“Indeterminacy,—the unplanned nature of time—is terrifying, but thinking about

precariousness makes it clear that indeterminacy also makes life possible.”

Anna Tsing, La seta del fin del mundo.

 

What does preserving seeds mean in 2023?

What is the significance of a seed bank today?

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Seeds are natural sensors; they convey everything that is invisible to the naked eye. If we allow seeds to share with us what they carry, we will discover resilient worlds—worlds of human and non-human communities—and ancestral knowledge for sustainable futures. These time capsules we call seeds, or germplasm, contain crucial information about the soil that hosts the plant, the local temperature, humidity, elevation, companion species, and pests—where each living being previously thrived. They react to changes in their environment and wait patiently in dormancy until the right moment arrives to be reborn. They can fly, they can swim, they can safely travel many paths until they find the right place to sprout. Moreover, they are the result of an admirable sacrifice by their plant ancestor, which, at the right moment, set out to expel the new life of its descendants in the form of a seed, in the face of climatic conditions that would no longer sustain its own existence.

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Preserving seeds today preserves possibilities; it preserves life stories, ecologies, cultures, identities, language, land, climate, wind, microorganisms, multispecies communities, exchanges, and justice. It means reconnecting with the earth we inhabit; it means reconnecting through our senses and dusting off that sensibility.