permaculture

["Lawrence F. London, Jr." <lfl@intrex.net>]

Daily Grist
09 Feb 07

You Put Your Seed in There
Norway reveals design for "doomsday" seed vault

Architecture geeks are salivating over Norway's release of the design of an agricultural "doomsday vault." The 
structure, which will cost $5 million to build and $125,000 a year to run, will hold seeds for the world's 1.5 million 
distinct crop varieties. You know, in case the guy who survives the apocalypse gets the nibbles. Lined with 
three-foot-thick concrete, it will sit nearly 400 feet inside a mountain on the Svalbard archipelago, near the North 
Pole. "It will be the best freezer in the world by several orders of magnitude," says Cary Fowler of the Global Crop 
Diversity Trust, a project partner. "The seeds will be safe there for decades." Designers say the vault's entrance will 
"gleam like a gem in the midnight sun," but sadly, few will ever see that. Scheduled to open in 2008, the ark will 
require just one annual inspection. "If you design a facility to be used in worst-case scenarios," Fowler points out, 
"then you cannot actually have too much dependency on human beings."
straight to the source: Reuters, Jeremy Lovell, 08 Feb 2007
http://today.reuters.co.uk/news/CrisesArticle.aspx?storyId=L08358455&WTmodLoc=World-R5-Alertnet-5
straight to the source: BBC News, Mark Kinver, 09 Feb 2007
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/6335899.stm
straight to the source: The Norway Post, Rolleiv Solholm, 09 Feb 2007
http://www.norwaypost.no/cgi-bin/norwaypost/imaker?id=51770