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March 3rd, 2012 
FAKE NEWS for the Zionist agenda Are there scenarios
you can envision that would render the earth’s environments entirely
inhospitable to seeds?
Fowler: No. If
the projections are correct it’s certainly going to get more inhospitable, but
not entirely inhospitable. The issues that I mentioned before—nutrient and
water availability and climate change—are going to cause some fairly radical
readjustments in agriculture if you look down the road any distance. And that’s
one of the things that differentiates us, the people involved in the seed
vault from others, we do tend to have a long view of what’s going
to happen and we’re trying to plan for that.
We expect that agriculture would even survive something like
an asteroid strike; after all, plants survived the last one. What we’re really
trying to do up in Svalbard is preserve options. We’re not saying that we have
a crystal ball and that we know what’s going to happen and we know what’s
needed, but we do know that the diversity we have represents an immense number
of untapped options, and what we’re trying to do is keep all of those options.
I think it was Paul Ehrlich who said “the first rule of intelligent
tinkering is to save all the parts,” and that’s what we’re trying to do.
Earlier you mentioned
that these seeds represent an inheritance from Neolithic Age, and it got me
thinking about a different sort of inheritance. At the seed vault do you also
store the intellectual and cultural capital of agriculture?
Fowler: In a
sense we do. We don’t have archives at the seed vault, but we do have a record
of what is there, and even though in a sense the seed vault is a kind of safety
backup for existing seed banks and their collections, you could also look at it
the opposite way, which is to say that the seed banks that contribute to the
seed vault are actually performing backup for the seed vault. There is
redundancy in our system. Everything that’s in Svalbard can be found somewhere
else, and that somewhere else is the main manager of that particular portion of
diversity, and those institutions maintain extensive databases that describe
everything they know about the traits and characteristics of every single
sample. We link back to those and in that sense we have a very good record.
Also, at the Global Crop Diversity Trust, we’re working with
some other partners to put together a large international database called
Genesys which will essentially unite all of these seed banks around the world
so that researchers or plant experts who, for instance, may want to take a look
at the whole diversity of rice or wheat can go onto one website and see what’s
available and where it is and how to get samples of it and things like that. A
lot of that information, characteristics and the history and so forth, is
missing in some of the seed samples, but for the samples that do have it, it’s
quite valuable and we try to maintain it.
Why is it that Norway
was chosen for this project? Is it just the geography or is there something
particular about Scandinavian culture reflected in the seed vault?
Fowler: I think
it’s both. There are a lot of reasons for that particular location. One of them
was historical; the Nordic countries, Norway, Denmark, Finland, Iceland,
Sweden, were storing backup copies of some of their seeds in an abandoned mine shaft up there, so there was a precedent.
But apart from that, Norway is special. Historically there
have been a number of controversies around these genetic resources, questions of ownership and access and so forth, and I think Norway was at the
top of the list in terms of the countries that everyone in the room trusted.
They didn’t have a commercial seed industry so there was no sense of a conflict
of interest or of a private interest being involved. Norway is just an unusually generous
and collaborative country. When I headed the committee that undertook the
feasibility study for the seed vault, and when we presented it to the
government, their attitude was “if this is a valuable natural resource and
Norway is the place to safeguard it, how can we say no?” And they jumped
right in and built the facility at their cost.
Some of your methods
make it clear that terrorism is a special concern for the Seed Vault. I know
that new seed shipments are screened with an airport x-ray scanner to make sure
that none contain bombs. Is that because you see terrorism as just one of the
many contingencies that could occur over
the next thousand years, or do think the Vault might be a likely target for
terrorism?
Fowler: I don’t
think it’s a likely target, but of course one can never know. No political or
religious group is against what we’re doing so I don’t think it’s a target in
that sense. When the vault was being built we performed a security assessment in order to assess the likelihood of it being a target, or the likelihood of it
being under any kind of threat, and the Norwegian government deemed the threat
to be extremely low. But, at the same time we thought that if we’re going to go
to all the trouble to build this place in the middle of a mountain in the
Arctic then we might as well go the whole distance, and we think that increases
the trust and confidence in what we’re doing, the fact that we have thought
through all of these contingencies even though we don’t think many of these
things are ever going to happen.
I remember when we were constructing the facility and I was
talking to the local Governor in Svalbard who’s responsible for security on the
island, and he said to me “Cary, if anyone so much as writes graffiti on
this thing we’ll know who it is.” After all it’s just a small village
there, and really what’s neat is that the villagers are remarkably proud
and protective of the vault. They know it’s there, and they’re proud of it and
that gives us an extra security blanket out there because the locals see
everything that’s going on—walking around up there I’ve had any number of
people stop me and say “we’re protecting that vault of yours.”
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