Built into a remote Norwegian mountainside, a concrete vault houses sealed boxes kept behind multiple locked doors, monitored by electronic security, safeguarding the key to human survival. What sounds like dystopian fiction is actually present-day reality. Seeds on Ice is the true, far-out story of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, written with authority by Cary Fowler, inaugural director of the Global Crop Diversity Trust.
Climate change has introduced new complexity to already challenging agricultural issues. The vault and its hundreds of millions of seeds exist thanks to farmers and scientists joining together worldwide and persisting in their mission to rescue future food supplies.
Svalbard is also home to the northernmost permanent settlement in the world, where polar bears outnumber humans two to one. Fowler shares the history and complexity of the vault and its surrounding community with straightforward prose, supported beautifully by vivid photographs from Mari Tefre and Jim Richardson. --Lauren O'Brien of Malcolm Avenue Review