For McPhee, the chief attraction of deep time is its ability to move us out of short-term thinking: ‘If you free yourself from the conventional reaction to a quantity like a million years, you free yourself a bit from the boundaries of human time,’ he wrote. The concept of deep time originated with the 18th-century Scottish geologist James Hutton, and was popularised by the American writer John McPhee in his book Basin and Range (1981). Standing opposed to this narrow band of apocalyptic time is ‘deep time’, a sense of scale rooted in geology rather than humanity. The millennium, be it religious or environmental, is always coming the day after tomorrow. When we think of environmental damage and the human impact on the ecosystem, we think almost exclusively in the short term. This obsession with impending disaster suggests that we see nature on a particularly human, individual scale. As of 2010, 41 per cent of Americans say that they expect Jesus to return to Earth by 2050. In this way, environmental discourse resembles the ranting of religious millenarians, who stubbornly maintain that the apocalypse will happen on their watch. Global warming, we’re told, will decimate all life within our lifetimes, or in our children’s lifetimes. We think of our relationship to the environment in the immediate. ‘However, it wasn’t primarily with that in mind that we started the planning of this facility.’Īlong with the language of catastrophe comes a very specific articulation of time. Wired, in 2011, referred to it as ‘the world’s insurance policy against botanical holocaust’.Ĭary Fowler, the former executive director of the Global Crop Diversity Trust, which helped to establish the seed vault, has neither coined nor entirely disavowed, the term ‘doomsday’ as it applies to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault: ‘We believe that in the case of a regional or global catastrophe that this seed vault would prove to be very, very useful,’ he told The Washington Post in 2008. ‘The “doomsday” vault is designed to keep millions of seed samples safe from natural and unnatural disasters: global warming, asteroid strikes, plant diseases, nuclear warfare, and even earthquakes,’ National Geographic reported in 2008. Everyone from Fox News to Wired magazine has used the unofficial nickname ‘doomsday seed vault’ to refer to the project, and it is routinely described as a last haven and refuge for plant biodiversity should some global catastrophe destroy the world’s crops. Since its inception, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault has repeatedly evoked a sense of the apocalypse. There are more than 1000 crop diversity collections worldwide, but the Global Seed Vault in Svalbard was built away from civilisation because it is the fail-safe, the insurance policy, the last resort. #Doomsday vault essay seriesA series of tunnels bored into the side of a mountain, this vault is climate-controlled, secure against tectonic activity or sea-level rise, and designed to hold up to 4.5 million different seed varieties for centuries to come.īuilt 900km north of Europe in Svalbard, a barren archipelago in Norway, it sits on the edge of the Arctic Ocean, containing duplicate specimens from other seed vaults scattered throughout the world. Her work will be featured in a solo exhibit at the Encuentros Abiertos Photography Biennial in Buenos Aires in August.Since 2007, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault has maintained a repository of the world’s agricultural heritage. Doherty says she is interested in the vault from a philosophical and cultural standpoint and is “captivated by the photographic process of collecting and making visible the inaccessible or invisible.” She also plans to photograph Argentina’s seed bank. The Svalbard vault did not have X-ray machines for her use, but she plans to use her documentary-style photos in a future book. She then incorporates the images into digital collages. For the project, Doherty has used X-ray machines to photograph seeds and cloned plants at the National Center for Genetic Resources Preservation in Colorado and the Millennium Seed Bank in England. The fellowship has allowed her to continue work on her project, Archiving Eden, inspired by an article she read about the Svalbard vault’s opening in 2008. Doherty took photos of the vault as part of her faculty fellowship with UNT’s Institute for the Advancement of the Arts. When photography professor Dornith Doherty journeyed to a remote Norwegian island this spring, just 800 miles from the North Pole, she became one of a select few to see inside the Svalbard Global Seed Vault.īuilt into a frozen mountainside and opened only a few times a year, the vault secures the world’s seed collections from natural disaster or catastrophe.
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