Tucked away on a remote island in Norway’s Svalbard archipelago, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault is ‘an insurance policy for world agriculture’. Cavernous and eerily stark on the inside, the vault contains hundreds of millions of frozen seed samples from across the globe. The US agriculturalist Cary Fowler, senior advisor to the Global Crop Diversity Trust, helps to oversee the project. He thinks that the vault could help humanity survive the incremental but very real challenges presented by climate change and other existential threats. Believing that ‘doomsday happens every day… in small bits and pieces’, Fowler views the long-term survival of our species as a problem that can be solved only by prudent thinking and ‘very quiet’ solutions.
Director: David Osit
Producer: Caleb Heller
videoEcology and environmental sciences
Join endangered whooping cranes on their perilous migratory path over North America
6 minutes
videoEngineering
Building a prosperous future demands bold ideas. These are some of the boldest
40 minutes
videoEnvironmental history
In Kazakhstan, ‘atomic lakes’ still scar the landscape decades after Soviet nuclear tests
13 minutes
videoNature and landscape
‘A culture is no better than its woods’ – what our trees reveal about us, by W H Auden
5 minutes
videoMeaning and the good life
Why Orwell urged his readers to celebrate the spring, cynics be damned
11 minutes
videoEarth science and climate
Images carved into film form a haunting elegy for a disappearing slice of Earth
3 minutes
videoAnimals and humans
Join seabirds as they migrate, encountering human communities along the way
13 minutes
videoFairness and equality
There’s a dirty side to clean energy in the metal-rich mountains of South Africa
10 minutes
videoBiology
‘Save the parasites’ may not be a popular rallying cry – but it could be a vital one
11 minutes