![]() The Svalbard Global Seed Vault is supposed to shield our collective human inheritance from temporary catastrophes. Yesterday, it was announced that ICARDA would become the first seed bank to request a withdrawal from Svalbard, to restore its collection. “One would not expect a seed bank, even in Syria, to be a target, but unfortunately there is a recent precedent: Seed banks in Iraq and Afghanistan were destroyed or severely damaged over the course of the wars there.” “The fact that this shipment is coming up right now in some ways points to the utility and value of the seed vault,” Fowler told me at the time. The scientists themselves relocated to Beirut. ICARDA ended up shipping seed samples representing 87 percent of its collection to Svalbard for safekeeping. Civil war had recently broken out in Syria, and the ICARDA team was worried its power could be knocked out, and with it, the facility’s refrigeration systems. Fowler told me about a new shipment they’d just received from ICARDA. Even if its refrigeration systems fail, its seeds can survive for centuries in the deep chill of the mountain’s interior.īack in 2012, I interviewed Cory Fowler, the founder of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault. And it’s designed to withstand a wide range of global disasters, including nuclear war, or an asteroid strike. The compound is designed to hold more than a million seeds, all deposited by other seed banks. The central backup drive for the world’s seed-bank system is the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, a steely compound tunneled five-hundred feet into an icy peak in the Norwegian Arctic. Seed banks are humanity’s agricultural memory. If climate change continues, there might be many more of these places on Earth’s surface, someday soon. It collected seeds from crops adapted to arid environments, be they deserts or drought-afflicted scrub lands. ICARDA, in Aleppo, specialized in a particular kind of agricultural memory. Seed banks constitute humanity’s agricultural memory. We don’t know what will grow next year, and what won’t. These seed banks collect and store hundreds of thousands of seed varieties, encompassing nearly every plant ever cultivated by humans, going back to the dawn of agriculture. Until recently, the city was home to ICARDA, a seed bank, one of many in a system that spans the globe. ![]() As Jonathan Steele noted in The Guardian earlier this year, Aleppo’s ancient citadel, a UNESCO site which sits atop the city like a crown, “has the grim distinction of being the world’s only ancient fortress that is back in action today as a garrison and artillery battery.” Many of the city’s residents are fleeing.Īmong those fleeing are Aleppo’s scientists. The city of Aleppo is not ruined, not entirely, but it has been devastated by the Syrian civil war. We restore them and we display them as a cosmopolitan way of regarding particularities, as an expression of our humane respect for the resourcefulness of the spirit over time. lift the past out of history and into time … They are proof of the astonishing multiplicity of answers to life’s questions that have been created by our tirelessly self-interpreting kind. Such ruins have a “mute and shattered eloquence” all their own, according to my colleague, Leon Wieseltier: The architecture of a city is itself an archive, even when the buildings are crumbling into ruins. These impressions accumulate, over time, making cities into places of memory, into places where libraries and museums thrive. Theirs is the largest migration in human history, and by a wide margin.Įveryone who lives in a city makes some impression on it, however faint. Hundreds of millions of people have moved into cities during this past century. For thousands of years, the pace of these changes was slow, but in our current era, urbanization has accelerated. We used to roam, then we settled, and condensed into nodes. Recent human history can plausibly be described as a great experiment in urbanism. ![]() When scholars debate the site of the world’s first city, they are yearning after our cultural origins. They seduced us with convergence, with hundreds, thousands, even millions of people, all living in one place. Cities tricked us out of this way of life. What is a city, if not a place of convergence? For the bulk of our existence, we humans have been wanderers, lovers of open land and sky. It would later become a hub on the Silk Road, where trade routes from Mesopotamia, China, Europe, and Egypt converged. Alexander the Great conquered Aleppo in the 4th century B.C, and made it an outpost in his empire. People used to say that Abraham had climbed its highest hill, to survey the surrounding landscape. There are hints that nomads camped out just north of Aleppo, as early as 11,000 B.C. Aleppo, Syria, has as good a claim as any to the title of “world’s oldest city.” It is certainly among the longest to be continuously inhabited.
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