かってNY times web 版にのったことがある。
ネットのニュースは日付がないのが多いのは不思議だ。
どんな陰謀があるのか？
さてこの記事は過去形でかかれているのが
NY タイムズの下心のみえるところかもしれない。
意識誘導ですね。
Cary Fowler, executive director of the Global Crop Diversity Trust, surrounded by shelves stacked with boxes of seeds in the seed vault.
このひとはいまは引退して女性が後任になっている。
The Man who Saved the World
Buried deep in the Arctic, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault protects and preserves mankind's agricultural heritage. Here's how Memphian Cary Fowler helped make it happen.
It is 4,059 miles from Memphis, Tennessee, to the Svalbard archipelago in the Arctic. Svalbard is the northernmost European settlement and north of the Arctic Circle — meaning it’s subject to polar night and midnight sun for months at a time. The Norwegian island group, covered in permafrost and glaciers, is home to about 2,400 hardy souls, a few international coal-mining interests, reindeer, Arctic foxes, and thousands of polar bears.
Norway is also the location of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault. Opened in 2008, the so-called “Doomsday Vault” is a safety net designed to protect the Earth’s crop diversity. Carved out of a mountain near the village of Longyearbyen, the seed vault is a backup storage bank for hundreds of thousands of seed collections deposited by 228 nations and dozens of international gene banks. Svalbard Global Seed Vault is a fail-safe that insures against incremental and catastrophic loss of crop diversity in the places around the world from where the seeds hail.
With three storage chambers built as deep as 478 feet from the surface entry point, the $9 million seed vault protects more than 4,000 species of crops and 650,000 crop varieties in a permanent, naturally subzero environment. Since Svalbard isn’t conducive to tectonic vagaries, and the vault is situated higher than the worst-case high-water
sea levels demonstrated by climate change models, these seeds will survive there for hundreds, and in some cases thousands, of years.
It is — hyperbole earned — the kind of place that might save millions of lives one day. And the Svalbard Global Seed Vault is the brainchild of a Memphian.
Activism and agriculture
We can be fairly certain that Memphis, Tennessee, and Svalbard, Norway, historically have had little in common. But today they are and probably will be inextricably linked, thanks to Cary Fowler, whose scientific efforts have well and truly brought together these two unlikely places, in the course of a single lifetime.
MBQ sat down with Fowler earlier this summer, when he was home visiting the city of his birth. The interview took place on a park bench at the Dixon Gallery & Gardens, with birds chirping, a mild breeze, and the occasional passerby as company.
Born in 1949, Fowler was born to parents who were dedicated to the service and well-being of their fellow Memphians. His mother, Betty, was a dietitian at the West Tennessee Tuberculosis Hospital. His father, Morgan, was a General Sessions judge. “I grew up with a sense of the importance of fair play and justice,” Fowler says.
Fowler learned much by observing what went on in court. “I give a lot of credit to my father, who was ahead of his time and a person of uncommon integrity. I’ve always been proud of what he did. He always said that he wanted the first experience people had of the judicial system to be a good one, to be run properly. He practiced his profession without regard to race or class.”
The judge’s son came of age in the 1960s, when the civil rights movement dominated the headlines, the news broadcasts, and his family’s breakfast conversations. “I grew up in turbulent times in Memphis,” he says. “In those days in some parts of the country, idealism came cheap. In the South, it was going to be tested. You had to learn how to get along with people, and you had to learn how to fashion pragmatic solutions. You learned the value of the individual, family ties, the importance of integrity — these are [all] lessons that are good on the international stage.”
Fowler was exposed to agriculture early. On his mother’s side, there was a family farm in Madison County near Jackson, Tennessee. “I used to spend a fair amount of time there,” Fowler says, “and it left a deep impression.”
On the farm, Fowler witnessed the transition from an older style of agriculture to the systems that are common today. The diversified family farm grew primarily corn, cotton, and soybeans, but also had other vegetables, chickens, a fishing pond, and dairy and meat cattle. At the time, the farm was large for the area, but nowadays it would be considered quite small. “I saw the transition from animal power to mechanical power,” he says. “I remember when the first tractor came and half of the mules left.”
Indeed, rural life was a large part of the culture in which Fowler grew up. His grandfather had a role in bringing the West Tennessee Experiment Station to Madison County. The station had a barbecue every year, Fowler recalls, and he would attend with his grandmother and watch as she walked among experimental rows and selected the crop varieties she would grow on the farm the next year. His grandmother would talk to him about soils and how much a particular field would produce. Resistance and yield were the prize attributes of a crop. “In some subtle way I began to understand the biology of agriculture,” Fowler says.
Political activism and modern agriculture: These two ingredients percolated in the Precambrian tide pools of Fowler’s budding intellect. “For a lot of people, agriculture and issues of justice and rights are separate issues. In my household there was no such border.”
Looking past the horizon of his youth, Fowler thought he’d follow in his father’s footsteps and become a lawyer in Memphis or perhaps go into politics.
He graduated from White Station High School in 1967 and matriculated at Rhodes College, then known as Southwestern; his father and aunt were Southwestern alumni. “I grew up at Rhodes and learned some of the most important lessons in life there.” He transferred midway through his junior year, however, and finished his degree at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, Canada, because, as he puts it, “I was youthful and had a lot of wanderlust.”
After Simon Fraser, he applied to several graduate schools in the U.S. and Sweden, and was accepted into the sociology program at the University of Uppsala. Why Sweden? A friend from college had gone to school in Sweden and liked it. Why the University of Uppsala? It had been founded in 1477 — before Columbus had sailed the ocean blue — and “seemed to be a venerable institution,” Fowler says.
He studied sociology and did his dissertation on the development of intellectual property rights over crop varieties from colonial days through the biotechnology era that began in the 1980s. Fowler had become acquainted with the issue of crop diversity in the early 1970s. His plan was to spend a couple months reading about it and doing some research. “I had no idea that there was a job down the road,” he says. “In fact, there wasn’t for a long time.”
After he earned his Ph.D., Fowler returned to the U.S. and went to work for the Institute of Southern Studies in North Carolina. The organization, founded by civil rights movement veterans, publishes a journal called Southern Exposure. In 1974, the magazine did an issue on agriculture in the South, called “Our Promised Land.” Fowler wrote an article for this special issue, an ode to family farming and its impending demise from federal agricultural policies and hyper mechanization. Agriculture was changing dramatically, and as it did, farmers were growing fewer varieties of crops.
His work on the article led to an epiphany. “It felt so good; it satisfied me,” Fowler says. “It integrated a lot of things in my background.”
With this renewed focus, Fowler next worked on a collaborative book about the world food crisis, called Food First: Beyond the Myth of Scarcity while at the Institute for Food and Development Policy. Then for about 10 years he worked for the Rural Advancement Fund/National Sharecroppers Fund, a nonprofit organization in North Carolina with which Eleanor Roosevelt was associated. During research he came across the work of an American scientist named Dr. Jack Harlan. A well- respected professional, Harlan was writing articles with names such as The Genetics of Disaster, and talking about the consequences of the loss of crop diversity, explaining how it might lead to catastrophic starvation on an unimaginable scale. “That was a life-changing moment.” Fowler says. “I realized that this diversity was in fact the biological foundation for agriculture. It’s the raw material for the evolution of our crop plants.”
Beans, at the CIAT gene bank in Colombia, which has just sent its latest consignments of seeds for conservation to teh Global Seed Vault in Svalbard, Norway.
What is diversity? As it relates to crops, diversity is the variation in plant features within crop species. Different varieties of a particular crop, say wheat, will have varying resistances to certain pests or diseases. Some will be uniquely suited for a particular environment and climate while others will not, among a virtually limitless litany of possibilities. There are more than 200,000 different varieties of wheat alone.
For millennia, Fowler explains, “most human beings who walked on planet Earth were not supported by agricultural systems but through hunting and gathering,” Fowler says. But eventually the farmers prevailed. He describes agriculture as both an art and a science. “Good farmers walk their fields out of interest, not just out of necessity. They have to make thousands of decisions. Farmers have to know what they’re doing and anticipate markets. And people who live and breathe their crop have this relationship with the crop that you can’t quantify. They have a feel for what’s going to happen — and sometimes they can’t explain it. That’s part of their art.”
For centuries, agriculture was a product of this art. The word “gene” wasn’t coined until after 1900, after all. But the world’s farmers were always primitive geneticists, saving specific seeds, domesticating their crops and saving the characteristics of a good plant for the next year, when there’d be more of those good plants, and the year after that even more. “The world’s farmers were plant breeders,” Fowler says.
In the U.S. during the nineteenth century, the government distributed millions of packages of seeds to farmers in experimental quantities. “Farmers in the 1800s engaged in millions of small-scale experiments,” Fowler says. “When a crop variety did work, they multiplied it, and the farmers who were best at selecting seeds for the next year became seed companies, selling seed to their neighbors. And this is how we have agriculture all across this country. It’s because of our ancestors and the diversity they had to play with, to select from. We’re still tinkering, and it behooves us to save the pieces.”
Today’s plant breeders can coax desired traits out of crop varieties. When a new pest or disease comes along, it can be assumed that the crop has seen that pest or disease somewhere in its history; otherwise it probably wouldn’t still be here. In fact, the plant in question may no longer have much resistance to that disease, but back in that particular variety’s lineage, genetic adaptations occurred to ensure its survival.
So can agronomists go back into the past, and through plant breeding, reinsert that resistance? To be able to do so requires that all of the historic diversity be conserved. “You’re going to need crop diversity as long as you want to have agriculture,” Fowler says. “And if you’re going to conserve crop diversity, conserving it for 49 out of 50 years is not quite good enough.
“It’s not just a nice thing to do,” he continues. “Many people get a warm, fuzzy feeling from the notion that we’re conserving all of this diversity and it’s not going to become extinct, and I’ll confess I have those feelings too. But what we’re really doing is conserving all of the options.” Variety isn’t the spice of life; it’s an essential component.
Fowler compares diversity to an artist’s palette. “If we have all of the diversity of colors, all of the diversity of wheat, we can do all kinds of things with it. Farmers and plant breeders can pick and choose and help those crops adapt to new conditions. But if you begin to take away colors, you limit what kind of painting you can produce.
“We’re in the middle of a mass extinction event in agriculture, and we’re in a race against time,” he says. “It’s the natural unintended consequence of the modernization of agriculture, particularly in developing countries where you still have a lot of diversity in the field. Because they don’t get their seeds from modern seed companies or plant breeding programs, a family may have been essentially saving a variety — choosing seeds from this year’s harvest, saving them to plant next year — and they may have been doing that in an unbroken chain back to Neolithic times.”
And a new variety comes along that promises a higher yield, Fowler says, “the genetic diversity and heritage of a millennium can be boiled up in a pot or porridge overnight.”
Once a variety is gone, its departure is permanent. “What we have now is what we’re going to live with as a species for the rest of our existence on earth.” Fowler declines to point fingers at anyone or anything for the reality of the situation. The modernization of agriculture and development of monocultures have replaced diversity, he admits, but he adds, “That’s where most of us get our food.
“We want farmers to be highly productive, and you can’t look a farmer in the eyes and say, ‘I’d like you to be a museum curator for this old unproductive variety in case 500 years from now we might need it.’ That’s not going to work because they’ll go out of business.”
But Fowler believes that crop diversity is at the crossroads of the planet’s future. “Can you imagine a safe, effective, sustainable solution to food security, to water problems, to climate change, to the energy crisis, to peace and development — can you make a success of dealing with any of those issues without crop diversity? Because if you don’t have crop diversity, your agricultural system is going to fail. And you’re not going to be able to produce varieties that need less water, or require less energy use. And you’re not going to be able to feed people, and if you can’t do that, guess what’s going to happen to peace and security in this world? It’s not a luxury to solve this problem. It’s a prerequisite for all of the other problems in the world.”
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