This is a thought provoking article about our food and how it is made. It discusses the dairy industry..

It does not require a Harper’s magazine subscription to read. Enjoy. Dex and I have had a very busy few weeks but we plan to feature more original art, news and ideas soon. This blog is just for fun anyways.

Cameron

A “doomsday” seed vault built to protect millions of food crops from climate change, wars and natural disasters opened a few weeks ago. The seed vault is buried deep within an Arctic mountain in the remote Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard.

This facility will serve as a backup for hundreds of other seed banks around the world. It has the capacity to store 4.5 million seed samples from around the world and shield them from man-made and natural disasters.

“The Svalbard Global Seed Vault is our insurance policy,” Norway’s Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg told delegates at the opening ceremony 130 metres underground (around 400 feet). “It is the Noah’s Ark for securing biological diversity for future generations.”

Dug into the permafrost of the mountain, it has been built to withstand an earthquake or a nuclear strike, said Kent Bradford, director of the Seed Biotechnology Center at U.C. Davis.

Many more details in this good Science Daily article

Government of Norway Press Release

The Svalbard Global Seed Vault opened February 26 on a remote island in the Arctic Circle, receiving inaugural shipments of 100 million seeds that originated in over 100 countries. With the deposits ranging from unique varieties of major African and Asian food staples such as maize, rice, wheat, cowpea, and sorghum to European and South American varieties of eggplant, lettuce, barley, and potato, the first deposits into the seed vault represent the most comprehensive and diverse collection of food crop seeds being held anywhere in the world.

The building of the vault itself has attracted much outside interest due to its location and its unusual engineering, security, and aesthetic features. Its engineering allows it to stay cool with only a single 10-kilowatt compressor, which is powered by locally generated electricity.

The vault consists of three highly secure rooms sitting at the end of a 125-metre tunnel blasted out of a mountain on Norway’s Svalbard archipelago. The seeds will be stored at minus 18 degrees Celsius (minus 0.4 degrees Fahrenheit) and sealed in specially-designed four-ply foil packages. The packages are sealed inside boxes and stored on shelves inside the vault.

Each vault is surrounded by frozen arctic permafrost, ensuring the continued viability of the seeds should the electricity supply fail. The low temperature and moisture level inside the vaults will ensure low metabolic activity, keeping the seeds viable. If properly stored and maintained at minus 20 degrees Celsius (about minus 4 degrees Fahrenheit), some seeds in the vault will be viable for a millennium or more. For example, barley can last 2000 years, wheat 1700 years, and sorghum almost 20,000 years.

Anyone seeking access to the seeds themselves will have to pass through four locked doors: the heavy steel entrance doors, a second door approximately 115 metres down the tunnel and finally the two keyed air-locked doors. Keys are coded to allow access to different levels of the facility. Not all keys will unlock all doors. Motion detectors are set up around the site. Boxes of seeds inside the rooms are scanned before entering the seed vault.

A work of art also will make the vault visible for miles around. Artist Dyveke Sanne and KORO, the Norwegian agency overseeing art in public spaces, have worked together to fill the roof and vault entrance with highly reflective steel, mirrors, and prisms. The installation acts as a beacon, reflecting polar light in the summer months, while in the winter, a network of 200 fibre-optic cables will give the piece a muted greenish-turquoise and white light.

I picked up the BBC series Planet Earth a few days ago. Its amazingly beautiful. Watching it in 1080 HDTV on blu-ray is incredible.

I recommend this enthusiastically if you like this kind of thing. It was shot with special high speed cameras. I bought the British version with David Attenborough as the narrator.

Here is a few previews:

Trailer:

Bird of Paradise clip:

For more information: Wikipedia on Planet Earth Series

Planet Earth is an Emmy Award-winning BBC nature documentary series narrated by David Attenborough and produced by Alastair Fothergill. It was first broadcast in the UK from 5 March 2006. The American version is narrated by Sigourney Weaver.

The series was co-produced with Discovery Channel and the NHK in association with the CBC, and was described by its makers as “the definitive look at the diversity of our planet”. It was also the first of its kind to be filmed almost entirely in high-definition. The series was nominated for the Pioneer Audience Award for Best Programme at the 2007 BAFTA TV awards.