![]() ![]() SGSV is a repository for 855,000 crop seed varieties – phenotypes – representing 5000-odd species. The vault’s entrance is the star of the show – a dramatic concrete edifice with an LED light display: an ark emerging from the rock in which the world is invited to send its seeds to safety, or a sort of portal to the back-up hard-drive therein. The juxtaposition of that treaty – negotiated so carefully to allow access to resources to all its signatories – with the attraction now of its Norwegian neutrality and prohibition on military installations is in harmony with the juxtaposition of the dirt and hurt of the work of natural exploitation, and Svalbard’s attraction for its natural diversity, protected now in a range of nature reserves. It also commits Norway to the environmental conservation of the area. The Svalbard Treaty of 1920 gives sovereignty of the Svalbard Archipelago to Norway, but it prohibits military infrastructure and Svalbard’s use in any “war-like” activity. Indeed, it’s not wilderness that brought the vault here: it’s the ice, yes, but also the infrastructure, and Svalbard’s curious global geopolitical status. It’s not very far at all from the airport to Svalbard Global Seed Vault (SGSV). Overwritten now by North Face and Santa Claus and the drive to conserve this Arctic sublime. Longyearbyen has grit and dirt and labour and toil written all over it. Mining is just one human indent on the tundra. All the protected cultural heritage of Svalbard relates to exploitation of nature in some way: coal extraction, whaling, hunting, fishing, trapping. Built heritage pre-1945 on Svalbard is automatically protected, and though later than that, the masts are too. They masts march towards a conveyor station, on stilts, on the side of one of the steep escarpments that quickly rise up from the town below. Most of the mines are closed now, and the buckets and cables have been removed from the conveyors, but the masts, the spoil tips, the shafts don’t allow forgetting. You can even stay in the old miners’ dormitories. ![]() The heritage of its coal-mining existence makes the landscape: the aerial coal conveyors criss-cross and bracket the town. It is an industrial frontier town, founded in the late 1800s as a tourist base, but developed in earnest in the early 1900s by an American industrialist, John Munroe Longyear, for his Arctic Coal Company. Because the second thing that strikes me is that Svalbard’s main town – Longyearbyen – has something of the frontier town about it. The pictures and the films of wild white tundra aren’t quite honest though. But the sharp-dull white of the Arctic Ocean as we come into land, and the sudden mass of bright white snow-covered coal-rich rock emerging from the clouds is a thrill. Dull white clouds in our journey here, broken only by the topography of Tromsø, where we stopped off was enough, I thought. I was fairly certain that I was content with the degree of whiteness in my life.
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