IRGRL

Sitting in my garden, flower and vegetable, never did It once pass my thoughts, that my beefsteak tomatoes or my white sugar sweet corn, could be a thing of the past. The changing climates because of global warming, could essentially over time see the depletion of certain crops, vegetation, life saving vegetation, trees. Things that we take for granted now.

Chesapeake Bay

Marsh and island loss. The current rate of a sea level rise is three times the historical rate and appears to be accelerating. Since 1938, about one-third of the marsh at Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge has been submerged.

Bermuda

Dying mangroves. Rising sea level is leading to saltwater inundation of coastal mangrove forests.

Kenya

2001 Worst drought in 60 years. Over four million people were affected by a severely reduced harvest, weakened livestock, and poor sanitary conditions.

Mongolia

A 1,738-year tree-ring record from remote alpine forests in the Tarvagatay Mountains indicates that 20th century temperatures in this region are the warmest of the last millennium. Tree growth during 1980-1999 was the highest of any 20-year period on record, and 8 of the 10 highest growth years occurred since 1950. The 20th century warming has been observed in tree-ring reconstructions of temperature from widespread regions of Eurasia, including sites in the Polar Urals, Yakutia, and the Taymir Peninsula, Russia. The average annual temperature in Mongolia has increased by about 1.3F (0.7C) over the past 50 years.

This is just a small taste of what Global Warming is doing.

When cold areas are warmed unusually it helps fungi and disease breed in crops, disease invades these crops,which would normally not be disease free  if given the normal cycle of warmth and cold to kill bacteria.  This will affect more of our worlds food crops.   Global warming has increased natural disasters which wipe out and devastate  vegetation.

There is a haven.  There are many believe it or not, the biggest of them being  The Svalbard Global Seed Vault near Longyearbyen on the Norwegian island of Svalbard.

Here locked away are the worlds crops seeds. Every crop, ever grown has seeds here, every generation of African Rice, United States wheat, Garbanso beans from Central America, are here.

Today, October 15, 2009 a great thing was achieved by the Millennium Seed Bank in West Sussex, UK added today the Musa itinerans, or the pink banana, a species of fruit that only certain elephants in Africa eat, that is close to being wiped out due to deforestation. It is one of over 24 thousand species of seeds to be added to this seed bank which is host to 10 percent of the worlds seeds.  This project was started in 2000 because they wanted  to try to ensure the survival of the estimated 200,000 seed-bearing plant species threatened by human development and climate change.

I look at my children and think, what the future holds for the generations after even them. Will the climate changes caused by global warming leave farmers needing to request seeds from a bank? Only time will tell.

These are banks we definitely don’t want withdrawals from.

On an added note. My children and I have started our own seed bank.  Every year the flowers, seeding and bulb, and vegetables in our yard we take seeds from and every fall from the plants and trees in our area.

(2009). Climate Hot Map . Retrieved from http://www.climatehotmap.org/namerica.html

Softpedia . (2009). Millennium Seed Bank Reaches Milestone. Retrieved from http://news.softpedia.com/news/Millennium-Seed-Bank-Reaches-Milestone-124347.shtml