Cultural expressions of the Seed Vault
In researching the Svalbard Global Seed Vault we have examined how the Vault is portrayed in the current cultural landscape. This brief overview is meant to give an introduction to some of the dominant cultural narratives about the Seed Vault, and to contextualise our own little data-exploration project. Importantly, this overview shows how our design project only addresses a small part of the broader challenges and possibilities represented by the Seed Vault.
The Svalbard Global Seed Vault opened in 2008 and has since become one of the iconic scientific projects of our time, alongside the likes of the International Space Station and the Large Hadron Collider. As with the ISS and the LHC, the Seed Vault is the subject of various cultural representations and media narratives. There are a number of things about the Seed Vault project that resonates with the popular imagination — including climate change, the Arctic, conservation and biodiversity, global scientific collaboration and doomsday preparation.
Media typically describes the Svalbard Global Seed Vault as a ‘Doomsday vault’. Currently, the trope of describing the Seed Vault in explicit (post)apocalyptic terms is something you will find across popular media and the Web — with headlines such as ‘Scientists Add 50,000 Seeds to Arctic Doomsday Vault Because Everything Is Awful’ or ‘The Arctic Doomsday Seed Vault Flooded. Thanks, Global Warming’. The notion of the Seed Vault as simply a ‘doomsday’ vault is both interesting and problematic. Just as the fallout shelter became a cultural representation of the fears of the Cold War, the Seed Vault has become an emblem for resilience in the face of the climate crisis. This building itself becomes the iconic solution to an impending threat. This is of course attractive for sensational media copy, but even when it brings attention to the need for conserving biodiversity, the popular notion of the ‘doomsday’ vault is a broad, and perhaps unhelpful, simplification of a complex, global scientific and agricultural project.
For a more nuanced perspective on the Seed Vault and its history it is useful to turn towards the communicative work of the likes of Dr. Cary Fowler — agriculturalist and the former executive director of the Crop Trust (the international organisation that manages the Seed Vault together with the Norwegian Government and the NordGen). Fowler was instrumental in establishing of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault and has been a central public figure in the dissemination of the project. Through lectures, books, interviews and online videos Fowler has worked towards making the challenges of agricultural biodiversity accessible for a broader public.
These, and other similar efforts from for example the Crop Trust, represents a kind of popular science communication that fits well within contemporary online media. It presents an accessible story, the issues are clear and engaging, and there is a visual spectacle to Svalbard and the Seed Vault that allows for iconic imagery. The celebration of the beauty of the architecture, the Arctic landscape and the epic scope of the project is clearly articulated towards online culture in the film produced by GoPro Cause (the charity arm of the action-camera manufacturer GoPro) with Fowler and the Crop Trust:
The media strategy of the Crop Trust is attuned to contemporary Web culture — favouring stunning visual imagery, high production value and interactive content (like their beautiful interactive visit of the Seed Vault). As reported by the Guardian, the Vault is the Crop Trust’s prime exhibit and a key part of the sales and fundraising strategy. As the Crop Trust adviser Frison said in an interview with the newspaper: “When you talk about a doomsday vault and you put a polar bear next to it, people are interested in finding out more about that”.
The story of the Seed Vault make the threats of loss of biodiversity concrete and relatable for the broader public. While the Svalbard Global Seed Vault is just one part of a much larger project, it has become the icon for the global effort to secure biodiversity for the future. As reported by the Guardian, this has become controversial in parts of the scientific and agricultural community. Other actors in the biodiversity sciences have questioned whether it would be more useful to spend the funds working directly with farming communities in the fields instead of focusing so much on seed banks. Looking at these issues from the perspective of cultural or media analysis, one could make the observation that the current cultural weight of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault perhaps renders these other voices invisible in the popular discourses about biodiversity.
Our final cultural observation about the Seed Vault concerns how the Vault have become a symbol of global collaboration. Fowler makes an interesting point about how there are seeds in the Vault from all the countries in the world (and we would add: from quite a few countries that do not exist anymore). The Seed Vault is an international effort where most countries, and most seed banks, are represented. Which, according to Fowler, makes it an unique case in the context of climate change, biodiversity and conservation. In a Norwegian context it is also interesting to note how the Seed Vault is presented by the Norwegian Ministry of Agriculture and Food. The Ministry shares a beautiful online photo collection that is reusable through a creative commons license (Attribution-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic (CC BY-ND 2.0)) (these are the images are used frequently media globally.)
Interestingly, events at the Seed Vault are also part of official Norwegian foreign affairs. A ‘Seed Ceremony’ is performed as part of state visits — as when Jon Georg Dale, the Norwegian Minister of Agriculture and Food, welcomed seed bags of rice from the delegation from Singapore in 2016.
This overview says something about the scale and scope of the Seed Vault in popular cultural discourse. In many ways it is impressive how the Vault have become a cultural and scientific icon in less than 10 years. This have of course been a global scientific, diplomatic and logistical undertaking, but one could argue that this has also been made possible through the use of cultural practices such as architecture, landscape photography, film-making, popular science communication and online media. In reflecting on this there are a few things that puzzle us, both as researchers and designers. First, one could argue that while the cultural expressions of the Seed Vault are limited to a form of streamlined narrative that works well for a certain important agendas (such as raising awareness, fundraising, diplomacy), it is also limited. These dominant cultural expressions gives us a specific overarching perspective on the Seed Vault project. While this is sometimes connected to other projects (such as those catalogued by the Seed of Time initiative), it would still have been interesting to see more and richer ways of engaging with the Vault through visual languages, stories and expressions. (Interesting examples of work that has begun to explore this includes that of Professor Andrew Morrison and students at AHO, who have used Design Fiction to explore arctic futures).
Finally, in the context of our data-exploration project it is interesting to note that the quiet spectacle of the digital, open database of the Seed Vault is largely under-articulated. The architecture of the Seed Vault and the arctic landscape lends itself well to media narratives about securing the future of humankind. The same can perhaps not be said about the media-friendliness of the complex spreadsheets of seed-sample-data shared on NordGen’s Seed Portal (website last updated in 2010). However, this database potentially tells a rich story about global collaboration, the vagaries of scientific logistics, and about biodiversity on the scale of one seed at the time. The database tells us that there are currently 597.238.873 seeds in the Vault, and provides detailed information about all of them. Svalbard and the Seed Vault might be remote and inaccessible for most people, but the vault’s data is openly accessible by everyone. This digital repository represents, we would argue, a narrative that is just as spectacular as those about the ‘doomsday vault in the Arctic’ — one that it perhaps might be more interesting to find different ways to engage with.
