Our desire to preserve is strongly linked to a narrative of loss, both for biodiversity writ large and for rare heirloom seeds. But we recognize the need for biodiversity and destroy it in the same breath. What if we protected the Amazon instead of just the genetics within it? What if we supported small-scale diversified agriculture instead of industrialized monoculture?
Seed preservation has a place, but it’s not the thing that will save us. Heirloom seed keepers attempt to preserve the past, while plant breeders control genetic resources to commodify the seed. Neither camp is particularly focused on how to expand biodiversity into the future, as if biodiversity and seed varieties are fixed and finite things.
Compounding this problem is the climate crisis, which is dramatically affecting our ability to grow food. Diversity is a core component of resilience, so we need rapid, ongoing and diverse adaptation of our regional food systems – everywhere, all the time. If we’ve been preserving all these seeds for some imagined future need, then the need is now. Arguably, it’s already too late.
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That’s fair, but isn’t that what we’re already doing? People are growing crops and trees, they are evolving naturally and also being modified and cultured to improve growth and adapt to changing environments.
This article was (from what I understood) mostly referring to old heirloom crops that are no longer widely grown because they’ve been superseded by newer commercial cultivars. I remember hearing that in the early 1900s, there were something like 53 potato cultivars available to buy in grocery stores in the USA, but by the end of the century, there were only 4. That probably applies to other crops as well. Another example of capitalism reducing biodiversity, I guess.
Yeah I suppose the nihilist in me is just assuming total societal collapse and I’m counting on dedicated preservationists to leave the universe evidence we were here.