Paper short abstract:

Drawing on the Turkish example, I explore how seed banking can challenge the universalist underpinnings of conservation science, and discuss the work that seeds do in cold storage.

Paper long abstract:

Drawing on two years of ethnographic research at the Turkish Seed Gene Bank (TSGB), this paper examines the work that seeds perform in cold storage. Following the Convention on Biological Diversity that granted sovereign rights to nation states over nonhuman genetic material and intellectual property rights to private parties over modified varieties, national seed banks proliferated across the globe. In this new ownership regime, national seed banks came to demarcate the sphere of national sovereignty from that of private property, as they nationalized nature on the one hand and naturalized the nation on the other. Today, historical anxieties that stem from colonial legacies of bioprospecting continue to inform the protectionist sensibilities of biodiversity-rich countries in the Global South, leading seed banks like the TSGB to close their collections to scientific institutions in the Global North for fear of losing the chance to research and commodify potentially profitable samples that can be used in the development of new, climate-ready crop varieties. This paper analyzes this future oriented, capitalist promise that seeds generate at the TSGB, which challenges the universalist underpinnings of conservation science along with the universalist readings of the Anthropocene that erase historical difference. By banking on its future ability to profit from latent nonhuman capital and by investing in competitive climate change futures, the TSGB puts into question the technology-driven hope of surviving climate change as a unified humanity through technocratic governance. How can we comment on the work that seeds perform in this endeavor?