The Germ and the Thaw: Maintenance, Performance, and Care in Seed Banking

• In Event: Sensing the Liveliness of Things and the Fragility of Life: Bringing Care and Maintenance Together II

Abstract

In the late twentieth century seed banking has emerged as the foremost endeavor in combatting large-scale loss of plant biodiversity. Since the global loss of biological diversity is believed to have arisen due to anthropogenic encroachment, the protection of nature is also being taken up as a human responsibility. While other forms of conservation focus their attention to salvage and reclaim spaces of ecological variety, overwhelming species and habitat loss is taken as axiomatic and irreversible in seed banking. In practice, nations and institutions have taken up the mantle of seed saving by varying means and ends, but there is consensus that the activity of plant genetic resource conservation is critical to the future of life on the planet, and our access to food in a troubled future climate. The blurring of lines between the protection of human life and life in general is purposeful and troubling.
My project interrogates the hopeful conceit of seed banking, which is the belief that seeds will always be viable once safely ensconced in their cryogenic home. Seeds in the banks are fertilized embryos of plants that existed in the past, and at the same time embodiments of plants will be realized as inhabitants of the future. Their existence in this liminal state holds together the tension between hope and despair. I study the practices of seed scientists to understand how they negotiate this tension and learn to care for seeds. Seed scientists struggle to make sensible the loss of viability or ‘germ-ability’ since the results of storing seeds in freezers can only be truly known by trying to germinate the seed. This test both removes the sample from the larger collection and destroys it. In addition, I explore the epistemological limits of using samples of seeds to provide viability information for a whole collection.
By studying the experimental care practices espoused by scientists involved in the maintenance of seeds, I study how ‘life’ is being prepared for the future. Based on eighteen months of fieldwork, this paper challenges the assumption that once seeds arrive at the bank, they can be considered saved. I will focus on one particular moment of material-semiotic knowledge production – the germination test – to think with the theories and practices that the seed scientists evoke to imbue hope and liveliness into a seemingly mundane step in the maintenance of seed viability.

Author

• Xan Chacko, University of California, Davis