In a concrete bunker carved into the permafrost of a Norwegian mountain, Ingrid Solheim spent her days counting seeds. Not figuratively. Literally counting them, one by one, logging each into a database that already held records for over 1.3 million samples from every agricultural region on earth.
She had worked at the Svalbard Global Seed Vault for eleven years. Before that, she had been a field botanist for the Norwegian University of Life Sciences, spending summers in the highlands collecting grass specimens that no one besides her doctoral committee would ever care about. The vault was different. The vault mattered in a way she could feel in her chest every time the airlock doors sealed behind her.
The vault received shipments from gene banks around the world — from CIMMYT in Mexico, from the Vavilov Institute in St. Petersburg, from small regional collections in sub-Saharan Africa that arrived in battered coolers held together with packing tape. Ingrid treated every shipment the same way: she opened the boxes slowly, inspected the packaging, and spoke to the seeds as if they were passengers arriving after a long journey.
Her colleague Anders Falk once asked her why she talked to them. She said, “Because someone should welcome them. They’ve come a long way to be forgotten properly.”
Anders didn’t ask again, but he started doing it too.