Arctic Cyles of Extraction and Deposit: Speculative Stories of Seed & Coal
Design
2024

Harvard Graduate School of Design,
Landscape Arctic Design
Instructor: Bert de Jonghe
Cambridge, MA

In ancient times, far away and close close by, crop grew plenty. The earth rotations were unburdened by human touch, fraction and extraction. Nobody had heard of carbon, energy or dollars simply because humans hadn’t become conscious of these concepts yet or at least hadn’t invented capitalism. Storytime >

In ancient times, far away and close close by, crop grew plenty. The earth rotations were unburdened by human touch, fraction and extraction. Nobody had heard of carbon, energy or dollars simply because humans hadn’t become conscious of these concepts yet or at least hadn’t invented capitalism.

Plants grew and died, grew and died.

For thousands of years, slowly sinking back into the earth and became carbon. The earth rotated with the axis of time, which lead to carbon, and coal, in the arctic.

The frigid temperatures and hostile environment meant that this black gold was left alone for thousands of years until 1904 when the first coal mine opened in Svalbard.

In 2012, pre-civil war Syria was cultivating land. It had heard of a global project to collect seeds and store them for future use.

The Syrian Ministry of Agriculture packed a number of precious seeds and shipped them to a surprising destination --

The seeds boarded a plane into the unknown – and touched down at the Spitsbergen airport and the almost only way in and out of the Svalbard archipelago where tourists, researchers, coal miners, and residents traverse.

From there, the seeds were transferred from the plane by three-hardworking members of the Global Seed Bank, private researchers who are completely funded by Norway to store the world’s supply of seeds for future generations. Their goal: preserve each type of genetic mutation of crop to house a crop-gene bank, illusively named for marketing purposes.

This vision would ensure future abundance despite our global trajectory of scarcity, and genetically modify seeds to breed strong crops of grain to overcome extreme heat, lack of water and air pollution.

The seeds are in good company. They sit housed in rows of boxes among specimen from different countries. In reality, US and Russia cannot agree on a border through territorial waters but in the Global Seed Bank they comfortably share a plastic one via PVC boxes that house the millions of seeds from around the world. North Korea, China, The US and France might not agree on Nuclear Powers but they agree to share next of seed kin.

Inside each box, seed varieties sit comfortably inside aluminum wrappers neatly coded and scanned through a barcode system which creates a digital seed footprint and ID, in some server farm somewhere in the hopes that it too will survive the apocalypse.

Each such mechanism is meant to protect the seeds from a different catastrophe:

1. Norway as an impartial global player with sufficient international-relations clout and a next-to-zero-chance of war or terrorism
2. A Mountainous cavity as a protection against the elements as a cryospheric archive in the ice
3. Elevated access in the mountain in case of flooding or heaven forbid non-conservative approaches to sea-level rise
4. Boxes, Shelves, and reinforcements in the case of an internal avalanche
5. Temperature-balancing systems and backup generators in case of outage or energy failure

Of course, due to inclement weather, the sublime cryosphere archive is insufficient and requires additional conditioning and careful temperature monitoring. Seeds must be kept at -21C, 15 degrees lower than the exterior -5C permafrost condition, whose degrees are only rising.

Perhaps they’d rise less if the coal wouldn’t be mined for energy a mere kilometer away.

Now initially – Cary Fowler imagined building the Seed Bank in the derelict leftover Coal Mine number 5. However, industry experts noted the unstable nature of such a place, with gas leaks and frequent explosions leaking from the wounds of an extracted Earth.

Instead, Cary Fowler and his friends decided to dig once again into the mountain and deposit their seed collection 130’ deep horizontally into the earthscape.

Now imagine instead – instead of a vault the seeds would fill the void of the mine. The 1m thick level of carbon would be stuffed with specimen seeds, that would cure the wound and fill the earth again with organic matter.

The matter, over thousands of years, would cure and become carbon again, a carbon sink, restoring earth’s equilibrium and preventing the initial chaos for which the global-vault-gene-editing-seed-bank was built in the first place.

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