from dying
15:59
Speaker 1: out in the meantime. Yeah, and so that's um, you know,
16:02
Speaker 1: diversity is a big deal. Climate change as another reason
16:06
Speaker 1: we bank seeds because we're not too certain what's going
16:09
Speaker 1: to happen in the future with the weather. Are actually
16:11
Speaker 1: not with the weather with climate because it's two different things. Uh.
16:14
Speaker 1: Nice natural disasters, um, like a tsunami or really kind
16:21
Speaker 1: of any kind of natural disaster could cause great harm
16:24
Speaker 1: to crop yield or disease, Yeah, which you would think
16:30
Speaker 1: would be considered a natural disaster too. Well, now it's disease. Well, sure,
16:36
Speaker 1: you gotta you gotta delineate here, you know, uh, man
16:40
Speaker 1: made disaster. And the point uh, the example deb uses
16:43
Speaker 1: here is um war, which yeah, you really think about war,
16:46
Speaker 1: but there have been uh. And as you'll see even
16:48
Speaker 1: with seed banks during times of war, especially in the
16:52
Speaker 1: Middle East, a lot of the seed banks in the
16:53
Speaker 1: Middle Ease have been looted and rated during war. So
16:57
Speaker 1: that sort of compounds the problem well. Plus also one
17:00
Speaker 1: of the other things that war does is um uproots populations. Right,
17:05
Speaker 1: you have to move because there's a war going on
17:09
Speaker 1: in your town and you can't live there anymore. So
17:11
Speaker 1: if you're a farmer, UM, you may never go back
17:14
Speaker 1: to farming anymore. And you may be one of the
17:16
Speaker 1: few indigenous people who were farming a specific variety of
17:21
Speaker 1: something and now that variety is lost forever because you
17:24
Speaker 1: moved and stopped farming. Yeah, and there's there's that can
17:27
Speaker 1: happen in more mundane pedestrian ways to where say a
17:31
Speaker 1: family that's farming an indigenous variety of crop UM just
17:35
Speaker 1: moves to the city for better work or something like that. Uh.
17:39
Speaker 1: And then the final way that she lists is UM
17:41
Speaker 1: that we might want us to seed bank is for
17:43
Speaker 1: research in the future. Plant based medicine has always been
17:48
Speaker 1: around UM. One and every six wild plants is used
17:51
Speaker 1: for medicine, and we don't know, I mean, we we
17:54
Speaker 1: know so very little still about the uses of plants
17:57
Speaker 1: for medicine, So we don't want to wipe out some
18:00
Speaker 1: thing that could be the cure for cancer one day,
18:02
Speaker 1: you know, right, And that that's kind of like the
18:05
Speaker 1: cornerstone of the idea of seed banks these days is
18:09
Speaker 1: that we need to take the seeds from every plant
18:12
Speaker 1: we can get our hands on today, every variety we
18:15
Speaker 1: can get our hands on, and just store just basically
18:18
Speaker 1: put them in suspended animation and the under the idea
18:22
Speaker 1: that eventually, because of climate change or because of war,
18:26
Speaker 1: or because we may figure something out in the future
18:30
Speaker 1: and need those plants or need access to their genetic information.
18:35
Speaker 1: And so if we have the the seeds stored away
18:38
Speaker 1: in suspended animation dormant um, then we will say thank
18:43
Speaker 1: you people a hundred years earlier for being so smart
18:47
Speaker 1: as to create seed banks. That's right, thousands of years
18:51
Speaker 1: earlier in fact, maybe maybe, But there's problems with seed banks,
18:55
Speaker 1: as we'll talk about. You want to take a break, yeah,
18:57
Speaker 1: let's do that, and we'll get to that alright. So
19:31
Speaker 1: as far as what kind of seeds are chosen, it depends.
19:35
Speaker 1: I mean they were there were more than four hundred
19:37
Speaker 1: or right around fourteen hundred seed banks in the world,
19:40
Speaker 1: So I know, uh smar Bald smar Bald, small Bard,
19:47
Speaker 1: small Bard. I really think you can say it either way.
19:49
Speaker 1: I know, I keep wanting to say key like it
19:51
Speaker 1: just sounds like a dude from there. Oh it does.
19:53
Speaker 1: Who's into like Viking metal? Yeah, he gets all the coverage.
19:57
Speaker 1: Ball Bard got so wasted. There are lost all of
20:01
Speaker 1: the seeds. Uh. There are about four seed banks though,
20:05
Speaker 1: all over the place, and it depends on which one
20:08
Speaker 1: you're talking about, really is to what kind of seeds
20:10
Speaker 1: they're gonna preserve. Um. Smaller seed banks are probably going
20:13
Speaker 1: to concentrate more on more local indigenous varieties. Uh. It
20:19
Speaker 1: seems like in all cases any kind of the endangered
20:22
Speaker 1: plant is probably looked after. Um first, Yeah, they tend
20:26
Speaker 1: to take priority from what I understand, But there's a
20:29
Speaker 1: great group called the Global Crop Diversity Trust, and their
20:33
Speaker 1: whole jam is to concentrate on priority crops that are
20:38
Speaker 1: that benefit everyone around the world the most. So those
20:42
Speaker 1: are the people that runs Vollbard, And from what I understand,
20:46
Speaker 1: they've kind of come in and said we we are,
20:51
Speaker 1: we're going to be setting the standards for seed preservation
20:54
Speaker 1: in the world. Now someone had to. Yeah, and there's
20:58
Speaker 1: a guy that was inter jewed in the guardian Um.
21:01
Speaker 1: He was one of the founders of this trust and
21:03
Speaker 1: one of the I think he was the first director
21:06
Speaker 1: of this wall Bard Global Seed Vault. The names Carrie
21:09
Speaker 1: Fowlers from Tennessee. And he said, we didn't create this
21:13
Speaker 1: seed bank to you know, prevent because we saw this
21:17
Speaker 1: catastrophe coming with like climate change or whatever. The doomsday vault,
21:21
Speaker 1: you know, right right it was. And and but again
21:24
Speaker 1: I think that the media kind of last front of that.
21:26
Speaker 1: He was saying the original intent with why they founded
21:29
Speaker 1: this vall Bard Seed Vault was because the current seed
21:33
Speaker 1: banks were doing such a terrible job keeping their their
21:37
Speaker 1: seeds like alive or intact, that we were losing varieties
21:42
Speaker 1: every day from ones that were stored at seed banks.
21:45
Speaker 1: They were just going away. So he was basically like,
21:48
Speaker 1: let me to it. He was like at the at
21:50
Speaker 1: the I T guy, Yeah, well, it's kind of scary though,
21:55
Speaker 1: Like when when he talked or when he was interviewed,
21:57
Speaker 1: he was um to say, like, you know, new clear
22:00
Speaker 1: war was in our biggest threat. It's underfunding and sloppy
22:03
Speaker 1: work right or yeah, budget cuts, UM, malfunctions and the
22:08
Speaker 1: equipment like badly maintained equipment. Uh, there's a lot of
22:13
Speaker 1: stuff they can go wrong with the seed bank and
22:15
Speaker 1: so so the point behind the small Guard seed Bank
22:19
Speaker 1: is to serve as a backup repository to where yeah,
22:24
Speaker 1: you keep your seeds there in your country and will
22:26
Speaker 1: show you the best ways to manage your seed bank,
22:30
Speaker 1: but also put a duplicate set with us and we're
22:32
Speaker 1: just gonna keep it stored. We're not going to do
22:34
Speaker 1: the science or anything like that. The whole point of
22:37
Speaker 1: the small Guard seed Bank is to just keep it
22:39
Speaker 1: stored under the right conditions so that when you need
22:42
Speaker 1: it it will be here for you. That is correct.
22:46
Speaker 1: So this Global Diversity Crop Trust, they work under a treaty.
22:50
Speaker 1: It's called the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for
22:54
Speaker 1: Food and Agriculture or PA and UH it was ratified
23:01
Speaker 1: by in two thousand four by forty different governments. UM.
23:04
Speaker 1: Imagine since then they're probably some more on board, right,
23:07
Speaker 1: I believe, so, although I wonder how much UM that
23:11
Speaker 1: has kind of fallen to the wayside since Crop Trust
23:14
Speaker 1: created this small Bard seed vault. They seem to have
23:17
Speaker 1: kind of taken over from what I understand. Well, I
23:21
Speaker 1: mean I think this treaty is just it's part of
23:23
Speaker 1: good practices too, you know. Yeah, So what they do
23:28
Speaker 1: is they do permit access for these seeds for research
23:32
Speaker 1: and stuff, not from small Bard because like we said,
23:35
Speaker 1: that's that's the bank that doesn't allow withdrawal, um. But
23:39
Speaker 1: it has to be a benefit to everyone. Basically, you
23:42
Speaker 1: can't just go willy nilly on a whim and pull
23:45
Speaker 1: seeds out and start experimenting. Right, Well, that's the that's
23:50
Speaker 1: that's for the other seed banks. That's kind of like
23:54
Speaker 1: the process where those are the ones that they're they're
23:56
Speaker 1: keeping so that somebody can come and like grow some
23:59
Speaker 1: stuff off and check out the genetic material of the
24:01
Speaker 1: plants or whatever. With small Bard, it's like you put
24:04
Speaker 1: it in, it stays there and you can't get it out.
24:07
Speaker 1: But it's only you, the depositor that has access to us. Correct.
24:12
Speaker 1: And so apparently that was they they agreed to that,
24:15
Speaker 1: or they set up that rule that only the the
24:19
Speaker 1: group or the country that put those seeds into the
24:22
Speaker 1: small Barred vault can get them out because there's a
24:25
Speaker 1: lot of worry when they were creating the Global Seed
24:28
Speaker 1: Vault that the whole thing was basically just a ruse
24:31
Speaker 1: for big agriculture to get their hands on heirloom seeds
24:34
Speaker 1: from around the world, which I mean, I can kind
24:37
Speaker 1: of understand that because from what I understand, the big
24:40
Speaker 1: agriculture UM seed companies are fairly shady. Yeah, and we
24:45
Speaker 1: should do an episode just on that, sure, love. Right,
24:51
Speaker 1: So if you go to one of these banks and
24:55
Speaker 1: again they're not They're all can be very different, but
24:57
Speaker 1: they all have the same kind of concept at heart.
25:00
Speaker 1: UH And I think the one Debbie used as an
25:02
Speaker 1: example was UM the Department of Environment and Conservation UH
25:06
Speaker 1: in Australia UM. But like I said, they kind of
25:10
Speaker 1: all operate in a similar fashion. What you first need
25:12
Speaker 1: to do is to decide how much room you have
25:16
Speaker 1: and what seeds you want to collect to begin with, right,
25:19
Speaker 1: and we mentioned priority goes to threaten plants obviously first
25:23
Speaker 1: and foremost. But the again to his vol bar, their
25:28
Speaker 1: whole mission is to to preserve every bit of the
25:32
Speaker 1: um corrupt diversity of the global crop supply, which that
25:37
Speaker 1: Carrie Fowler Dude says is about one point four million varieties,
25:42
Speaker 1: and last I saw they were coming up on a million.
25:46
Speaker 1: I think they had like about nine hundred and forty
25:49
Speaker 1: thousand varieties in their in their care correct. So once
25:53
Speaker 1: you've decided what you need in your in your little
25:55
Speaker 1: local seed vault seed bank, you collect seeds um. It
25:59
Speaker 1: seems like the most of these places start uh, and
26:02
Speaker 1: when when vegetables and fruits are ripe is probably the
26:07
Speaker 1: best time to collect and store these seeds UM. As
26:10
Speaker 1: fruits they release their seeds when they ripe, so that
26:13
Speaker 1: usually works out pretty well. But then you know, it
26:16
Speaker 1: kind of depends on the plants. Some plants don't give
26:17
Speaker 1: up their seeds so readily so UM, which can be
26:21
Speaker 1: a good thing and a bad thing. Maybe to have
26:23
Speaker 1: a longer time to retain their seeds which allows for
26:26
Speaker 1: longer collection time. UM. But you know, if you're in
26:29
Speaker 1: that position, you know when the best time is to
26:32
Speaker 1: get the seed from each plant. Sure, and then when
26:35
Speaker 1: you're collecting it, you're also making notes of the um
26:39
Speaker 1: soil quality and type, the growing conditions UM, the the ecosystem,
26:46
Speaker 1: like what kind of ecosystem is growing in. That's like
26:48
Speaker 1: the most important part, almost besides the seed it's extremely important.
26:52
Speaker 1: We read this one article. Let you see the one
26:55
Speaker 1: from um Berry Bay very point, you know, the one
27:01
Speaker 1: Importland very botanic garden. I wanted to add something extra,
27:06
Speaker 1: but they basically had a rundown of how they do it,
27:09
Speaker 1: um and and they were saying important record keeping is
27:14
Speaker 1: about as important as having the seed itself, because if
27:17
Speaker 1: you don't have the information you need, including what kind
27:20
Speaker 1: of seed is where, it's just basically useless as far
27:23
Speaker 1: as the seed bank is concerned. Yeah, well I wouldn't
27:26
Speaker 1: say useless, but you would certainly have to grow it
27:28
Speaker 1: and take those records and kind of start over. And
27:30
Speaker 1: then this be like what is this? It talks? Uh,
27:35
Speaker 1: So you recorded all this information. Um, they're gonna assign
27:38
Speaker 1: it a sample number, very um specific number obviously for
27:42
Speaker 1: that seed. So everything is, you know, it's the record
27:47
Speaker 1: keeping is a huge, huge part of it. So you
27:49
Speaker 1: know what everything is. You don't want to get stuff
27:51
Speaker 1: mixed up in case of, you know, a nuclear apocalypse
27:55
Speaker 1: that sucks so bad. You're like, wait a minute, wait
27:58
Speaker 1: a minute. I had the wheat in my left hand right,
28:02
Speaker 1: I think I just stink or we thought we were
28:05
Speaker 1: growing corn, but we're growing papaya and we're having a party. Actually,
28:11
Speaker 1: that wouldn't be so bad. That's why you have a party,
28:15
Speaker 1: because you'd be like, oh, I thought this is gonna
28:17
Speaker 1: be corn, and it's a papaya. What a treat, Thank
28:20
Speaker 1: you God. All right, So you've got these seeds, You've
28:22
Speaker 1: got all the data recorded, everything super organized. You've washed
28:25
Speaker 1: your hands very important part. And then you also want
28:29
Speaker 1: to wash You want to clean these seeds. You can't
28:31
Speaker 1: just take a wet watermelon seed and throw it in
28:35
Speaker 1: a tiny Manila envelope and contest to see who can
28:40
Speaker 1: get it in the manilla envelope. No, you have to
28:42
Speaker 1: clean everything. You've got to make sure it's of really
28:45
Speaker 1: high quality. Um. Some of this is done by hand.
28:48
Speaker 1: Some of this is done by machine these days. Uh.
28:51
Speaker 1: And then you want to get the moisture out of it.
28:55
Speaker 1: Like I said, Uh, moist not only is a gross word,
28:58
Speaker 1: but it's not good for storing seeds. No, it's really not,
29:02
Speaker 1: because they will start to germinate, which is not what
29:05
Speaker 1: you want going on in your seed bank. Only for
29:09
Speaker 1: storing seeds. Moisture is really good for seeds, sure, yeah, yeah,
29:12
Speaker 1: for storing seeds, it's not good um or they can
29:16
Speaker 1: search a rot to depending on the conditions. So you
29:19
Speaker 1: want to dry them. And apparently there's a rule of
29:21
Speaker 1: thumb when you're preparing seeds for long term cold storage,
29:25
Speaker 1: where you dry them at about fifteen degrees celsius at
29:30
Speaker 1: about fifteen degrees relative humidity or fifteen percent relative humidity.
29:35
Speaker 1: It's so easy a child could remember it, that's right.
29:38
Speaker 1: So you're you dry them out like that, usually in
29:40
Speaker 1: the presence of like a desk tant or something like that,
29:42
Speaker 1: like what is it um and and once they're dry,
29:48
Speaker 1: you you put them into cold storage and that's where
29:52
Speaker 1: they stay. And in cold storage, I think you get
29:55
Speaker 1: it down to zero point four degrees fahreh height, which
29:58
Speaker 1: is negative eighteen degrees celsius and um. They can stay
30:02
Speaker 1: there for decades, sometimes depending on the seeds sent a century.
30:09
Speaker 1: And but we should say a chuck. These are specific
30:11
Speaker 1: types of seeds. There's basically two kinds of seeds in
30:14
Speaker 1: the world as far as categorizing seeds goes. One is
30:18
Speaker 1: the orthodox seed, which can undergo the process we just described,
30:22
Speaker 1: and which if you go to a seed bank, those
30:24
Speaker 1: are the kind of seeds that are there. It's what
30:26
Speaker 1: most people think of as seeds. Right, then there's something
30:30
Speaker 1: called recalcitrant seeds, which are things like um a tuber
30:35
Speaker 1: or acorns or a lot of the fruit out there
30:38
Speaker 1: in the world, typically tropical plants the way that they seed.
30:43
Speaker 1: You can't do what we just said to recalcitrant seed.
30:46
Speaker 1: It will destroy it and it won't be viable. So
30:49
Speaker 1: seed banks don't typically tend to store recalcitrant seeds unless
30:53
Speaker 1: that's their specialty. Yeah, and in that case, you can't
30:57
Speaker 1: use all these uh, you gotta gotta go low fi. Yeah,
31:02
Speaker 1: it seems like a more old world method of storing
31:05
Speaker 1: a seed if you're working with the racalcitrants. Um. I
31:09
Speaker 1: was just thinking of a Twilight Zone episode or something
31:13
Speaker 1: like you break into the doomsday vault because everything has
31:17
Speaker 1: been lost, and like, at least we got these seeds,
31:19
Speaker 1: like the guy with the the library and he sits
31:22
Speaker 1: on his glasses. I love that when that was Burgess Meredith. Yeah,
31:26
Speaker 1: but in this case they would find that, uh, they
31:29
Speaker 1: had all gotten moist and grown and died. So the
31:32
Speaker 1: seed vault is just full of dead plants. That'd be
31:36
Speaker 1: the worst. That'd be pretty sad. Man. Why am I
31:38
Speaker 1: such a downer. I don't know. Uh, did you talk
31:42
Speaker 1: about cryo preservation yet? No, No, that that's actually I
31:46
Speaker 1: was gonna say, with recalcitrant seeds, you you might want
31:50
Speaker 1: to use cryo preservation, which is where you take the
31:52
Speaker 1: living tissue of the plant, like say a banana, and
31:56
Speaker 1: actually like freeze the banana and liquid nitrogen. Well that yeah,
32:00
Speaker 1: that's in vitro storage. Okay, that's not cryo preserve preservation.
32:05
Speaker 1: It's it's using cryo preservation for in vitro storage, Is
32:09
Speaker 1: that right, Yeah, because that's like in the case of
32:11
Speaker 1: a banana, like you said, there is no seed, so
32:13
Speaker 1: you just gotta you gotta get a piece of that
32:15
Speaker 1: bad boy, right in vitro style. Right. Because so there's
32:20
Speaker 1: this really great, damn interesting article from years ago that
32:24
Speaker 1: is about how bananas are all clones of one another,
32:28
Speaker 1: that they're all a sexual and like every banana in
32:31
Speaker 1: the world is related to other bananas. Yeah, we've talked
32:36
Speaker 1: about that before, but um, I feel like we have.
32:38
Speaker 1: I think I'm worried about bananas and other people are too,
32:41
Speaker 1: about how they're not actually healthy. Yeah, I mean there's
32:44
Speaker 1: a banana problem, right, is there? I think so what's
32:48
Speaker 1: the problem for some reason, I think there's a shortage,
32:51
Speaker 1: or maybe I'm just making that up. I think they
32:53
Speaker 1: do that from time and times just gild people pay
32:55
Speaker 1: like an extra fifty cents or something, you know what
32:56
Speaker 1: I mean. Alright, So with these seed banks, UM, they store,
33:03
Speaker 1: like I said, each of them stores different things. But
33:05
Speaker 1: you might think they wouldn't store things like, um, poisonous
33:09
Speaker 1: plants or base of species. But you can kind of
33:12
Speaker 1: find a home for any seed that exists somewhere because
33:17
Speaker 1: you just never know. Um katzoo was an example. Debbie
33:20
Speaker 1: used that, Um, you know, it's a very famous invasive
33:23
Speaker 1: plant species here in the South. But now and you
33:26
Speaker 1: know it was always just like nothing but a problem,
33:29
Speaker 1: but now there are moves to maybe try and turn
33:31
Speaker 1: it into a biofuel. So it's just trying to not
33:34
Speaker 1: be so shortsighted things that you think, um, you can't
33:38
Speaker 1: use now because you never know what it's gonna be
33:40
Speaker 1: like in five years. It turns out they also um
33:46
Speaker 1: have marijuana seeds and seed banks as well. Yeah, dog,
33:49
Speaker 1: because who's who's to judge? You know, well, plus it's
33:54
Speaker 1: medicine and UM, they're there trying to you know, all
34:00
Speaker 1: kinds of plant based medicines. So they're not going to
34:03
Speaker 1: discriminate against marijuana. You kid me. It probably has its
34:06
Speaker 1: own little room with beaded doorways and it's all black light.
34:11
Speaker 1: Macromay owls on the wall. Man, Macromay owls are the best,
34:15
Speaker 1: So chuck. Once you have all your seeds in the
34:17
Speaker 1: bank and everything, you just leave them for decades, right,
34:19
Speaker 1: and then then that's it. Maybe they'll stay forever. No,
34:23
Speaker 1: you got to manage, and you gotta have a caretaker.
34:25
Speaker 1: You do. There's a there's a few things you need
34:27
Speaker 1: to do. One thing is that when you um, when
34:31
Speaker 1: you let seeds go for a while, like their dormant
34:34
Speaker 1: little package waiting to become a plant. Right, But they
34:39
Speaker 1: can die, like even though they're basically they're they're in
34:42
Speaker 1: a state of suspended animation, especially at zero degrees fahrenheight,
34:47
Speaker 1: they can still go bad. They can still die. They
34:49
Speaker 1: can still age out of being able to produce crops.
34:52
Speaker 1: So every once in a while you want to come in,
34:55
Speaker 1: grab your seeds, take them, plant them, grow more seeds,
34:59
Speaker 1: and and rebank the seeds from the plants you just
35:02
Speaker 1: grew from the seeds you had banked Originally it's kind
35:06
Speaker 1: of a it's kind of pain really if you think
35:08
Speaker 1: about it. But seeds are seeds are worth it, you know, Yeah,
35:13
Speaker 1: that's what they have on their front door. And then
35:15
Speaker 1: so when you're also doing it, when you're doing that,
35:18
Speaker 1: you're also you want to test the plants DNA. You
35:21
Speaker 1: wanna eventually apparently they don't really do this very much,
35:25
Speaker 1: which I was kind of surprised. You want to basically
35:28
Speaker 1: scan the genome of the plant and maybe store that information.
35:33
Speaker 1: You want to create a database so that all of
35:35
Speaker 1: that genetic information can be can be accessed, so you
35:39
Speaker 1: know what genes are in what plants, and where those
35:41
Speaker 1: plants are, and what seed bank. And apparently that's the
35:45
Speaker 1: steps that small bards taking, but they're they're nowhere near
35:49
Speaker 1: that now. And I was really surprised to hear it's
35:52
Speaker 1: really supposedly pretty low tech that the seed banks in
35:55
Speaker 1: the world are just tasked with keeping seeds alive and
36:00
Speaker 1: and aren't doing terribly much else unless it's like a
36:02
Speaker 1: research station that that their seed bank is attached to. Well, yeah,
36:06
Speaker 1: I mean, out of i'd say the vast minority of
36:11
Speaker 1: the murder these super high tech organizations. You know. Yeah. Um, alright,
36:15
Speaker 1: well let's take another break and we'll come back and
36:17
Speaker 1: we'll talk a little bit more about small Bard and
36:19
Speaker 1: his black metal band, as well as the fact that
36:24
Speaker 1: could there be anything wrong with this plan? So check
36:59
Speaker 1: that was that was quite a teaser. Should go ahead
37:03
Speaker 1: and talk about that then? Yeah, well yeah, I mean,
37:06
Speaker 1: like you think, what could possibly be wrong with seed banks?
37:09
Speaker 1: What's your problem? Just let small Bard have his seeds, right, Yeah,
37:13
Speaker 1: And I kind of was surprised to know that there
37:15
Speaker 1: was any downside, but um, there is a school of
37:18
Speaker 1: thought that is very much um from people that like
37:22
Speaker 1: our hands on with farmers themselves, where they say, like,
37:27
Speaker 1: you know, it's it's great that you're doing this, but um,
37:31
Speaker 1: in a thousand years, those seeds might be worthless. Right.
37:35
Speaker 1: It was like I was saying, you have to come
37:37
Speaker 1: in and and plant those seeds and get new seeds
37:40
Speaker 1: from those plants, right, You can't just leave them, correct, right,
37:45
Speaker 1: but they could also be worthless, chucking that when you
37:48
Speaker 1: take seeds out of the world and bank them put
37:52
Speaker 1: them in suspended animation, you're halting evolution as well. Well yeah,
37:56
Speaker 1: I mean that's kind of the point, Like plants are
37:58
Speaker 1: are well, they're literally growing things, but they're also evolving things.
38:04
Speaker 1: And like these farmers are saying, you know, they day
38:07
Speaker 1: to day and year to year and crop to crop,
38:09
Speaker 1: they see changes. So these seeds that you've got for
38:12
Speaker 1: decades and decades may end up not being anything like
38:16
Speaker 1: the seeds that you're growing or that you may lose.
38:19
Speaker 1: I mean, I guess as long as you're keeping it
38:21
Speaker 1: up though, I mean I side with the seed vaulters
38:23
Speaker 1: for sure. Yeah, yeah, well, okay, so there's two there's
38:28
Speaker 1: two schools of thought. One is banking seeds, right and
38:31
Speaker 1: just protecting the genetic information of every variety of plants
38:34
Speaker 1: you possibly can, right, it can't be for future use, right.
38:39
Speaker 1: The other school of thought is, no, we need to
38:41
Speaker 1: be working with farmers out in the field to protect
38:45
Speaker 1: protect crop diversity and like like protected by making sure
38:51
Speaker 1: that those varieties are still being farmed and that there's
38:54
Speaker 1: a bunch of different varieties and that these farmers stay
38:57
Speaker 1: farming that they can you know, make their living you know,
39:00
Speaker 1: doing this this farming, and and that's the way to
39:04
Speaker 1: protect bio diversities to keep evolution going, not take the
39:09
Speaker 1: seeds and ultimately the plants out of evolution for a
39:12
Speaker 1: while and maybe do both, you would think so, But
39:16
Speaker 1: as far as um, as Suzanne Goldenberg says in that
39:19
Speaker 1: that Guardian article, there's just not the funding to do both.
39:22
Speaker 1: So there's a big division in in crop sciences, in
39:25
Speaker 1: in botany and in biology about which route do you take.
39:30
Speaker 1: And svall Bard has been getting a lot of the
39:32
Speaker 1: money lately. So the seed banking way is kind of
39:35
Speaker 1: the way that people have been going. But there's a
39:37
Speaker 1: there's a lot of people are saying, I don't know
39:40
Speaker 1: if that's such a good idea after all, maybe we
39:42
Speaker 1: should be protecting crops in situ in the fields and
39:45
Speaker 1: in supporting indigenous farmers um instead. So there's a big
39:50
Speaker 1: debate about which way to go. Still, yeah, I mean,
39:53
Speaker 1: and then like you said at the very beginning, uh,
39:56
Speaker 1: seed banks, and of course the one in Norway is
39:59
Speaker 1: very um it's kind of a it's about the sexiest
40:03
Speaker 1: seeds can get sure as far as the media goes,
40:06
Speaker 1: especially when you have backers like Bill and Melinda Gates
40:10
Speaker 1: and these you know, very wealthy philanthropists kind of backing
40:14
Speaker 1: the idea of these seed banks. Um. You know, I
40:18
Speaker 1: think hopefully that doesn't divert so much funding from the
40:22
Speaker 1: other that it's you know, a wash. You know, well,
40:25
Speaker 1: that's part of the problem. It is very much. So
40:27
Speaker 1: it's diverting a ton of funding away from the stuff,
40:30
Speaker 1: the campaigns that are carrying out in the field. And
40:33
Speaker 1: I think part of the reason is is because there
40:36
Speaker 1: this division has become pronounced, you know, it's one or
40:39
Speaker 1: the other. Some people are saying, Okay, well I'll choose
40:42
Speaker 1: this side over this side or something. I don't like
40:44
Speaker 1: a black and white line of thinking. I don't either,
40:47
Speaker 1: And it does seem like this is important enough to
40:49
Speaker 1: try both approaches. But I guess the will is not there.
40:52
Speaker 1: The finances aren't really right. So um, there there's it's
40:57
Speaker 1: becoming a battle. Um. But I'm with you, man. I
41:00
Speaker 1: think I think seed banking is good. I also think
41:03
Speaker 1: working with farmers is good. Um, so let's try both,
41:06
Speaker 1: is my thing? Agreed? Um. The other The other thing
41:10
Speaker 1: that I'm starting to kind of see about the Crop
41:14
Speaker 1: Trust and small Bard is that they're, like I said,
41:17
Speaker 1: they're coming in. They're saying, here's the standards for seed preservation,
41:20
Speaker 1: and they're kind of carrying out this some social Darwinistic
41:25
Speaker 1: mission where it's like, if you're not up to snuff
41:28
Speaker 1: to our standards we're making, you're you're not getting any
41:32
Speaker 1: fun anymore. You're gonna wither and die. And we're just
41:34
Speaker 1: going to support the ones that we that we feel
41:37
Speaker 1: are up to snuff, the seed banks around the world,
41:41
Speaker 1: which is fine, but it's also um like, I mean
41:44
Speaker 1: I get it on the one hand, right where you're
41:46
Speaker 1: just kind of like, um, this works. These standards work,
41:52
Speaker 1: But it's the same thing as saying like this, this
41:56
Speaker 1: um strip mall works. You put an old navy here
41:59
Speaker 1: at t J Max here in a grocery store in
42:01
Speaker 1: the middle that works, builded everywhere. Do you lose something
42:05
Speaker 1: in the irony of it is that we're trying to
42:07
Speaker 1: protect crop diversity by standardizing the way that they're protected,
42:14
Speaker 1: and it just seems like one point is missing the
42:16
Speaker 1: other in that sense. You know, yeah, yeah, I get it.
42:20
Speaker 1: Um so small Bard gets all the headlines, but there
42:22
Speaker 1: are some other fairly high profile seed banks around the world.
42:25
Speaker 1: Um one uh at Q Gardens in London. Well it's
42:31
Speaker 1: a little south London, a few a couple of hours south.
42:33
Speaker 1: I think, No, I've been there, buddy, Is it really
42:36
Speaker 1: on the map. It looks like it's pretty pretty far south. Well,
42:40
Speaker 1: I mean it's it's South London. Well, London is huge, Yeah,
42:45
Speaker 1: I mean we Emily and I went and it was
42:48
Speaker 1: the Royal Tanical Gardens. It's just one of the loveliest,
42:51
Speaker 1: uh loveliest gardens I've ever seen. I posted pictures on
42:55
Speaker 1: the stuff you should know while I was just so
42:56
Speaker 1: blown away. But there they have the Millennium Seed Bank Project. Um.
43:01
Speaker 1: And their goal there is to obviously, um store plants
43:06
Speaker 1: for the United Kingdom, but they really want to protect
43:08
Speaker 1: the twenty four thousand global species as well. UM. And
43:13
Speaker 1: I think right now they have all the native plant
43:16
Speaker 1: population covered. It was pretty amazing. England, oh, just of England,
43:21
Speaker 1: not the UK as a whole. Maybe it is the
43:23
Speaker 1: UK as a whole. It probably is the UK as
43:25
Speaker 1: a whole. Careful yeah really. Um. There's one in Russia
43:31
Speaker 1: which I believe is the oldest seed bank. Yeah. So
43:34
Speaker 1: that one is the Vavilov Institute of Plant Industry. It
43:38
Speaker 1: was established in St. Petersburg, right and St. Petersburg was
43:43
Speaker 1: known as Lennon Grad for a while while Stalin was
43:45
Speaker 1: in power. Um, and if you'll remember correctly, there was
43:50
Speaker 1: a siege on Lennon Grad that lasted like three years,
43:53
Speaker 1: I think, and plant the plant scientists, like apparently large
44:00
Speaker 1: number of the plant scientists who worked at this Institute
44:03
Speaker 1: of Plant Industry starved to death, died of starvation rather
44:08
Speaker 1: than grow these seeds into food because they were so
44:11
Speaker 1: bent on protecting it. And the guy that they that
44:15
Speaker 1: they named the place after he was he was a
44:18
Speaker 1: great seed banker as well, very smart guy, um who
44:22
Speaker 1: figured out that the genetic diversity was of paramount importance
44:26
Speaker 1: as far as crops go. Um. He died of starvation
44:30
Speaker 1: as well because Stalin made an escapegoat when his collectivists
44:34
Speaker 1: policies caused a famine. So imagine being a seed a
44:39
Speaker 1: guy who's banking seeds to protect against famine and then
44:42
Speaker 1: dying of starvation as a result. No good, No, that's
44:47
Speaker 1: no good. So you've got anything else? No, I say,
44:51
Speaker 1: hats off to seed vaulters and um good farmers. Yeah
44:56
Speaker 1: they got them all. Oh man, we almost left out
45:00
Speaker 1: the big, the big thing, the big news about sval Bard.
45:03
Speaker 1: What happened? Well back in May there are reports that
45:06
Speaker 1: there is this um that due to climate change, the
45:10
Speaker 1: perma frost melted and small Bard became flooded and the
45:14
Speaker 1: sea bank was threatened. Well, it turns out that that
45:16
Speaker 1: was wildly overblown. That the um there's water intrusion just
45:22
Speaker 1: about every year in small Bard, but it's so cold
45:25
Speaker 1: that the water makes it, you know, a couple of
45:28
Speaker 1: meters down towards the vault, which is a hundred meters long,
45:33
Speaker 1: the tunnel is and then freezes solid. And the world
45:37
Speaker 1: found out about this and they said, no, you need
45:39
Speaker 1: to do something about that. So apparently they're waterproofing it.
45:42
Speaker 1: But it wasn't necessary climate change, it wasn't part. But
45:46
Speaker 1: it was the fact that they built the seed vault
45:49
Speaker 1: into the perma frost. And when you cut into perma
45:52
Speaker 1: frost you allow for heat intrusion, which keeps the perma
45:55
Speaker 1: apart from becoming well being permanent. So it's not all
46:00
Speaker 1: he's frozen. It will freeze in thaw. So by creating
46:03
Speaker 1: the seed vault, they messed up the perma frost. But
46:08
Speaker 1: it's not It wasn't flooded, the seeds weren't an issue,
46:11
Speaker 1: and it's all under control. It's basically just the media
46:14
Speaker 1: finding something ironic and running with it. I do have
46:18
Speaker 1: one more interesting little tidbit. I don't think we covered that.
46:21
Speaker 1: This is about small bard. Uh. It is such a
46:23
Speaker 1: serious deal there that like there's there's no one person
46:28
Speaker 1: with like the key, like you have to It only
46:31
Speaker 1: opens for deposits three times a year, and it's sort
46:33
Speaker 1: of like war games, like you have to there. There
46:37
Speaker 1: are multiple people that have to be there to even
46:39
Speaker 1: access this thing. You have to beat it at tic
46:42
Speaker 1: tac toe before it we'll let you in. Pretty neat, man,
46:46
Speaker 1: it is. It's very neat, and the idea behind it's
46:48
Speaker 1: pretty awesome too. I I say, do it all, do
46:51
Speaker 1: everything we can to protect crop diversity. Uh. If you
46:56
Speaker 1: want a more about seed banks, you can type those
46:58
Speaker 1: words in the search bar how stuff works dot com.
47:00
Speaker 1: And while you're at it, go read the Doomsday Vault
47:03
Speaker 1: colon the seeds that could save a post apocalyptic world
47:07
Speaker 1: in the Guardian. That was a good article as well. Uh.
47:09
Speaker 1: And since I said as well, it's time for listener mail.
47:16
Speaker 1: I'm gonna preface this email with an offer to you
47:20
Speaker 1: to revise your statement on the magnificence of the Aurora borealis. Man.
47:27
Speaker 1: I I want to say, I want to preface that
47:30
Speaker 1: with I'm never going to read the Independent again. Certainly
47:35
Speaker 1: I won't mention anything I read in the Independent again.
47:38
Speaker 1: So it turns out I read the one, the one
47:42
Speaker 1: article about how the Aurora borealis actually stinks. And it
47:46
Speaker 1: turns out that something around nineties seven percent of our
47:50
Speaker 1: listeners have seen the Aurora borealis and all of them
47:54
Speaker 1: can tell you that it does not, in fact stink
47:56
Speaker 1: in real life. That this is just the one article
47:59
Speaker 1: on the entire Internet that says that, yes, you are
48:01
Speaker 1: well intended, but boy did we hear about it. This one,
48:06
Speaker 1: This one ranks up there with emails that we've gotten
48:10
Speaker 1: in the past. Uh. So I'm gonna read this one
48:13
Speaker 1: example from Maya Uruk and Maya is uh in Minnesota,
48:19
Speaker 1: in Minneapolis in fact? All right, so maybe may and
48:21
Speaker 1: her husband can come to our show there. I hope
48:23
Speaker 1: they will. In fact, Maya write us an email and
48:26
Speaker 1: I'll put you on the list. How about that? Yeah?
48:29
Speaker 1: You like that? Whoa sand is coming to town? All right?
48:34
Speaker 1: I feel like we've all been friends for years, guys.
48:36
Speaker 1: After joining your episodes every week, we shared so much together.
48:39
Speaker 1: It was definitely time to share something with you. My
48:41
Speaker 1: husband and I are in our twenties. Forget it, nothing
48:44
Speaker 1: free for you kidding? Living in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He's a
48:48
Speaker 1: band teacher and he plays in a funky rock band
48:51
Speaker 1: called the Confused Brothers Band. That's a great name. The
48:55
Speaker 1: bass and the guitar players are brothers. The brothers, I
48:59
Speaker 1: guess so. Uh. The brothers parents have a large tract
49:01
Speaker 1: of wild land, A huge tract of land in central
49:04
Speaker 1: Minnesota where each year, over Memorial Day, the brothers invite
49:08
Speaker 1: three hundred of their closest musician friends camp out in
49:11
Speaker 1: the woods put on a music festival. Boy, I want
49:13
Speaker 1: to play in this festival. Yeah, man, that sounds great. Uh.
49:18
Speaker 1: This year, they were walking from the tent to the
49:20
Speaker 1: main stage and a couple of people um asked us
49:23
Speaker 1: to look up and said, do you see those flickering lights?
49:25
Speaker 1: Or are we just tripping too hard? Uh? Sure enough,
49:28
Speaker 1: the northern lights were dancing across the sky the wilderness
49:31
Speaker 1: with no large towns nearby. The Aurora borealis is moving
49:34
Speaker 1: in sharp relief. Imagine a laser show, but a little
49:37
Speaker 1: more alien and way more breathtaking, mesmerizing moment that made
49:41
Speaker 1: me really be glad to be alive in this amazing world.
49:45
Speaker 1: Your episode on Aurora Borealis and Aurora Australis left me
49:48
Speaker 1: so sad that you believe Julia Buckley's experience to be generalizable?
49:53
Speaker 1: Is that a word it is? Now? She may have
49:56
Speaker 1: had a poor experiencing the Northern lights, but that doesn't
49:58
Speaker 1: mean they always appear as a aggie shadow here to
50:01
Speaker 1: attest that the site could be powerful reminder just how
50:03
Speaker 1: beautiful this planet could be. Thanks for all the knowledge
50:06
Speaker 1: and last you give me over the past few years.
50:08
Speaker 1: Maya Yurick, Uh So, Maya, it's in me an email.
50:13
Speaker 1: Just respond to say I want to go to your
50:16
Speaker 1: show for free. That is quite an offer, ski Ulrich
50:19
Speaker 1: take him up on it. If you want to get
50:22
Speaker 1: in touch with us, like Maya Skeet did, you can
50:26
Speaker 1: tweet to us at s y s K podcast. I'm
50:29
Speaker 1: at josh um Clark also on Twitter. You can add
50:32
Speaker 1: with Chuck on Facebook at Charles W. Chuck Bryant or
50:35
Speaker 1: Stuff you Should Know. Uh. You can send us an
50:37
Speaker 1: email to Stuff podcast at how Stuff works dot com
50:40
Speaker 1: and be sure to say hi to Jerry too because
50:42
Speaker 1: they go to her as well, and then, as always,
50:45
Speaker 1: hang out with us at our luxurious home on the
50:47
Speaker 1: Web Stuff you Should Know dot com for more on
50:54
Speaker 1: this and thousands of other topics. Is It How stuff Works?
50:56
Speaker 1: Dot com