Seeds on Ice: Svalbard and the Global Seed Vault

Fowler, the visionary founder of the Global Seed Vault in Norway, leads an enthusiastic visual tour of the remote storage facility. It's carved into naturally frozen stone and designed to be the ultimate backup of the world's agricultural genetic biodiversity, isolated from "war, uprisings, industrial accidents, and the general insanity... of modern life." Fowler's pride in the project is evident in his history of the vault's creation, design, and function, which is accompanied by photos of the facility glinting in Arctic light, the tunnel leading inside, boxes from around the world, and the author climbing along the shelves of boxed seeds. He concludes with the story of the vault's success in replenishing the seed collection of a gene bank destroyed by the fighting in Syria, which he declares is proof of the "return on investment." The book evokes both the isolation and the camaraderie of those working in the Norwegian outpost of Svalbard. Tefre's dramatic images of the surrounding habitat, laid out in full-page spreads, capture the colors of the darkness of the polar night, the glow of the aurora borealis, and the rose hues of the midnight sun. Tefre evokes the sense of a place nearly devoid of humans, and Fowler populates it with human meaning. Color photos. (Sept.)