2 days ago
History You Can Eat
This personal reflection is part of a series called The Big Ideas, in which writers respond to a single question: What is history? You can read more by visiting The Big Ideas series page.
History helps us make sense of the here and now by providing context and perspective. And sometimes history provides us with something more tangible: dinner, for instance.
During the Neolithic Age some 12,000 years ago, humans as a species began the slow transition from hunting and gathering food to developing agriculture.
We can think of this long agricultural history, and the crops that nourish us today, as the common heritage of humankind. This heritage is the result of trillions upon trillions of tiny experiments by early farmers and gardeners and by nature, conducted each growing season over hundreds of thousands of years.
Human society has evolved with its domesticated crops. We depend on them, and they depend on us. Conserving the diversity of our agricultural crops, the raw material for future adaptation to pests, diseases and new climates, has become our 'evolutionary responsibility,' in the words of Sir Otto Frankel.
I take this responsibility to heart. It is what led me to make the first of dozens of visits to the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard in 2004 and spearhead the creation of what the media would later dub a 'doomsday vault.'
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