In the mid 20th century, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) first identified the loss of biodiversity in crop plants as a global ecological problem. Consequently, the ex situ preservation of seeds in international storage facilities was adopted as a key strategy to counteract this “genetic erosion”. However, seed banks are exposed to a variety of threats ranging from financial and capacity limits to wars and natural disasters. Therefore, by the turn of the millennium, the need for a global backup system for the conservation and long-term availability of crop diversity was declared. In order to safeguard the global diversity in plant genetic resources, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault was established on the Arctic island of Spitsbergen in 2008, which serves as backup storage for the seeds conserved in gene banks worldwide. Storing the seeds in Norway, which has a reputation internationally for being politically stable, far from densely populated areas as well as surrounded by permafrost, is considered the best possible solution to ensure their preservation for the future. While some consider the vault a “Noah’s ark” for the world’s plant biodiversity, others argue that it reproduces the industrialized world’s instrumental and extractive relation to nature that has evoked the endangerment in the first place.

My PhD project focusses on the relations between humans and their non-human environment that techno-scientific practices enact. The practice of seed banking paradoxically invokes nature as a threat and at the same time a promise for the future of human life on earth. The mountain that encloses the seed vault paradigmatically embodies this: on the one hand, the permafrost provides a protective enclosure for the seeds, on the other hand, recent melt water intrusion has turned it into a threat to the seeds. In my project, I am interested in the ambiguity of seed banking as an ontopolitical technology of government while at the same time possibly a practice of care.