Cold storage for grains, veggies

Deep inside this mountain in the remote Arctic archipelago of Svalbard, Norway, a gigantic vault is being constructed. Yes, construction is occurring inside the mountain. When complete next February, the new vault will be roughly half the length of a football field; it also will be the most secure facility of its kind in the world.

Svalbard is located less than 100 miles from the North Pole. It’s accessible only by sea or air; it’s not the kind of place one stumbles upon by happenstance or bumbles into unnoticed.

So what’s so valuable that it needs to be protected by steel, rock, permafrost and the occasional polar bear?

Seeds.

The Svalbard International Seed Vault is being constructed to protect, and thereby preserve, the planet's crop diversity. The seeds housed in the vault will represent every variety of food known to man. You might not be aware, but there are more than one hundred thousand varieties of rice. (Uncle Ben’s isn’t one of them.)

The world’s crops are vulnerable to natural disasters yet are also at risk in areas of civil unrest or war. In 1992, Afghanistan’s national seed collection was destroyed by mujahedeen fighters. Last month, a Typhoon sent a wall of water and mud through field collections in the Philippines, washing away banana, taro, sweet potato and pigeon pea varieties that held global importance. Catastrophic events aside, bio-diversity is a laudable goal in an era where climate change, pests, and disease present growers with significant challenges.

Stored at sub-zero temperatures, scientists estimate the seeds deposited in the vault could last hundreds, even thousands of years.

The Global Crop Diversity Trust, an initiative launched by the United Nations in 2001, will help operate the vault and the project has generated sizeable donations from corporations and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which recently pledged support to the tune of thirty million dollars. It is also supported by more than one hundred countries. Even Ethiopia, one of the world’s poorest countries, has pledged financial support.

A canine mouse hunter

This is farm dog. At least that's what we
call him when he's on patrol at
Four Cedars Farm. When he's roaming the
hallways of our place in the city, he's less instinctual predator, more couch potato. In the city, farm dog answers to Simon.

But farm dog prefers the
farm and we prefer to have him patroling our
acreage because he's got a
helluva nose for rodents. Just a few weekends
ago, he sniffed out a nest of
field mice and even helped us kill one of
them. (We used the shotgun against
the others.)

He found a similar nest last fall.

Earlier this summer, he cornered a rather hideous possum, and he's constantly on the prowl against rabbits, starlings and the occassional errant cow wandering over from the neighbor's place. I've watched farm
dog chase down but just miss a few pheasants and cast a longing eye toward the ducks out on the water.

They're safe though. Farm dog doesn't
like to swim. I guess that, and his
mousing ability, makes him a bit
like a farm cat. Don't tell him, though.

Inspiration

I discovered author Maud Hart Lovelace a few Christmases ago through one of her more obscure children’s books, "The Trees Kneel at Christmas." The book was a gift from the pastor at St. Maron’s; I suppose he thought I would be interested in a tale that features the children of Lebanese immigrants. I found the story to be precious, even though I no longer have young children at home.

Maud Hart Lovelace is better known for her series of children’s books that feature the characters of Betsy and Tacy, two girls who live in the fictional community of Deep Valley. Those familiar with either the Betsy-Tacy series or with southern Minnesota know that Hart Lovelace set the Betsy-Tacy stories in her hometown of Mankato. Fans of the series have created a downloadable map of Betsy-Tacy sites to visit, including Betsy’s house and Tacy’s house. There is even a Betsy-Tacy Society.

I suspect the author’s encounter with Lebanese immigrants and their traditions occurred in New York, not in Mankato. The author and her husband had homes in New York and in Minneapolis, where Hart Lovelace moved after she enrolled in college. Hart Lovelace attended the University of Minnesota but took a leave of absence to travel to California. After she returned to the university, she worked on the Minnesota Daily but she again left college to travel, this time to Europe. She never did finish college. On Thanksgiving Day in 1917, she married Delos Lovelace; they’d met only six months earlier. There is something about the writer’s impetuousness and wanderlust that attracts me to her story.

Hart Lovelace’s first published book was a historical novel set in Minnesota titled "The Black Angels." She wrote several more historical novels but is best remembered for the Betsy-Tacy series, of which there are a dozen books.

When I had a young girl to whom I could read storybooks, I hadn’t yet heard of Maud Hart Lovelace. Now that I have, I have no one to whom I can introduce Betsy, Tacy or their friends from Deep Valley. Someday, that just might change. I guess that means I should download that map, just in case.

Transition leads to growth

Endings can be unpleasant business. It doesn’t matter if we’re ending a relationship, saying goodbye to a loved one, leaving a job or moving away from home, the fact that we’re turning away from the familiar and moving toward the unknown leaves us disquieted. We are apt to avoid endings for this reason. This might be why so many of us botch our endings; we don’t practice them often enough.

Yet though endings are difficult, they are important because they beget new beginnings. If you think back on your life to all the endings you’ve experienced, you will recognize how endings, even those you hadn’t chosen for yourself, led you to someplace new, and hopefully, someplace better. Some call the ending-new beginning cycle growth.

If you reflect deeply enough about endings, soon or later you’ll find yourself contemplating death, for what is death but life's natural ending. I think it’s good to contemplate our final ending for a couple reasons. First, if we reflect on how we’ve spent our lives thus far and find areas we haven’t yet perfected, we still have time to improve: We can tell people we love them before we leave, so they never have to wonder; we can try a hobby we dreamed of trying but didn’t because we couldn’t find time; we can examine how we use our time and redirect energy into making a difference for others.

It’s also worth contemplating how our ending affects us. This exercise is made easier when belief in an after life, which assumes the existence of God, is part of your composition. By reflecting on all the descriptions of Heaven you’ve ever heard or read and on all the advice you’ve ever been offered on how to gain access, it becomes easier to examine life – our years of action or inaction – and bring to an end some of the activities that lead us away from eternal happiness.

On the night my sister-in-law Lynn passed away, I got a few minutes with her. I sat at the edge of her bed, took her hand and kissed her cheek. She looked at me and both of us knew it was time to say goodbye. Then she said two things: "It's so hard," and "I'm not afraid."

“It’s so hard,” refers to the stage in her transition called ending. It was hard for her to say goodbye to all of us, hard to let go.

“I’m not afraid,” refers to the stage of transition called a new beginning. Lynn knew a better existence waited for her beyond the walls of her hospital room and wasn’t afraid to embrace it.

It’s been said we gain the gift of clarity as we age – or as we approach our ending. I think Lynn captured perfectly the trouble most of us have with endings: the unpleasantness in endings blinds us to the potential that lies in our new beginnings. Endings are hard; new beginnings are nothing to be afraid of.