the great collection
Gazing ahead into the future, nearly automatically makes us think about the future past, the present as history.
As species of all kinds are disappearing at worrisome rates, several initiatives are trying to protect, document, collect and preserve. The Norwegian government has, for example, taken the initiative to install at Svalbard, an island near the North Pole, the Global Seed Vault. Compared by many to Noah’s Ark, the initiative will use an old mine to preserve an estimated 1.5 billion samples of the Earth’s seeds in permafrost. The aim is to preserve as many of the Earth’s (diversity of) seeds as possible, especially those of species important to the food chain. Countries around the world are expected to send in samples.
As such the seed bank moves beyond cataloguing life to safeguarding it. Scandinavian ancestor Carolus Linnaeus will be happy. Craig Venter‘s Sorcerer expeditions (cataloguing the genes of oceanic micro-organisms) on the other hand try to map out the Earth’s ‘small life’ that has largely remained under the radar of catalogues and categories.
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