Paper short abstract:

In the face of environmental uncertainties, plant genetic resources animate alternative visions of the future. From the Svalbard Global Seed Vault to the dandelion dreams of Thomas Heatherwick's seed cathedral, the latent possibilities of seed are woven through Anthropocene imaginaries.

Paper long abstract:

The future of agriculture is increasingly uncertain, as global climate change alters, for example, historical temperature and precipitation patterns and incidence of extreme weather events. Human security will be shaped by how we frame understandings and ethical commitments we articulate in response to unfolding impacts. Plant genetic resources are increasingly important in our global dreamings of survival. Modernist discourses about agricultural sustainability in the Anthropocene value collections of heritage seeds as libraries of genetic traits with the potential to empower ongoing adaptation to climate change and end world hunger through scientific crop breeding. Social movements instead revere heritage seeds for their capacity to root particular human communities in place and history. They have protested artificial transformations of seed and plant fertility in GMOs as processes that dispossess farmers of cultural and economic resources for sustainable livelihoods. Different visions thus depict seeds both as source materials for a new modernity and as enabling traditional cultural survival. These contested visions come together in seed banks, which act as boundary objects precisely because the future ecologies to which these seeds will give life are inherently unknown, conditioned as they must be by as-yet unforeseeable developments in technology, society and nature. From the Svalbard Global Seed Vault to the dandelion dreams of Thomas Heatherwick's seed cathedral, the latent possibilities of seed are woven throughout global imaginaries of the Anthropocene. This paper examines research on global collaborations in seed banking to reflect on emergent narratives about the past, present and future of human agriculture.