To mark the IUCN World Conservation Congress, which starts tomorrow with a visit by President Obama, I have a post over at the work blog arguing (well, implying) that the biodiversity conservation community has got itself into a tangle dividing its work into in situ and ex situ ((And indeed between agricultural biodiversity and everything else, but that was a bit of a subtext, which I may expand on here some time)). When will we see genebanks, including Svalbard (about which there’s a new book out, incidentally), as an integral part of biodiversity conservation, rather than a reluctantly tolerated add-on? Answers on a postcard, please.
The publisher’s blurb for the `Seeds on Ice’ book about the Svalbard seed vault claims that the vault “a visionary model of international collaboration, is the brainchild of Cary Fowler”.
There is an interesting account of the lead-up to the second Svalbard vault (the first had been around for decades) in a thesis by Marte Qvenild – well worth reading in that it gives a different view (Sect 4.2). [www.umb.no/statisk/noragric/publications/master/2006_marte_qvenild.pdf]
Marte seems to credit the original idea to Henry Shands, who was leading a genebank upgrade process for the CGIAR during which Shands realized the importance of backing-up the CG collections in an external site, and came to think of Svalbard.
“The 8th of August 2003, Henry Shands sent an email to Professor Cary Fowler, who was based in Norway … Shands expressed his discomfort with backing up the collection of CGIAR centers within the centers themselves.” As interviewed by Marte, Shands went on:- “I believed that the original Norwegian [Svalbard] proposal should be revisited with several changes.”
Marte reports:-“ Within this new framework [the ITPGRFA], Fowler agreed with Henry Shands that the Svalbard idea could be looked into again, and he drafted an introductory note on Svalbard for the forthcoming meeting of the CGIAR’s the Genetic Resource Policy Committee (GRPC).” This was considered at the GRPC 15th Session, February 2004.
I think I have commented on this before.
One of the Editorial Reviews of this book on the Amazon website has a quote from Jack Harlan apparently endorsing the book (the whole purpose of the several other Editorial Reviews). However, Jack passed away in 1998 and the extract quoted is from as long ago as 1972 (a paper entitled “The genetics of disaster”, currently stored in my old stable): nothing to do with Svalbard.