Freezing Seeds, Governing Biodiversity: The Cryopolitics of Natureculture at the Svalbard Global Seed Vault

• In Event: Cryo-innovations: Life in the Age of Artificial Cold

Abstract

For over ten years now, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault has been home to a growing stock of frozen crop plant seeds for the purpose of reinsuring worldwide collections of agricultural biodiversity. The vault is located in the remote Arctic Svalbard archipelago, where permafrost ensures constant sub-zero temperatures securing the seeds’ preservation even in case of a failure of the additional technical refrigeration system. It was founded to counteract the increasing loss of genetic diversity in agricultural plants in the wake of the mid-20th century Green Revolution and to secure genetic resources for future challenges to agriculture arising from changing ecological conditions.
Based on ethnographic field research and interviews, the paper analyzes the practice of freezing seeds to secure future agriculture as a (cryo)political technology of governing biodiversity. It illustrates that in the fields as well as in the icy environment of Svalbard, 'nature' acts as both threat and promise, which motivates the idea of a cryo-insurance as well as the cryo-optimistic stance toward the future. However, the cryopolitics of seed preservation transgress traditional boundaries between nature and culture or technology. The paper argues that the Svalbard Global Seed Vault merges the 'natural' and the 'artificial' into a naturalcultural assemblage that gives rise to new and specific forms and futures of life. Drawing on feminist STS, it discusses prospects for a critical analysis that recognizes the ways in which the Seed Vault is more than a typical modernist techno-fix insofar as it embraces naturalcultural entanglements.

Author

• Franziska von Verschuer, Goethe University Frankfurt/Main